Commentary: For a better foreign policy in 2024, let’s be more like Taylor Swift
“ My team is losing, battered and bruising./ I see the high-fives between the bad guys.” Taylor Swift’s “Miss Americana & the Heartbreak Prince” song is a critique of America’s domestic politics, but it could well be our theme song on the world stage today too, as many at home and abroad talk of America’s decline.
Some pundits and experts speak of a multipolar world in which many global powers hold sway. Others assert we’ve shifted to a world of two competing superpowers, with America countered by a rising China.
The one thing they seem to agree on is that the American century is over, with the United States no longer dictating the path of world events. This comes against a backdrop of a more violent world, with 2022 and 2023 seeing than any other years since the end of the Cold War, according to the Uppsala Conflict Data Program. All of this threatens American, and global, security.
