[기고] The end of the US-led world order?
▲Supporters of President-elect Trump are holding pickets at a campaign rally in Pittsburgh on the 4th, the day before the election. ⓒFacebook
※External contributions may differ from the editorial direction of this magazine. -Editor’s note
Before the U.S. presidential election, a tremendous internal conflict unseen since the Civil War emerged between the Trump and Biden-Harris camps, almost at the level of a civil war. In the end, Trump was elected, and the conflict subsided for a while. However, the phenomenon of American Schism (the splitting of the United States in two) is serious.
“Why did America become like this? Why did the American people choose Trump again? “What is the position of American evangelical Christians?” In order to understand, one must know the more fundamental “historical dynamics of Western modern thought and Christian values.”
Traditionally, the United States has been a Christian country based on Christian values, while at the same time pursuing universal human values pursued by French intellectuals during and after the French Revolution.
The problem is that it is difficult for the traditional Christian values of Britain and the United States and the continental values of France and Germany to coexist.
Continental law and thought developed based on anti-Christian Greco-Roman law and philosophy through the Enlightenment of the 16th and 17th centuries and the French Revolution of 1789. However, the British and American national systems developed in a way that emphasized Christian values while accepting the laws and ideas that had continued to develop in Europe since the Roman Empire, that is, continental law and ideological values.
Christianity has been on the decline in continental Europe over the past two centuries, and now saying “I am a Christian” in itself is considered almost psychotic. Western modern thought based on ancient Greco-Roman values devastated Christian values.
This is where the concepts of right and left begin. Those who pursue traditional European Christian values are called the right wing, and the modern values that follow the spirit and ideology of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution that rose up against them are called the left wing. In other words, the core of the leftist concept is humanistic anti-Christian modern thought.
The United States is a country founded on Christian values and vision due to the influence of the Puritan spirit, but at the same time, it began as a country based on continental European ideas, that is, left-wing enlightenment and modernist ideas. Since then, humanistic modernist ideas have become more prevalent and deepened. As a result, Christian values were increasingly pushed into a peripheral corner.
So what is Greco-Roman thought? In a word, it can be called globalism. It is a global integrationist ideology that states that the world must be integrated in order to realize the universal human value of world peace.
Therefore, historically, Western elites and intellectuals have constantly pursued globalist ideas and world integration. Finally, the League of Nations and the United Nations were launched, the EU was formed as an advanced model of global integration, and the G7 and G20 were created to strengthen the drive for integration.
However, over the past 20 years, distrust toward globalists who pursue globalism has become increasingly widespread in the world. The American and European globalists who run the world say they are working for world peace, but they are strengthening international norms and pursuing global integration, but in reality, suspicions that they are evil global elites trying to dominate the world have spread into conspiracy theories. The evidence is that they just keep causing war. The argument is that they are behind most of the world’s wars.
In ancient times, the Roman Empire conquered and ruled the Mediterranean and Europe with globalist ideas and visions based on Stoic philosophy, but in fact, it was an imperialistic ambition that pursued pax Romana, or Roman peace, not world peace. It was. Similarly, although the United States led an alliance with Europe to form NATO and intervened militarily around the world, in reality it continues to create wars for the ambition of Pax Americana.
This distrust has become increasingly widespread in Russia, the Middle East, South America, Africa, and Asia, but the problem is that a presidential candidate making this claim has emerged in the United States as well.
▲President-elect Trump is greeting people at a campaign rally in Pittsburgh on the 4th, the day before the election. ⓒFacebook
When Trump campaigned against Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton before President Biden, he began strongly criticizing globalists. Trump fiercely criticized them, calling them ‘evil globalists’ and shouting, “America First.” Why do you want to interfere and control other countries when you can just take care of the United States?
He is a businessman. I know well the cause of the empire’s fall. When an empire spends more to control and dominate the world and the revenue it receives from world management costs decreases, it collapses. The United States is a large country and has many resources, so it is an absolute power in itself. Instead, it should not intervene in the world and should prioritize the United States, leaving other countries alone “as long as they do not challenge the United States.”
