With all that has happened in the past year, one could be forgiven for thinking that it has been more than 12 months since January 1, 2017. To help make sense of it all – from Donald Trump’s tumultuous presidency to China’s increasingly vocal bid for global leadership – we have compiled a list of some of our top politics commentaries from 2017.
Looking back, 2017 may well be remembered as a year of great historical consequence. Yes, 2016 was the year when the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union and Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. But 2017 was when the rest of the story began to unfold, and discrete events started to ramify in ways that will affect global politics for years or even decades to come. To help capture all that has happened over the past 12 months, we have selected some of Project Syndicate’s most-read columns on politics in 2017.
Not surprisingly, many of the year’s commentaries focused on the all-too-real reality show playing out in the US. At home and abroad, Trump continued throughout the year to violate political and social norms and undermine democratic institutions, confirming Balzac’s observation that one who needs to prove one’s power to oneself must abuse it to succeed.
Still, our list also makes clear that Trump and those sustaining his presidency are just one part of a much larger story, of which 2017 was but one chapter. The US is no longer the hard center of the international order. The world is quickly changing, and people everywhere are renegotiating traditional sources of identity, systems of governance, economic arrangements, and conceptions of wellbeing. Those debates will continue for years to come, and we at Project Syndicate look forward to contributing to them with the same caliber of informed analysis that you will find in the compilation below.
Looking back, 2017 may well be remembered as a year of great historical consequence. Yes, 2016 was the year when the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union and Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. But 2017 was when the rest of the story began to unfold, and discrete events started to ramify in ways that will affect global politics for years or even decades to come. To help capture all that has happened over the past 12 months, we have selected some of Project Syndicate’s most-read columns on politics in 2017.
Not surprisingly, many of the year’s commentaries focused on the all-too-real reality show playing out in the US. At home and abroad, Trump continued throughout the year to violate political and social norms and undermine democratic institutions, confirming Balzac’s observation that one who needs to prove one’s power to oneself must abuse it to succeed.
Still, our list also makes clear that Trump and those sustaining his presidency are just one part of a much larger story, of which 2017 was but one chapter. The US is no longer the hard center of the international order. The world is quickly changing, and people everywhere are renegotiating traditional sources of identity, systems of governance, economic arrangements, and conceptions of wellbeing. Those debates will continue for years to come, and we at Project Syndicate look forward to contributing to them with the same caliber of informed analysis that you will find in the compilation below.