Does the U.S. have a coherent foreign policy on the Pacific region, Eurasia or even Europe that takes the new era into consideration? I do not think so. The U.S. is making decisions on all of these hot and important regions with old Cold War reflexes without understanding the new era or its power and situation relating to itself, its allies and the future. Why is this so? Can the political mind of a state, which has been the superpower of the world since World War II, regress to such an extent? It can only regress under one condition. If the U.S. thinks that it still lives in the world of the 20th century and determines its allies and enemies accordingly, its political mind has become a thing of the past and the decisions based on the reflexes of this mind will harm the U.S. itself first, then the whole system. If it persists, it will turn into a systemic crisis that will first devour the U.S. Let us take a look at the brief history of this.
It is now clear that the systemic crisis that broke out in the U.S. in 2008 is not a total collapse, meaning it cannot be resolved with the rapid and radical repartition process used after the Great Depression of 1929. This crisis is much more widespread and profound. As such, it cannot simply be tamed with domestic regulations.
The U.S. was the absolute winner of World War II. The Soviets, on the other hand, put forth their power and influence to become one of the most indispensable segments of the system's reconstruction. All of the institutions in the new world order established under the leadership of the U.S. after World War II are based on the idea that the U.S.'s interests reflect all those of developed countries. Institutions like the United Nations, World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) were created on the basis of the U.S.'s implicit agreement with the Soviet Union without taking into account the theories and suggestions of other sources like brilliant British economist John Maynard Keynes, who had the most coherent theory to overcome the 1929 crisis. The developing and underdeveloped countries were almost partitioned between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.
From 1947 onward, developing countries, including Turkey, were confined to the stereotypical economic prescriptions of the IMF. During the same period, the Middle East came to be reshaped. The state of Israel emerged, and Baath regimes, which were destroyed and replaced by pro-American dictates and terrorist structures, were built in Egypt, Syria and Iraq. What is happening in the Middle East today depends on the complete dissolution of this structure and the destru
ction of all past balances. The U.S. is no longer in the post-World War II world. The Asia-Pacific region is not just about a Japan defeated by war, and China not knowing what to do after the revolution. China now possesses the power to disrupt all of the balances at any moment. Also, there are no Soviets threatening the U.S. to compromise for the sake of the status quo. Russia's new expansion strategy is based not on a permanent detente, but on enlargement by opening up to the outside and strengthening. On the other hand, in Latin America and Eurasia, which includes Turkey, there are hardly any countries left to fall victim to the vicious circle of underdevelopment as a regional apparatus of the U.S. After successive crises in the 1990s and 2000s, these countries found that the stereotypical IMF prescriptions did not work and were the cause of the crises and began to implement relatively unique economic policies.
As a result of all of this, we are faced with a global systemic crisis today that is deeper than the 1929 crisis. The 1929 crisis was overcome with a world war and U.S. hegemony. The current crisis is precisely the crisis of the old system, which was built upon the economic and political hegemony of the U.S., and is unlikely to end without overthrowing the old system.
As long as the U.S. does not see it and continues to behave in line with post-World War II conditions, the crisis will continue to deepen. Unlike before, there is no one-dimensional detente based on only two countries, the U.S. and the Soviet Union. There is now an opportunity for multilateral partnerships, regional economic unions and relevant high-level technology exchanges on all levels.
Apart from all of this, we can understand by looking at the Nobel prizes given in the field of peace and economics that the U.S.-centered economic and political approaches have failed, not only on a practical level, but also on the theoretical and scientific levels, as well. The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded this year to an anti-nuclear weapons civil society organization, but old politics under U.S. dominance, including North Korea, threatens the world with nuclear weapons.
The adventure of the Nobel Prize for economics is more striking. This is because it was given to an economist who has long mathematized economic theory within the framework of maximizing firm and individual profits rather than focusing on crit
ical and alternative economic theories that produce a solution to the crisis and transcend the innovative and neoliberal paradigm that will take the countries out of the crisis.
Development economics and the Keynesian school were almost ignored. Joseph Stiglitz, who today claims that neoliberalism is dead, shared the Nobel Prize with George Akerlof and Michael Spence in 2001, not because of his current criticisms and Keynesian views, but because of his work on the asymmetric information theory. Now, the Nobel Committee resorted to delegating economy to psychology to overcome the current lack of dominant economics in the U.S. This year, Richard Thaler won the Nobel Prize as one of the masterminds of behavioral economics with his studies of the individual psychological effect on economic decision-making mechanisms, and his work substituting social preferences and psychology instead of rational individualism in the formation of markets. In fact, we can read Thaler as follows: The rational individual that was created by the U.S. after World War II has perished, and those rationally robotic people no longer work.
As a result, every step taken by the U.S. now is based on the old rationality and is not rational, feasible and sustainable today. In other words, the political "mind" of the U.S. has remained in the previous century. According to Henry Kissinger, the 20th century was the U.S.' century, but we are now in the 21st century.