I refuse to fisk Anne Applebaum’s column at the Washington Post. All I will say is that the notion that our international accords are the basis of American “wealth, prosperity, and military power” is simply laughable. Those accords are the basis of European wealth and prosperity, not ours.
American wealth, prosperity, and military power are all built on our large, free domestic market and the incentives that our formerly free country afforded to its formerly free people. Expanding those freedoms to more people, e.g. blacks and women, was an undeniable good. Where we’ve come since then with unending wars and crony capitalism is a tragedy.
Well, if you look at history you’ll find that all the great nations and empires fell because they supported an insufficient number of international institutions.
That’s true. The Roman empire fell in the 5th Century because Augustulus objected to the ISDS clause in the Trans-Imperium Trade and Investment Partnership, triggering a mass migration of barbarian centrist tribes into MSNBC’s primetime slots.