Still Globalization If Quacks Like Duck

WSJ says “Globalization Isn’t Dead But a Shake-up Is Building” to account for world’s bad actors abusing it. Hope wake up includes West avoiding its mistake of guilt-driven wealth transfer give-aways post “Colonialization”?

The newspaper’s story summarized globalization’s epiphany this way: “Multinational companies still want cheap & efficient markets, but they also want safety” aka “diversification away from direct tensions between the world’s great economic powers.” Put another way, companies pushing for globalization willy nilly had always assumed they could make a fast buck in selling their goods to developing nations without getting grief from the USA, EU, Russia & China. Vast political & economic incentives were given away to any & all comers; perhaps the biggest mistake was allowing communist China to join the World Trade Organization, plus given preferential treatment as a “developing nation,” so it has become the world’s biggest exporter. Hello Trojan Horse. As the West finally sees saber-rattling, Taiwan-threatening China as the economic & military threat it always was, the multi-national companies now see they have no choice but to navigate around the real world’s take no prisoners economic competition as well as potential military wars between the superpowers. Of course, Russia’s war on Ukraine and how it’s roiling world trade is real enough.

Might we add one wish to the WSJ’s insight into globalization’s new reality: That the West also wakes up to see that continuing to give away its wealth and/or political power to developing nations … & bad actors like China, Russia & Iran … only weakens its ability to help anyone, let alone themselves?

Davd Soul