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The post-war trading system, which is at the foundation of our prosperity and orderly international relations, may be ending. Instead, ahead of us may lie an indefinite period of fragmentation of world trade and a more fractious and unstable world order. As trade rules embodied in the World Trade Organization (WTO)—which are imperfect and outdated but still constitute the bedrock on which the world trade edifice stands (Wolff, 2023)—become increasingly eroded, trade will be reconfigured inefficiently along regional and “friendship” lines. The global economy will slow, expectations of higher living standards will remain unmet, the poverty reduction of decades past may be reversed, and climate action will be impeded (Georgieva, 2023).

This book seeks to address the questions—uppermost in the minds of policymakers and analysts around the world—why fragmentation is happening, how it might evolve, and what can be done to prevent, or at least mitigate, the economic and political disruption that it will bring. I do not claim to provide a definitive answer, nor—frankly—would I expect anyone to do so. Indeed, uncertainty about what fragmentation will bring is the essence of the challenge it poses for policymakers and firms. I aim, however, to advance our understanding of fragmentation by considering both the politics and economic thinking that drive it, and the economic and security context within which it is occurring. I try to sketch possible outcomes of the fragmentation process and suggest policies that respond robustly to the uncertainty the erosion of trade rules is generating.

Along with a succession of crises—the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), China–U.S. tensions, the pandemic, the war in Ukraine—the prevailing narrative on globalization and trade changed. In many quarters trade is no longer viewed as a source of efficiency, growth, and peaceful relations but as a source of unfair competition, inequality, and a threat to national security. What did not change, however, is a compelling body of theoretical and empirical evidence dating back 250 years which shows that nations gain from international trade. If anything, the evidence continues to accumulate. Countries could not have fought the pandemic without trade in vaccines and medical equipment, and without foreign supply of everything when whole nations went into lockdown at various times. As the effects of climate change became more visible in prolonged droughts and other disasters, so did the need for trade in food, solar panels, and critical materials for batteries. As the world’s climate continues to deteriorate, nations will have to choose between agricultural trade and mass migration, and to choose between trade in environmental goods and use of fossil fuels.

Why did the narrative on globalization become so negative and why is the resurgence of protectionism threatening? One reason is as old as the annals of commerce yet remains fundamental. Nations gain from trade but, in sectors where they do not have comparative advantage, workers and capital invested lose, creating a coalition to resist trade. A sequence of crises which undermined confidence in globalization and discredited the prevailing policy paradigm bolstered the political resistance to free trade by those who lose from it. The “Washington Consensus” became the Washington dissensus.

The resistance to trade found new life in three developments. The first is the intensifying rivalry between China and the United States, the world’s superpowers, and largest economies. The second—and connected—development is a revolution and inward turn in the trade policy of the United States, the architect of the post-war system, which has its roots in its increasingly fractious social and political divisions, and to the rising inequality and macroeconomic instability of recent decades. The third development is the mounting concern that WTO rules are outdated and increasingly getting in the way of sovereign preferences in many areas. While traditional agendas such as differences in labor standards and in industrial policy (e.g., support to infant and declining industries) remain insufficiently addressed, even more pressing and divisive issues, namely climate change and national security took center stage.

Economic efficiency mandates that the right policy response to the mounting tensions is not to close trade but to address the problems at the core—to find a strategic accommodation with China, to mitigate the losses of some workers from trade with adequate social support, and to coordinate decarbonization policies. For all its shortcomings, there is enough flexibility in WTO trade rules to accommodate national preferences and where there is not, the WTO offers a means to achieve better coordination without unduly restricting trade. But however valid these arguments are, trade policy is a balancing act between conflicting interests and views, and the balance is rapidly and decisively shifting toward allowing countries more “policy space.”

It takes time for the world economy to change direction and this book shows that the fragmentation of world trade has barely started: it is not too late to prevent fragmentation. Protectionism and rule-breaking in many quarters have been offset by trade liberalization in others, especially under the growing number and increased depth of regional and mega-regional trade agreements. Global value chains continue to show remarkable resilience. Many companies that once called for protection have either become defunct or are adapting, reorienting toward world markets, importing cheaper inputs, drawing on foreign technology, investing overseas, and calling on equity and debt capital from abroad. Trade continues to grow, technology advances, enormous gaps in wages and productivity across the world persist, and the gains from globalization are far from spent.

