Borders Are Back and A New Game Looms

We were promised a world without borders. In 1990 the Japanese management consultant and business school professor Kenichi Ohmae published “The Borderless World,’’ in praise of global supply chains. In 1996 John Perry Barlow penned his Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, addressed to the “governments of the industrial world.” He told them defiantly: “Cyberspace does not lie within your borders.”

Just over two decades later, borders are back. In his speech last week to the United Nations General Assembly, President Trump was unequivocal: “We must uphold respect for law [and] respect for borders.”

Like Trump’s reference to the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong Un, as “Rocket Man” and his threat to “totally destroy” Kim’s country, this was calculated to appall the people Steve Bannon calls “globalists.” Yet Trump’s assertion of national sovereignty was one of the few lines in the speech that won applause.