Being a profound intellectual and so on, I am concerned that a line from Top Gun keeps haunting me. In the scene, a fighter pilot who has lost all confidence is bearing down on a target but refuses to fire, claiming that his angle on it is not ideal. His fellow officer is adamant. “It doesn’t get to look any better than that.”
Anyway, this reaches you from Singapore. No country on Earth profited more from the liberal world order that is said to be breaking down right now. Trade enriched an island that did not have the natural resources of Malaysia to count on. Global rules and institutions protected a small country as a might-is-right system would not. It is a good place in which to toast that passing world.
Someone has to. The enemies of liberalism are one thing. They think what they think. It is the apologetic liberals, forever pledging to “do better” than post-cold war globalisation, as though it was distasteful anyway, who are harder to take. A false note in Mark Carney’s now over-discussed speech at Davos stands out. “We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn’t mourn it.” Why ever not?