Konstantin Kisin

Congratulations, the multipolar world you ordered is here, and now we all get to suffer the consequences.

For several years now, there's been much talk about the end of the post-war order and the coming of a multipolar world.

The desirability of this wonderful new arrangement has been pushed by three groups, naive woke leftists, similarly naive isolationists, and of course, and above all, our enemies.

Each had their reasons.

Western progressives view the world through a simple, warped, but powerful lens.

Their approach to global politics is exactly the same as their view of domestic politics and is based on the appealing but misguided idea that success is always and everywhere the product of unearned, ill-gotten privilege.

Their antipathy towards the West, white people, men, Jews, and the rich stems from this basic formula.

Whoever is doing well must be doing so at the expense of others.

To them, any imbalance in wealth, income, influence, and so forth is necessarily bad and to be corrected.

At the domestic level, the culmination of this worldview is their demand for social justice, a forced redistribution of wealth, influence, and opportunity from the oppressors to the oppressed.

You don't need to be a Robin DiAngelo acolyte to see how this Marxist dynamic extends to global affairs.

Social justice at home becomes global justice abroad.

If the world is unequal, which it is, then that must be corrected.

The extraordinary ignorance of the world beyond the borders of the safe, peaceful, and civilized countries they live in is extremely helpful in this regard because it prevents them from seeing that peace, stability, and prosperity are the products of culture, science, and innovation.

Instead, they argue that the West's recent dominance is a product of colonialism, racism, and imperialism.

They hate the West for being successful and want a multipolar world as both a punishment and a corrective.

The isolationists, on the other hand, are primarily an American phenomenon, albeit one which has spread to other parts of the West, along with every other aspect of American culture.

I have some sympathy for their instincts, even though they are, in my view, as misguided as the woke left about the way the world actually works.

Having traveled extensively around America, I well understand the feeling of a man living a comfortable life in rural Ohio being asked to care about events happening halfway around the world.

When I sit on the porch of my Airbnb somewhere in the middle of America, I find it much harder to care about those events too.