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Hoelang duurt eeuwig? Eeuwigheid en tijd in het Oude Testament - Bijbel online

Mensen zijn eindig. Ons leven is beperkt in tijd en ruimte. Dat is de ene kant van de medaille. De andere kant is dat mensen zich uitstrekken naar dat wat ...

C2026-06 #Theologie #Eeuwigheid #Olam (Hebr.)

·debijbel.nl·Jun 9, 2026

Hoelang duurt eeuwig? Eeuwigheid en tijd in het Oude Testament - Bijbel online

Don’t Give Up on Global Order | Foreign Affairs

Don’t Give Up on Global Order America Depends on It—and Can Restore It Philip H. Gordon June 9, 2026 Marines holding the U.S. flag, New York City, May 2026 Marines holding the U.S. flag, New York City, May 2026 Eduardo Munoz / Reuters PHILIP H. GORDON is Sydney Stein, Jr., Scholar at the Brookings Institution and Frank E. and Arthur Payne Distinguished Lecturer at Stanford University. He served as National Security Adviser to the Vice President in the Biden administration and as White House Coordinator for the Middle East in the Obama administration.

More by Philip H. Gordon Listen Share & Download Print Save Americans these days agree on very little about politics and international relations. But there is a growing consensus around two fundamental points. One is that the long-standing liberal world order—founded after World War II and based on a system of U.S.-led alliances, multilateral institutions, relatively open trade, and the defense of rules and norms such as state sovereignty, nonaggression, and freedom of navigation—is now dead and buried. It had been waning for some time, the logic goes, but the second Trump administration is proving to be the final nail in the coffin. The second point of emerging consensus is that a fundamental remaking of that order has become essential. The American role in preserving the old order had become counterproductive and unsustainable, and it is long past time that Americans shed the burdens required to try to maintain it.

The problem with this line of thinking is that neither assertion is true, and assuming otherwise could create a dangerous, self-fulfilling prophecy. U.S. President Donald Trump certainly doesn’t believe in a liberal, rules-based, U.S.-led order, and there is no guarantee that order will survive four years of the damage his administration is inflicting on it. At the same time, it would be premature to succumb to the fatalistic conclusion that there is no hope for more principled and reliable U.S. leadership after Trump, whose policies are now reminding many Americans what they lose when such leadership is abandoned. It would be even more misguided to presume that if the U.S.-led world order really is dying, it won’t be sorely missed when it is gone. To paraphrase what British Prime Minister Winston Churchill once said about democracy, a U.S.-led world order is probably the worst of all possible orders—except for all the others that have ever been tried.

Cynics (or frankly any honest observer) might question the degree to which a liberal rules-based order ever actually existed; it would be easy to make a long list of examples of how rules have been bent, broken, or ignored, not least by the United States itself. As Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney acknowledged in his landmark address to the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2026, the notion of a rules-based order was always “partially false.” The world’s strongest powers would consistently “exempt themselves when convenient,” trade rules were “enforced asymmetrically,” and international law was “applied with varying rigor depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.” At the same time, as Carney also acknowledged, the liberal international order was also partially true, and for eight decades, American hegemony “helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security, and support for frameworks for resolving disputes.” The United States during that period adopted and maintained a broad, enlightened view—historically unprecedented among great powers—that it had a national self-interest in making other countries secure, prosperous, and free. That view in turn gave other countries an interest in supporting U.S. leadership and the order that came with it.

The U.S.-led international system that has been in place since just after World War II has been marred by wars, injustices, inequalities, and other horrors. But it has also underpinned the most stable, secure, and prosperous 80-year period in world history. Much of that is because every U.S. president before Trump believed in it, defended it, and had the necessary public support to do so. Rather than complacently accepting its demise—let alone celebrating or contributing to it—the American president who comes after Trump should set out to update, improve, and sell the idea of an enlightened and U.S.-led world where leadership, rules, values, institutions, and norms still matter.