Yet, the signs that the trading system is on the cusp—that an avalanche of protectionist measures has begun to roll and is building—are unmistakable. These signs now go well beyond the trade war between China and the United States and the sanctions on Russia and Iran. They include, for example, over thirty WTO trade disputes that remain in limbo after its Appellate Body became disabled, a vast increase in trade concerns expressed in WTO committees, large trade-distorting subsidies in the United States which has newly embarked on import-substituting industrial policy, and a widespread expectation that decarbonization measures will cause a new wave of trade disputes. Donald Trump is the Republican candidate in the 2024 Presidential election and has promised to escalate the trade war with China and impose an additional 10 percent MFN tariff on U.S. imports, which would amount to the United States tearing up the WTO and is bound to prompt retaliation by partners that account for most U.S. exports.

Avoiding fragmentation or, at least mitigating the damage it will cause, is possible. An essential condition is for China and the United States to reach an accommodation on trade. The tension in China–U.S. relations is no longer mainly about trade if it ever was, and nor is reduced trade the most worrying consequence of their rift. The rivalry between a rising China and the incumbent United States has preoccupied eminent American scholars such as Graham Allison (2017), John Ikenberry (2014), Henry Kissinger (2011, 2012), and Joseph Nye (2023). The perspectives they offer are diverse, but they build on the same assumption: the nuclear-armed giants have the means to destroy the other without realistic prospect of defense, and so they will coexist or not exist, and must be constantly wary of the risk of escalation. Others of the self-denominated realist school see a military conflict between the superpowers over supremacy in Asia as highly likely (Mearsheimer, 2006)….”

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Industrial policy has enjoyed a major return to popularity in the United States, with the introduction of the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act in August 2022, driven by the need to expedite the clean energy transition and mitigate geostrategic concerns by reducing dependence on China.

The subsidies linked to domestic content requirements in these statutes have shifted sourcing patterns, while restrictions on the exports of advanced microchips to Chinese firms have directly affected trade. The World Bank’s October 2023 East Asia Update measures how these laws have reduced Chinese and ASEAN exports to the United States and increased those from Mexico and Canada.

The direct impact of US industrial policy extends beyond its borders by providing preferential treatment to FTA partners and discriminating against others. It may also have spillover effects by contributing to an already growing appetite for similar policies in East Asia and around the world, particularly Europe. This tit-for-tat policy game could apply to subsidies and other instruments of protection as countries try to compete on an increasingly uneven playing field.

To some, these developments signal the end of the export-led model in spearheading growth. While trade growth in East Asia averaged over 8 per cent in the years leading up to the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, it is expected to fall to 4.4 per cent in the post-pandemic years.

While diversifying trade patterns will increase the resilience of trade flows and the sustainability of the export-led model, the two-decade steady decline in the region’s trade growth rate is a cause for concern. Supply chains are shortening and some policy-induced reshoring has taken place. But the slowdown has mainly affected goods rather than services trade. There is huge potential for growth in services trade, especially intermediate services, with digitalisation further reducing barriers.

This has led some commentators to assert that globalisation is not dead but simply transforming. Similarly, if the export-led model of old is dead or dying, then it may be superseded by one in which the composition and the pattern of trade changes, but not its role or importance. The composition will shift away from goods towards services while the pattern of trade will be determined less by efficiency and more by geopolitical factors.

Rapid growth in digital trade is related to this compositional shift towards services. Digitalisation increases the scale, scope and speed of trade and will affect assessment of the export-led model’s viability in at least three ways.

First, digital goods and services are likely to make up most future trade growth, while digitalisation will facilitate future services trade growth. Second, reported statistics on trade may underestimate the true volume of digital trade, given a host of measurement difficulties. Third, many of the barriers that inhibit goods trade in developed countries do not apply to services trade, while increasing digitisation enhances the ability of traders to circumvent protectionist barriers.

The export-led model is unlikely to die anytime soon. Though the shift towards embracing industrial policy may represent more than a transitory phenomenon in the United States, the fact that Washington’s security-driven trade policy has favoured friend-shoring and near-shoring more than reshoring implies a change in the pattern rather than the volume of trade.

