PRESIDENT Joe Biden told the Munich Security Conference in 2021 that “America is back”, reassuring his audience that Trump was an aberration and the US-led, rules-based international order that had prevailed since 1945 still operated.

He was wrong. There would be no return to 2015.

Before the arrival of Trump in 2016, many Americans had already begun to question whether the United States any longer benefitted from the global system it had dominated since World War II.

Was globalisation not removing jobs from America to China and third world countries? The owners of the companies transferring jobs to those places may be American billionaires, but what about American factory workers?

Chris Donnelly: The big drum was beaten at Drumcree but unionists refused to march

Stephanie Chase: Young people have looked on in disbelief as Drumcree Orangemen attempted to drag us back to the past

Whole cities like Detroit – Motown – had been laid waste by closures and lay-offs. Cheap Chinese goods were undercutting American products. Other countries weren’t buying American.

Hundreds of American troops were being killed in ‘forever wars’ in places many Americans couldn’t point out on a map. What were they doing in those places?

What benefit did Americans derive from such campaigns in George W Bush’s ridiculous ‘war on terror’ which by 2015 was costing trillions of dollars?

Why were........

© The Irish News