Additionally, the Trump camp strongly opposes globalists’ efforts to eliminate America’s traditional values, that is, Christian values. Why are they carrying out anti-Christian projects that dismantle families and churches, such as excessive human rights for children and legalization of same-sex marriage, and why are they trying to kill Christianity, which has made America great?
The Trump camp believes that globalists, including the American Democratic Party and neocons within the Republican Party, allied with anti-Christian elites in Europe, are trying to take over the United States, the world’s superpower. They have taken over Europe, so if they take over the United States, there will be no force to challenge them.
That is why the Trump camp calls the forces in solidarity with globalists in the United States the evil Deep State. Trump defines those forces in the United States as enemies of the United States.
Therefore, Trump’s overwhelming victory and return through this presidential election can historically be said to be the end of the US-led world order after World War II. The United States itself is leaving its position as ‘manager of the world.’
This is similar logic to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. In the Soviet Union, which was comprised of 15 countries at the time, Russia was the big brother and absolute leader. However, Yeltsin, the leader of the Russian Republic at the time, voluntarily withdrew from the Soviet Union, saying, “Why should we, Russia, sacrifice ourselves for those poor countries?” This became the decisive end to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. However, Communist Party Secretary General Gorbachev insisted on sticking to the Soviet system until the end, saying that he could not betray his brother countries.
Globalists believe that “Christianity and Judaism, which believe in Jehovah God, are self-righteous and are an obstacle to world integration.” Therefore, since World War II, a movement for religious integration has been secretly carried out with Catholicism and the WCC at the forefront. The logic is that “the world’s major religions must be integrated to establish a permanent world peace system.” The logic is that religious conflicts are usually behind world conflicts and wars. Therefore, religious unity is absolutely necessary for world peace.
They also define nationalism as a serious enemy of building a peaceful human community. The world must become one, but emphasizing national identity and independence is unacceptable.
For globalists, in principle, ‘nationalists who only emphasize national identity’ and ‘Christian evangelicals who only emphasize Jesus’ are enemies of humanity that must one day be completely eliminated.
Therefore, Christian evangelicals and Jews fundamentally resist these globalist projects. This is why Professor Yoram Hazony, a renowned Jewish scholar, emphasized the nation state and criticized globalism. There is no way Israelis would agree to the vision of a world community in which ethnic groups disappear and merge into global citizens.
The Trump camp ideologically criticizes globalism and advocates state nationalism. In fact, the same applies not only to Russia’s Putin, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Salman, and Turkyeong Erdogan, but also to the leaders of Brazil, Egypt, India, and Mexico.
So they came together to create the Brics system, which responds to the globalist system.[브라질(Brazil), 러시아(Russia), 인도(India), 중국(China), 남아프리카 공화국(South Africa) 머릿글자]was launched. The Brics system is increasingly expanding and strengthening.
Chapter 16 of Revelation prophesies about the battle of Armageddon. The content is that the nations of the world will unite against God and wage the final war. As seen in the Tower of Babel incident, we can see that globalism with a vision of world integration is fundamentally an evil rebellion.
At the Trump camp rally at the end of the election, the slogan “Jesus is King” (Jesus is our king) broke out. At the Harris camp rally, when someone shouted “Jesus is King,” Harris responded, “You came here in the wrong place.” “Get out!” he shouted at the crowd. Looking at this extreme contrast, we can understand the current situation.
In his victory speech, Trump confessed and declared that “God protected me” during several assassination crises. The world and history are not innocent. It remains to be seen how Trump, an extreme idealist and thorough realist, will manage the United States and influence the world in the future. However, what is clear is that the current phenomenon is extremely apocalyptic.
Missionary Paul Choi
President of Korean Peninsula International Graduate University
Intercorp General Manager
