The answer posed in the title of this essay has come from the current occupant of the United States' presidential residence, the White House. Donald Trump wants his country to pull back from the world in which it has been a dominant player since the end of the Second World War. Eighty years ago when Japan signed the surrender document, there was consensus among the Americans that isolationism, nationalism and authoritarianism lead to disaster. This consensus held for 80 years but Donald Trump, America's current president, decided that his country should go alone.

Naftali Bendavid wrote in a review of the world system post-Second World War, in an essay written for The Washington Post, "Eighty years ago, desperate to prevent another global cataclysm, world leaders built bulwarks that have d

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