World Review: America at 250 — What the US Means to the World

A synopsis of this week's edition of World Review

Each week, I host a video podcast called World Review with Ivo Daalder where journalists from major news outlets around the world join me to discuss the latest global news stories of the week.

World Review can now be heard on Sundays, at 7:00 a.m. Central Time, on Chicago’s NPR station, WBEZ, or on the WBEZ app. We’ll still tape the show on Fridays, and post the video on YouTube and the audio version on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

“World Review is always fascinating. I love the fact that you can get journalists from around the world to participate since zoom is the medium.”

— A Subscriber to America Abroad

Now, on to this week’s show. This Fourth of July, rather than our usual roundup of three global stories, I devoted the entire episode to the single question America’s 250th birthday forces upon us: What has America meant for the world — and what does it mean today? I can think of no better panel to take it on: Zanny Minton Beddoes, Editor-in-Chief of The Economist; James Harding, Editor-in-Chief of The Observer; and Sylvie Kauffmann, foreign affairs columnist and former editorial director of Le Monde.

While I encourage you to watch or listen to the episode (and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts!), here are a few interesting things I took away from our discussion.

Born on an Idea

Zanny set the tone with the observation that “America is the only country really founded on the pursuit of an idea.” That idea — that government derives its legitimacy from the governed, that certain rights are self-evident — was radical in 1776. And it traveled. Sylvie reminded us that the Declaration was quickly translated and spread, inspiring not only the French Revolution of 1789 but Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam declaration of 1945 and the peaceful revolutions of 1989 in Eastern Europe. James noted that The Observer itself was founded in 1791, just fifteen years after the Declaration, “with a promise to share all species of knowledge that conduces to the happiness of society” — a newspaper born, in spirit, from the same impulse.

But what about today? The Declaration, James observed, was meant as “an expression of the American mind.” Now, he said, we look across at America and see “a mind that feels so divided, so fractured, so at odds with itself.” The idea is still there. It still inspires. But can a country this fragmented express it?

Zanny pushed back on the gloom — though not entirely. America, she argued, has always lived in the gap between its ideals and its practice, slavery being the most searing example. That gap is not a refutation of the idea. It is integral to it. America is “an aspirational country” — and the aspiration is the point. She added a useful corrective: when she travels in the United States, she doesn’t find a country that thinks it has arrived. She finds “a country that is deeply polarized, deeply unhappy... a long way away from what they imagine to be the ideal of America.”

A System the World Holds More Dear

The second segment produced the richest debate of the episode. Was the post-1945 order America built — the UN, NATO, Bretton Woods, the nuclear umbrella — genuinely global? Or, as James provocatively suggested, something that worked rather well “for Europeans talking about the benefits of a transatlantic relationship” rather than for the wider world?

Zanny went straight at it. The system was far bigger than Europe, she argued. It underwrote freedom of navigation, created the IMF and World Bank, and produced — after 1989 — a wave of democratization and economic opening that ran from Eastern Europe to Africa to Asia. She should know: her first job after Harvard was as an adviser to Poland’s first post-communist finance minister. “I really, really disagree with the idea that this was just something for the benefit of Europe.”

Sylvie offered the more ambivalent verdict. America was “victim of its success.” It brought lasting peace and prosperity to Europe, built democratic Germany, helped bring down the Soviet empire. Then came hubris — the assumption that everyone would follow the same path, that free markets would deliver democracy everywhere. They didn’t. The democratic recession we now see globally is, in part, a consequence of that failure of imagination.

James returned to his opening argument. “The United States has created a system that the rest of the world currently holds more dear than it sometimes feels the United States does itself.”

The Country of the Second Chance

I asked Sylvie, who hails from America’s oldest ally and most consistent critic, whether this was the moment de Gaulle had been waiting for? Her answer was disarming: France is not bragging. “The situation is so complicated and so difficult even for France.” Strategic autonomy sounds appealing until you reckon, as Zanny put it, with the prospect of Europe becoming “a vassal to America in AI terms” unless it builds real leverage of its own.

Zanny’s diagnosis was unsparing: “The old post-war order is over, and I think we should stop clutching our pearls for it.” The Economist has a piece out this week called “The Wrecking Ball Revolution.” She does not think America is in decline — quite the opposite. She expects it to dominate the 21st century economically, especially in AI. But it will play a different kind of role. The question — open, urgent — is whether a US-dominated world without US-led institutions can be as stable and prosperous as the one we are leaving behind.

Then came the birthday wishes. Sylvie, rightly, called America “the country of the second chance.” After the Iraq War debacle, she recalled, officials in Southeast Asia told her they thought America was finished. “And then they elected a Black president, and we realized that America was able to start all over again.”

James closed with Ellis Island — the moment when a nation, at its best, “takes people who have nothing and who have nothing but fear, and enables them to build a life.” As an immigrant to the United States myself, I couldn’t have said it better.

Those are my quick takes on this week’s episode of World Review. To get the full story, please listen to the episode itself.