Such policies have so far favoured countries which have free trade agreements (FTAs) with the United States, at the expense of China and ASEAN member states. But this could change if attempts by ASEAN countries like Indonesia and the Philippines to sign limited FTAs with the United States for critical minerals materialise.

Similarly, the rapid growth in digital trade is altering the product composition of trade, as new digital goods and services are traded and modes of delivery change. Trade statistics probably underestimate the true significance of these changes on volumes of trade, given measurement difficulties that lead to under-reporting.

The main reason why the export-led model is likely to survive, in one form or another, is the region’s long-standing commitment to free and open trade, which has facilitated massive economic transformation and social progress. The growth and spread of supply chains in the region has underpinned its economic success and is largely irreversible.

There is evidence that this commitment is still present. Recently, Malaysia decided to remove price controls and subsidies on sensitive agricultural products. The Philippines has removed the long-standing and controversial foreign equity limitation on public services, allowing 100 per cent foreign ownership in all public service sectors outside of public utilities. The ASEAN-led Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership initiative, with its open rules of origin at a time of global pressures against liberalisation, is another indicator of the region’s commitment to openness, as is the recent launch of negotiations for the ASEAN Digital Economy Framework Agreement.

If there is a risk to the export-led model, then it is likely to come from outside. But the primary question, of whether the region’s long-standing commitment to openness will be sufficient to withstand disruption and fragmentation from a sharp escalation in geopolitical tensions, remains.

Jayant Menon is Senior Fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore.

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Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, good morning! It is a pleasure to share this panel with Vice-President Dombrovskis and Deputy Secretary General Lapecorella.

Let me begin by thanking the organizers for inviting me to this conference and to your beautiful city, particularly as it celebrates its 700th anniversary this year. I very much look forward to discovering more of the rich history and culture of Vilnius during my stay.

I would like to make a few points today. My first point is that in the past few years, we have been living through a trifecta of crises: the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and the climate emergency. Throughout these crises, trade has been an important shock absorber and enabler of resilience in the global economy.  In short, trade is an essential part of how the world addresses crisis.

In the first half of 2020, COVID-19 pandemic sent the world’s economy into free fall. In Q2 2020, the value of goods trade fell by 23% and services trade by 30% year-on-year. But trade rebounded strongly after the lockdowns, and by early 2021, global merchandise trade was at all-time highs. Over the course of 2021, merchandise trade bodog online casino grew almost twice as fast as global output, making external demand a key engine of economic recovery for countries around the world.

We all remember how export restrictions exacerbated medical supply shortages during the frightening first weeks of the pandemic. But we tend to overlook how trade and cross-border supply chains quickly became a means for ramping up production of and access to personal protective equipment, pulse oximeters, respirators, and eventually vaccines.  Of course, it’s been much easier in the developed world than in many developing countries, which are still in the throes of the crisis – but no matter the level of development, trade has been indispensable to recovery.

The billions of COVID-19 vaccine doses that made normal economic life possible again in so many parts of the world were manufactured in supply chains cutting across as many as 19 countries. There is no doubt that without trade, the economic and health recoveries would have been much slower.  And more trade is needed to boost that recovery in less developed countries.

In 2022, hot on the heels of the pandemic came the war in Ukraine, which has been a shock to the global trading system and the WTO. Ukraine’s GDP contracted by almost a third in 2022, and its exports have collapsed due to the disruption of Black Sea shipping.

But the economic consequences of the war reverberate far beyond Ukraine’s borders. Ukraine and Russia together account for barely 2% of global GDP and only 2.5% of merchandise exports. However, before the war, the two countries exported nearly 12% of food calories traded globally and were among key suppliers of energy, fertilizers, and certain metals. The disruption of shipping in the Black Sea is intensifying the food crisis in many parts of the world. Therefore, it was very disappointing to see the Black Sea Grain Initiative terminated, which is generating instability in markets and threatening the supply of vital humanitarian aid to some of the hardest hit corners of the world.

