Opinion: Principal of isolationism won't solve global concerns

Complex and multi-dimensional challenges such as terrorism, migration, climate change, rising inequalities and joblessness are certainly some of the pressing issues that affect our globalised world today, and whose grave impacts have variously forced leaders and other decision-makers around the world to come together to think of how best to solve them.

Much as disagreements about the how’s of sorting out these problems have time and again surfaced at the global stage, however, the why’s have normally glued countries together as one multifaceted global community.

But now there is cause for concern due to the sudden surge of populism and anti-globalism in the West. The new US President Donald Trump is leading this introversion in the social, political and economic sense, which caused the Brexit referendum in UK in June 2016, together with the general reluctance that we see in Europe in accepting refugees from conflict-ridden middle Eastern states like Syria owing to a magnified cultural and security fears.

This inversion poses a big threat to global unity and peace as it aims to ensconce the repugnant cultures of selfishness, islamophobia, nativism, racism and xenophobia.

Donald Trump’s political slogan of “Make America Great Again” for instance, seem to be a philosophy of division with a vapid desire to revive white supremacy and the policy of racial segregation in America. His smutty diatribes have severally hitted societies in and outside the superpower country, Africa being the recent victim by being referred to as “shithole”.

RETROGRESSIVE APPROACH

The modus operandi of President Donald Trump goes against the pro- multiculturalism approach of most of his predecessors. Jimmy Carter once said, “We become not a melting pot but a beautiful mosaic. Different people, different beliefs, different yearnings, different hopes, different dreams.”

Trump’s recklessness also appeared in the inconsiderate decision he took on Jerusalem in December last year by controversially naming this city, which carries the symbolism of unity of the followers of the three Abrahamic religions: Islam, Christianity and Judaism, to be the capital of Israel. In the domain of Islam, Jerusalem is recognized as the third holiest city after Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia.

The above announcement made by Trump officially disqualified his ability, if he had one, of resolving the age-old Israel-Palestine conflict through a two- state solution. Al jazeera’s senior political analyst for Middle East Marwan Bishara described President Donald Trump during that moment as a man who had drunk “Netanyahu’s Kool-Aid” by giving a declarative speech that had Trump’s voice, but the content and spin being that of Bibi.

Ideally, Trump was no longer the man who once sold to America and the world at large the idea that his business acumen had sharpened his negotiation skills, which were highly needed in such a tense political situation.

To make matters worse, fresh reports have also emerged that the US President has cut America’s financial contribution to the United Nations Relief and Works agency (UNRWA) for Palestinian refugees by more than half of the $125 million it was to give out.

The agency is the main humanitarian entity in Palestine that deals with basic welfare issues of the refugees like housing, medical care, food and education. My guess is that this inhumane act is aimed to blackmail the Palestinian authority to accept America’s unjust decision on Jerusalem.

Hungarian Prime minister Victor Orban is another rising populist who ignited the anti-refugee sentiments in Europe. But this argument that they want to preserve their culture by locking out the refugees shows that they don’t understand history which teaches us that civilization is a “cooperative product”.

That’s what the late British historians Will and Ariel Durant captured in their book ‘The Lessons of History’. America is for example best known as a nation of immigrants. In cultural terms, there is Europe in America, Africa in America and and East in the West and vice versa. But I am not sure if the likes of President Trump know that White house for example is a handiwork of the slaves from Africa?

INTER DEPENDENCE

To show you that man is not an island, even at the times when there were no planes in the sky and computers on our desks, road and sea routes connected diverse people in trade, knowledge and helped to build a useful appreciation for the ways of life of others.

It is therefore mystifying that after all the advancement we have made that some people are thinking of making us to cut off from each others, which is a tacit call to stagnation and insecurity.

Globalization is the inevitable reality of our time that needs support, and fashioning constructive improvements where there are alleged vulnerabilities and imbalances. But making the world closed will not solve anything. 

As Martin Luther King Jr once said, “ If we are to have peace on earth...our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nations; and this means we should develop a world perspective.”