In late May, President Donald Trump’s national security adviser H.R. McMaster and director of the White House National Economic Council Gary Cohn penned an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal praising their boss for his recent trip to Europe and the Middle East. "The president embarked on his first foreign trip with a clear-eyed outlook that the world is not a "global community," they wrote, "but an arena where nations, nongovernmental actors and businesses engage and compete for advantage."
Two days later, the president declared his intention to pull out of the Paris Accords – a 147 country effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and slow climate change. The op-ed and the withdrawal sum up what there is of a Trump foreign policy doctrine: the U.S.is engaged in a zero-sum competition with other countries where the benefits of cooperation are limited. It is a view of the world that simply doesn’t fit with the facts, and one that is incredibly damaging to the prospects for America’s security prosperity – along with the planet’s.
Cooperation is winning out over competition in international relations. One sign is that, despite the fear-mongering by the president and his team, the world has never been more peaceful. For all the horrors of Syria and continuing tragedy from South Sudan to theUkraine, war deaths worldwide remain near historic lows, and the wars that are ongoing are overwhelmingly within, not between, states. Since 1975, according to data compiled by Oxford economist Max Roser, the average year has seen less than two interstate conflicts ongoing anywhere in the world – and the trend is downward. There were only two such conflicts in total between 2004 and 2011.
There is a strong economic reason for the low level of global conflict. Access to land or natural resources like oil – the traditional rationale for many wars – is just a smaller and smaller part of what makes a country rich and powerful. That is how South Korea(controlling 0.1% of the planet’s land surface) can have a higher GDP than the whole planet did in 1820. Globally, we have reached ’peak farmland,’ according to Jesse H. Ausubel at the Rockefeller University and colleagues.
Ausubel also suggests the U.S. may have passed peak use of a whole range of natural resources from aluminum through iron, steel, copper and cement. That is why production in rich countries is increasingly weightless, with advanced economies reaching ’peak stuff’ – the physical weight of goods consumed in countries is declining. Meanwhile, the supply of natural resources keeps on growing. In 1950, the world’scopper reserves were below 100 million tonnes, or 38 years worth of production at that time. In 2012 – 62 years later – reserves were approaching 700 million tonnes, or forty years of current production.World oil reserves were 643 billion barrels in 1980; they are 1,656 billion barrels today.
All of this adds up to the fact that a country’s wealth and well being is increasingly dependent on ideas, technologies and market institutions rather than physical infrastructure and resources. A World Bank effort to calculate the wealth of nations – the value of infrastructure, forests, farmland and resources and other ’intangible capital’ – suggested that in 2005 total global wealth was $708 trillion. Intangible capital was 77 percent of that, and physical capital such as roads and buildings was 18 percent. The value of natural capital was just $44 trillion, or six percent of the total.
The great thing about ideas, technologies and market institutions is that many countries can use them at the same time. If you use the oil pumped out of a well in Texas, I can’t. But if you use the technology of double-entry bookkeeping or word processing, that doesn’t stop me from using it. Indeed, if we both use it, it becomes even more valuable to the both of us. The global economy is increasingly built on such collaborative rather than competitive foundations. The genius of global trade is that it allows such collaboration – companies from many different countries working together in production chains to make a finished product. Half of China’s exports involve unfinished goods – parts of equipment to be assembled elsewhere, for example. And 80 percent of the value of those exports is made up of products previously imported into China. Beyond driving global prosperity and providing new export and investment opportunities for U.S. companies, the growing complexity of trading patterns has increased the potential costs of conflict between major trading partners.
But if the threat of global war is receding, other threats to U.S. and global security are looming larger. An interconnected world brings huge economic benefits, but it also increases the risk of a new disease outbreak spreading worldwide. The 1918 influenza pandemic killed more people than the First World War – and that in an age where the fastest way to cross an ocean was by boat. Again, production is becoming lighter and resource-intensity is dropping, but not yet fast enough to ensure climate stability – and the costs to the U.S. alone of climate change could reach into the trillions of dollars by century’s end.
These problems will only be resolved through global cooperation. With the leadership of the United States under President Ronald Reagan, the world headed off one planetary threat through a series of protocol agreements to phase out the use of chlorofluorocarbons, which were damaging the ozone layer and threatening 6.3 million skin cancer deaths in the US alone over a 150 year period. Thanks to the agreements, the ozone layer is recovering. Similar global cooperation will be a cornerstone of efforts to tackle other threats, which is why withdrawing from the Paris accords sets such a tragic precedent.
Rising threats to the global commons combined with the economics of war, peace and prosperity means that the long term-strategy for a stable, sustainable planet and a successful America is to bind the world even closer together. The U.S. should be fostering trade relations that create jobs. It should support scholarships and visas for people from the world over to travel to the U.S. for education and to build global economic ties. And it should embrace global agreements from the International Law of the Sea through the Paris Accords. Going in the other direction will do harm the rest of the world but simply hobble the U.S. The idea that America can be great only by making others worse off is the thuggishness of the schoolyard outcast.
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