In addition, integrated and diversified international markets are necessary to help countries cope with disruptions in their access to food and energy from their traditional suppliers. Let me give you a few examples. Ethiopia used to source nearly a third of its wheat imports from Ukraine. The war ended those imports, but Ethiopia was able to replace them with wheat from the US and Argentina. By the same token, imports of LNG from the United States, including through the port of Klaipeda have helped Europe adjust to the loss of piped Russian gas.

The lesson is clear:  with respect to food as well, the free flow of trade is vital to global food security.

And then there is climate change, the single biggest existential threat facing humanity. The IPCC’s latest Report on climate change mitigation has been seen by many as the “last warning” before key Paris Agreement goals fall out of our reach. It is now widely recognized that trade is the missing piece of the puzzle in climate change mitigation and adaptation. Trade can help countries reduce emissions by increasing the availability and affordability of environmental goods, services, and technologies, such as solar panels and wind turbines. In fact, our research at the WTO shows that reducing tariffs and non-tariff measures on environmental goods could increase exports of such products by 5 percent by 2030 and reduce global emissions by 0.6 per cent.

Furthermore, trade helps countries recover from extreme weather events. When crops fail due to drought, heat, cold, or flooding, the ability to switch quickly to imports is vital, without cumbersome procedures at home or restraints imposed by others.

Although the evidence of the benefits of trade abounds, we have witnessed in the last couple of years a drive by many to “onshore”, “nearshore”, or “friend-shore” supply chains and sensitive technology. As governments and business seek resiliency in supply chains, we can all certainly understand, to a degree, the push to do business only with friends and neighbours given global uncertainties, even if it increases costs a little — or even a lot.  But the consequences of taking this too far will be counterproductive — less resilience, more vulnerabilities, and greater exposure to shocks. This is especially true given increasingly frequent and more intense natural and man-made disasters — extreme weather events and climate change, armed conflicts, and pandemics.

Our economists estimate that if the world were to decouple, real GDP loss would be at least 5% on average, and more for developing and least developed countries. And the opportunity cost of decoupling as opposed to further economic liberalization is 8.7% of real income at the global level. By contrast, reinvesting in multilateral trade liberalization can create significant income gains compared to fragmented trade scenarios. Deconcentrated and more diversified global chains, and those that include countries and communities that are now at the margins of the global economy, are key to better resilience, especially in times of crisis. In short, the world needs to re-globalize instead of de-globalizing.

At the WTO, we have a vision for such re-globalization: it will be green, digital, services-based, and inclusive. Last year, global trade in services grew by 15 percent and reached $6.8 trillion, or just over one-fifth of total world trade in both goods and services. We estimate that the share of services in world trade grow further to reach one-third by 2040.  The share of Lithuania’s GDP covered by services has doubled since 2005, which means there is tremendous potential for more growth.

In 2012, digitally delivered services trade constituted 8% of global trade, but today it is 12% and is worth $3.8 trillion. Digital trade has the potential to spur economic growth of smaller economies, particularly in Eastern and Central Europe. Recent research suggests that Lithuania has made significant progress in digitising its economy, with much scope for further work, which would boost innovation and productivity., According to some estimates, digital growth may bring Romania’s digital economy to almost €52 billion by 2030, which amounts to 15 percent of the country’s 2021 GDP. Digital trade can also allow more MSMEs, women, and youth to participate more effectively in regional and global trade and make it more inclusive — better for them, and better for their economies and societies. It can also be a lifeline for countries affected by natural disasters or conflict, and with limited access to infrastructure. For example, in 2022, IT services was the only growing area of exports of Ukraine, reaching the historic high of $7.34 billion.

Technological developments can unlock new opportunities for businesses and individuals around the world. To realize this potential, we need to understand how to harness new technologies so that they translate into job creation and economic growth, as well as help deliver UN Sustainable Development Goals in line with the WTO’s stated mission to improve living standards.  We also need new rules that would reflect current technological and business realities and address the digital divide faced by developing countries as well as underserved communities within the developed world. Many of our Members are actively working on these questions at the WTO as part of the Joint Initiative on E-Commerce.

An open and predictable multilateral trading system, with an effectively functioning WTO as its guardian, are prerequisites for re-globalization. That’s why strengthening the WTO and keeping it fit for purpose is so important to economic health and resilience.

