From Vox.

Venezuela. Greenland. Iran.

Things have been moving so quickly that we weren’t even at war with Iran when we recorded this episode of The Gray Area with Sean Illing. It’s only March, but it’s been a long year.

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The war in Iran is only the latest sign that something deep is shifting in our global politics. Alliances fraying. Norms weakening. Democracies wobbling. So what exactly is happening? Is the liberal international order slowly eroding? Is it just going through a particularly turbulent chapter? Or are we watching it all collapse?

Sean talks with Zack Beauchamp, author of Vox’s On the Right newsletter, about the global democratic backslide and whether the American-led liberal order is slipping, imploding, or just going through a rough patch. Their conversation, which was recorded before the conflict in Iran, digs into the Greenland saga, alliance politics, and why democratic decay can be both obvious and hard to see at the same time.

Host: Sean Illing (@SeanIlling)
Guest: Zack Beauchamp (@zackbeauchamp)

1:10 Covering democracy and the rise of the right
5:45 The US-led world order
11:10 Democratic peace theory
15:55 Trump vs. the world order
21:36 If the world order shifts, what happens to America?
25:00 Is this an era of liberal decadence?

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