An Open World Is in the Balance—and on the Ballot

In my weekly column for World Politics Review, I write about how the COVID-19 pandemic has thrown globalization even further into reverse, and how the removal of many restrictions on cross-border flows of goods, money, ideas and even people is on the ballot Tuesday.

As Americans cast their ballots Tuesday, and indeed for the millions who already have, they are voting for the future not just of their own country, but of the open world that the United States helped create. A distinctive element of this global order, particularly since the fall of the Berlin Wall, has been the removal of many restrictions on cross-border flows of goods, money, ideas and even people. Under every American president since the Cold War, until Donald Trump, the United States championed global integration as a motor of prosperity, a bulwark of peace and—at least implicitly—a source of solidarity. It is that open world that is on the ropes today, thanks to disillusionment with globalization, Trump’s nativist and anachronistic “America First” policies and, more recently, the COVID-19 pandemic, which has dramatically curtailed cross-border exchanges.

Read the full World Politics Review article here.