Last year, we had a very successful Ministerial Conference (MC12), reaching outcomes on pressing issues related to the pandemic response, food security, and extension of the moratorium of customs duties on e-commerce. Most importantly, our Members added a new agreement to the WTO rulebook — the Agreement on Fisheries Subsidies, which is the first WTO agreement with environmental sustainability at its core and only our second new multilateral agreement since 1995. We are now actively working to have 2/3 of WTO Members deposit their instruments of acceptance of the Agreement to the WTO so that it can officially enter into force. I would like to thank the EU and its member States, including Lithuania, for being among the first to ratify this historic Agreement and deposit the instrument of acceptance.

The MC12 outcomes were achieved in the midst of a war, a global pandemic, and a food crisis. This success shows that consensus is still possible, even at times of deep geopolitical rifts, and that the WTO plays an essential role for its Members.

But the WTO must do more.  All of our Members agree that we need to reform the WTO across all three of our functions — negotiating, monitoring, and particularly dispute settlement, as we approach our 30th anniversary. We need to arrive at a common understanding of what kind of reform we want to achieve and establish a plan to attain it, knowing that different areas of focus will require different action and timetables. Members are actively working on this goal in Geneva.  The EU is an active participant, focusing the discussion on reforms to improve the WTO’s deliberative function and address trade-related environmental and inclusivity issues, as well as distortions caused by industrial subsidies and other practices. 

Reform of the dispute settlement function is particularly vital to the future of the WTO. As you may know, our second level of review — the Appellate Body — is not functioning due to divergent views among our Members about its role.  As a result, Members that lose at the initial panel stage can appeal into the void of a non-functioning Appellate Body, resulting in a lack of finality.  But to give teeth to the WTO’s rulebook, we need strong enforcement tools, making the need for reform even more acute. 

At MC12, our Members agreed “to conduct discussions with the view to having a fully and well-functioning dispute settlement system accessible to all Members by 2024”. Our Members are engaged intensive and promising discussions to this end. All eyes are on our 13th Ministerial Conference, which will take place in February in Abu Dhabi, and we hope that Members can agree on meaningful outcomes in this area.

At the same time, our Members continue to use the existing system to enforce the rules and bring about results.  For example, the EU has brought a case against China, challenging restrictions imposed by China on Lithuania concerning its recognition of Chinese Taipei, as it is officially named at the WTO.  This case is currently pending before a WTO panel.

In addition to dispute settlement, at the 13th Ministerial Conference, we need to achieve outcomes in other important areas at our upcoming Ministerial Conference:

• First and foremost, we need to complete the second wave of negotiations on fisheries subsidies.
• Members also need to decide on how to address the treatment of COVID diagnostics and therapeutics under intellectual property rules and on extending the Moratorium on e-commerce duties.
• We must also make progress on agriculture, especially issues related to food security.
• And finally, we need workable solutions to concerns raised by developing countries, such as addressing the digital divide and the risk that developing countries will be left behind in an industrial or green subsidies race, excluded from supply chains in a push to reshore or friendshore, or relegated to extractive role.

I count on the continued active engagement of the European Union and its member States, including Lithuania, in addressing these issues.

To conclude, let me leave you with three brief points:

• The WTO and similar institutions are especially needed in times like these, when the existing global international order is under threat and the temptation for unilateral action is high.
• The WTO remains an important — and sometimes the only — forum to manage and deescalate economic tensions, such as through negotiations and discussion in our specialized committees/councils.
• Negotiating agreements at the WTO is a long game, and consensus is difficult to achieve, but the results prove its value.  The WTO is worth investing in and improving. Please help us make sure it continues to be effective and fit for purpose.

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One of the defining transformations of the 20th century was globalization. Since the end of World War II, countries and cultures have become more interconnected than ever before, through free trade agreements, technology, multi-national corporations, and the creation of structures such as the IMF and the World Trade Organization. Trade economists liked to think that the benefits of globalization—economic growth, more consumer choice, lower prices—had made it unassailable. But cracks in the international order have started to appear. 

