The Last 4 Years and the Coming Decade 1

When the 21st century stepped into its third decade, the major tone of the world sharply switched. Internecine confrontation, cartelism and calumniation snaffled the high pitch, while comprehension, cooperation and cosmopolitanism, like ill-adapting burdens and nuisances, are inexorably pitched out of the era's finickier and finickier register. The last 4 years, principally accountable for the bend toward such trend, has a clear pattern. Since the moment that pussy-grabber grabbed the oval office through foreign fix, everything seemed to have been predetermined. Needless to argue: just as a train steering along its normal route suddenly swerved into an appalling aberration under multiple symptoms of systematic failure, poped up a chain of bizzare behaviors: a row of willful withdrawals from multiple international organizations and treaties, barefaced dunning over allies for protection fees, capricious veer of trade vanes highlighting haphasard jitters of tariff rates toward countries of utterly different natures and qualities, pussyfooting pace toward putin and patronizing pose before pals as well as other unpredictable hitches and glitches in the making and implementation of policies or even nondescript whimsical whistles that had perplexed many politicians, publicists and observers who believe U.S to have relapsed into isolationism, that is, paying more attentions to or becoming exclusively occupied in its own business with less or without interventions or concerns upon external matters. Many uttered criticism over this phlegmatic position, pointing out it was the isolationism that had connived at the fascist aggrandizement and caused the inadequacy of vigilance in the pearl harbor incident before it finally gave way to requisite engagement. But I have to say the wording of isolationism is simply unfitting nowadays. One can prove this by drawing a comparison between the degree of globalization of recent times and that before world war 2. As we take a glimpse back to the period around 1940, we can find that oversea entities and links were relatively meagre and the corresponding influence and leverage upon other countries relatively negligible. At that time, pursuing isolationism was more or less of a certain venial aspect.