There are currently six people living in space. Two Americans, three Russians, and one Japanese.

The six are working together aboard the International Space Station (ISS) — almost literally enclosed in a bubble, distant from everything below on Earth, including the politics. Makes you a little envious, doesn’t it?

The International Space Station is a chimeric symbol of global optimism (and more cynically, financial pragmatism). Its birth was the result of combining two separate sets of plans by NASA and Roscosmos, its Russian counterpart. In the aftermath of the Cold War, agreements for cooperation in space were forged to express unity and peace. But time passes — and the political situation in 2016 looks very different than it did in 1991, or even at the turn of the millennium when the first parts of the ISS launched.

All over the world, nationalism is resurgent. Russia, under the leadership of Vladimir Putin, is once again asserting its power on the global stage, putting it in direct conflict with Western interests. In the United States, Donald Trump’s brand of isolationist nativism has put him just a handful of electoral-college votes away from the White House. In Europe, practically every country has a nationalist party of its own to worry about, and Britain has voted to leave the European Union.

Since the Ukraine crisis, there’s even been a persistent background hum of stories about Russia’s intent to pull out of the ISS project, including one report of a plan to literally separate the station in two—with Russia taking its half and using it to build an independent space station.

In short, it feels like we’re drifting further from the future we were promised by Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry. He saw space exploration as an expression of human optimism — that together humans can achieve incredible things.

But recent events make me incredibly pessimistic that Roddenberry’s vision could ever come to fruition. With the rise of nationalism around the world, is international cooperation in space doomed?