The Solvency Gap

Abstract

Abstract The West has overreached. A large and widening gap has opened up between Western governments and their voting publics over foreign policy. On issues ranging from international trade to global governance, support for anti-globalism has been gaining ground in Western democracies. In this chapter, we lay out the book’s central argument about the sources of this widening gap, tracing it back to foreign and domestic policy decisions that Western leaders made in the decade after the end of the Cold War. These decisions sought to globalize markets and pool national sovereignty at the supranational level while undercutting social protections at home—a combination of policies that succeeded in expanding the liberal order, but at the cost of the mounting public discontent and political fragmentation we see today. In developing this argument, the chapter advances a new theoretical framework and methodology to track Western democracies’ foreign policies, and domestic support for them, and summarizes our core findings about how and why Western governments’ international ambitions came to exceed what their domestic publics are willing to bear.