The New Leaders of the 21st Century
Why Nations Like New Zealand are Rising While America and Britain are Collapsing
If you want to know what the changing nature of global leadership in the 21st century looks like, it resembles this: New Zealand’s deputy prime minister telling a jeering, Covid-denying, Trumpist heckler to “sit down…sunshine”:
And yesterday, something remarkable happened: Jacinda Ardern was re-elected in a landslide.
That might not sound like a big deal, so let me put in context. The big three Anglo societies — Australia, Britain, and America — have all fallen prey to strongman politics. America has become the world’s laughingstock, led by the Idiot-in-Chief, Donald Trump. Britain isn’t too far behind, with clownish Boris Johnson treating the future more like a satire than an exercise in governance. And then there’s Australia — whose PM is a climate change denier, even as his continent is being struck by megafires.
The Anglo societies are leaders — in the wrong direction. They are pioneers of social collapse. America has the world’s highest Covid death toll — while Britain has its highest per capita deaths. The only two societies in the world — outside hardcore failed states, like North Korea — where incomes, happiness, trust, and life expectancies are all falling, in a kind of grim trifecta of implosion? America and Britain.
America has no Covid strategy whatsoever, and so the current death toll of about 215,000 plus is simply skyrocketing upwards, at the jaw-dropping rate of about 1000 per day. Britain, on the other hand, now faces the “double cliff edge,” as former PM Gordon Brown has correctly put it, of a hard Brexit — breaking up with its largest trading partners, having no real way to obtain even basics like food, medicine, water, and energy — during a literal global pandemic. The mismanagement of Anglo societies is on an epic, surreal scale. They once used to be the envy of the world. No longer. Now they are the laughingstock of the world.
