Globalization was implemented in the wake of World War II, beginning with the signing of the Global Agreement on Tariffs and Trade in 1947, in an effort to prevent any more such wars in the future. Free trade, it was believed, would make all countries more interdependent on one another and would level out living standards by elevating them in poor countries. The world would become one big, happy country where no one nation could derive any benefit from attacking another. Clearly, at least in the form that has been practiced up to this point, it hasn’t worked. War has once again broken out, a war that could easily turn into World War III.
Trade between Ukraine and Russia isn’t the issue. The issue is the notion that rewarding your enemies with lucrative trade deals will make them your friends, and not just wealthier, more powerful enemies. It’s truly no different than businesses paying “protection” money to a local crime syndicate that’s running a protection racket. When has that not ended badly? You pay until they bleed you out of business.
That’s especially true of trade between the U.S. and China. Experts have been warning for years that China is no friend, and that our trade dollars – nearly $6 trillion paid to China since they were granted “Most Favored Nation” status in 2000 – have built them into a superpower that now threatens our very existence.
Now China and Russia – two superpowers made rich and powerful by our naive embrace of the globalist trade protection racket – have aligned themselves against us. Experts have for years been raising the alarm over what we were doing – surrendering the manufacturing sector of our economy to enrich our enemies and fund their military build-ups. Now the two of them are a match made in heaven, or in hell, to use a more appropriate metaphor: Russia has the resources and China has the manufacturing might. Who can stand against that?
Layer this failure – the misguided hope that cozying up to our enemies will make them our friends – on top of the other failures of globalist trade policy. Foremost is its failure to account for the role of population density in driving massive trade imbalances (see “note” below), turning loose badly overpopulated nations to prey on the markets and manufacturing jobs of those more reasonably populated and, in addition, enabling further population growth beyond sustainable levels.
Globalist free trade policies have created huge economic distortions and destabilizing imbalances around the world and, instead of turning enemies into friends, have enriched despotic dictatorships like Russia and China, building them into superpowers that now threaten the rest of the world. Globalism has back-fired, ensuring that this next world war will be far more lethal instead of preventing it.
Note: I’ve been sitting on the latest U.S. trade data since it was released earlier this month. The explosion in our trade deficit is accelerating at an astonishing pace. I found the data to be so disheartening that I’ve struggled to even post about it. I fear that there may be no hope for the U.S. to avoid economic ruin. Nevertheless, I’ll provide the data soon in one of my next posts. Also, look for posts about admitting refugees from Ukraine and the trade sanctions imposed on Russia.
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