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SILVER LININGS In the 1979 film Monty Python’s Life of Brian, set in AD 33, the character Reg (played by the comedian John Cleese) famously asks fellow members of his Judean resistance group, “What have the Romans ever done for us?,” only for them to mention aqueducts, sanitation, roads, irrigation, medicine, education, public order, and even wine. Reg is reduced to responding, “Apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, . . . what have the Romans ever done for us?” A similar joke could be made about American critics who dismiss the benefits of U.S. global leadership over the past 80 years: apart from avoiding great-power war (for the first time in history), keeping sea-lanes open, curbing nuclear proliferation, fostering unparalleled prosperity, advancing democracy, and granting the United States the unique benefits of global preeminence, what did the U.S.-led order ever do for Americans?

To say this is not to ignore the conflicts, injustices, and hypocrisies of the past eight decades but to note how favorably that period compares with any previous one in world history. Consider, for example, the prevention of wars between major powers. In the 80 years that preceded 1945 or any similar period before that, the world’s strongest countries fought regularly and repeatedly, wreaking havoc on humanity. World War I and World War II alone killed roughly 100 million people. By this standard, the last 80 years compare rather favorably. To be sure, what the historian John Lewis Gaddis has called “the long peace” that followed World War II was due in part to the deterrent effect of nuclear weapons, whose invention coincided with the dawn of the U.S.-led world order. As the political scientist John Mueller has pointed out, it was also due to the simple reality that modern military technology, even beyond nuclear weapons, makes war so catastrophic that major powers are largely deterred from waging it against each other. But much of the long peace also had to do with the presence and power of American military forces, alliances, and defense agreements all over the world, which have deterred the sort of territorial aggression and great-power wars that used to be commonplace.

Nuclear weapons nonproliferation provides another case in point. U.S. President John F. Kennedy’s famous 1963 warning that the world could see some 15 to 25 nuclear states by the 1970s—a thought that “haunted” him—was hardly implausible. Many experts and intelligence services concurred. But it didn’t happen, not because nuclear know-how, material, or technology was not available to states but because the United States gave credible security guarantees to many of the states that might have considered that option and set up multilateral institutions to deny access to adversarial potential proliferators. The system was far from perfect—five countries developed nuclear weapons after Kennedy’s warning—but others were deterred from or incentivized against doing so. More nuclear weapons proliferation will not necessarily lead to nuclear weapons use, accidents, or terrorist threats, but it does not seem to be a gamble worth taking.

The liberal international order—anchored by American security guarantees that provided stability for large parts of Europe and Asia, open sea-lanes for the entire world, and U.S.-led institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization—also helped to foster the largest expansion of global prosperity in history. Critics may claim that the U.S.-led order benefited only the United States and other advanced industrial countries, and that economic growth was unevenly distributed among and within countries. But from 1945 to today, global GDP increased more than tenfold, thanks in no small part to rising levels of wealth in so-called developing countries. Average incomes tripled, and the share of humanity living in extreme poverty fell from nearly 60 percent in 1950 to around ten percent in 2025. The rise in global income lifted over a billion people out of poverty altogether, and the global middle class grew to include more than half the world’s population. Life expectancy rose from 46 years in 1950 to 73 years in 2024. This economic growth cannot be solely attributed to the U.S.-led world order. But that order did provide unusually propitious conditions for it to take place.

American global leadership also helped promote the greatest expansion of individual freedom and democracy the world has ever seen. In 1945, most of the world lived under authoritarian rule. By the 1990s, more than half of all states were democracies; by 2016 it was six out of ten. Even with the democratic recession of the past decade, the world remains far more democratic than in any previous era. The United States often wielded its great power selfishly, but it nonetheless provided a model and the space for promoting open societies, rule of law, and human rights far beyond anything before.

NOT DEAD YET Some critics of the U.S.-led order might grant that it has been great for the world. But they believe it has been an unsustainable drain on American resources. Trump, for example, framed his campaign for president in 2024 on a narrative