The West’s disregard for global norms is endangering the world

livemint.com:

In the summer of the year 416 BCE, an Athenian naval fleet turned up on the island of Melos and demanded that its population submit to slavery. The Melians argued that since they had refused to side with Sparta—Athens’ main adversary in the ongoing conflict —and instead wished to remain neutral, it would only be right for the big powers to leave them alone.

The Athenian response, one of the famous lines in world history, was “You understand as well as we do that in the human sphere judgements about justice are relevant only between those with an equal power to enforce it, and that the possibilities are defined by what the strong do and the weak accept." In Richard Crawley’s classic 1874 translation of Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War, the words are punchier. “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must." We are seeing this in world affairs today as a rules-based international order crumbles under blows inflicted by the US, China and Russia.

But I was reminded of the pithy Athenian statement reading a reflective essay by Angus Deaton for the International Monetary Fund. The 2015 Nobel laureate repudiates the economic benefits of globalization and immigration over the past 30 years.

More worrying than this conclusion is his claim that he had “seriously underthought (his) ethical judgments about trade-offs between domestic and foreign workers. We certainly have a duty to aid those in distress, but we have additional obligations to our fellow citizens that we do not have to others." In other words, the eminent economist is telling us that it is ethical for rich countries to prefer their own citizens’ interests over those of the world’s poor.