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 defined the modern world. Leaders gathered in New Hampshire in 1944 to create an interconnected financial system and they met in San Francisco in 1945 to form the United Nations. NATO was born in 1949, and early version of the European Union a few years later. The philosophy: anything to bind countries together so they would not fight again."

The institutions established once the war was over could have been dominated by the United States which was the clear winner. But Washington chose to share power with other large global players. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) was to be headed by a European while the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) was to be led by an American. While the IMF did not change, the IBRD was transformed........

© The Express Tribune