In 2016, the surprise result of the Brexit referendum was seen as a repudiation by the U.K. general public of the decades-long European integration process. In 2018, the Trump administration, seizing on the loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs from offshoring and concerns about unfair industrial practices, instituted a range of tariffs on goods exported from China. President Biden has maintained the tariffs, even though they have led to higher prices and a decrease in the real income of American households. To this day, anti-globalization is a common theme in political campaign rhetoric. This rhetoric, while usually not supported by facts, has been incredibly persuasive, leading a large share of the American electorate to support measures that further limit free trade. 

Davin Chor, an international trade economist at Tuck and a globalization chair at Dartmouth, was curious if evidence-based information derived from research, communicated in a concise way, could shift people’s preferences for trade protection. To answer this question, Chor and colleagues Laura Alfaro of Harvard Business School and Maggie Chen of George Washington University, conducted a series of survey experiments on a representative sample of the U.S. population from 2018 through 2022. As they explain in their new working paper—“Can Evidence-Based Information Shift Preferences Towards Trade Policy?”—what they found was both expected and surprising.

In the surveys they conducted, which were administered by the survey company Qualtrics, they presented four randomized information treatments providing a concise summary of evidence established by economic researchers on the gains and losses from trade.

These treatments are described as follows:

1. Trade Hurts Jobs: The rise in imports from China hurt the labor market outcomes of manufacturing workers in the U.S.
2. Trade Helps Jobs: The growth of imports of goods from China led the U.S. to specialize more in its service sectors.
3. Trade Helps Prices: The rise in imports from China led to lower prices for durable and non-durable goods.
4. Tariffs Hurt Prices: The tariffs imposed in 2018 raised the prices of tariff-related goods and lowered U.S. real income.

After presenting these treatments, the surveys asked a series of questions to solicit the respondents’ preferences about a range of trade policy tools, such as import tariffs, free trade agreements, and a minimum wage.

Unsurprisingly, when respondents were given the “Trade Hurts Jobs” narrative, they were significantly more likely to react by preferring more limits on imports, compared to a control group who received no information narrative. Since limiting imports has been associated with the Republican party’s recent trade policy platforms, the authors summarize the size of the effect of this information treatment as making respondents “one-third more Republican.”

Things got more interesting when respondents instead received information expressing the benefits of trade. When presented with the “Trade Helps Jobs” narrative, there was a rise in the bodog poker review respondents’ overall preferences for trade restrictions. “Even more strikingly,” they write, “exposing participants to either the ‘Trade Helps Prices’ or the ‘Tariff Hurts Prices’ information induces a strong protectionist response: learning that imports from China have contributed to lower prices, or that the recent tariffs on these imports have hurt U.S. consumers, still raises respondents’ propensity to favor more limits on imports.” The researchers gleaned from these responses that people don’t react symmetrically to information that highlights the gains rather than the losses from trade. In other words, learning about the benefits of trade makes some people dislike free trade even more. “That caught us off guard,” Chor says.

After ruling out some basic explanations for this asymmetry, such as respondents’ misunderstanding the information, they began drilling deeper into the correlation between the trade policy preferences and the respondents’ political affiliations (based on the party they voted for in the last presidential election). They found some traction there. “If you told a Republican supporter that trade has hurt jobs, it accentuates their preferences,” Chor explains. “But if you tell them that trade has had some benefits, that also amplifies their protectionist tendencies. So it’s almost like they double down on their pre-held beliefs.” The researchers found this to be true for Democrat supporters as well, but with their preferences for trade restrictions instead easing up, consistent with there being less opposition to free trade in the Democratic party’s recent trade policy positions. When told that trade has benefits, the information dampens their preferences for protection. But when told that trade has done some damage, it also moves them in a less protectionist direction.

To better understand the mindset of the respondents who preferred more limits on trade, the researchers asked them directly about their pre-held beliefs in this area. Their top concerns were imports from countries like China and the loss of American jobs. The researchers believe these two concerns weighed heavily on the respondents’ survey responses and may illuminate a deeper truth about human nature: it’s very difficult to alter someone’s preexisting beliefs. In this case, appealing to mere facts wasn’t enough.

“If you want to try to persuade people with evidence that there are benefits to trade,” Chor says, “you’re probably not going to do it unless you figure out how to address their pre-held concerns, whether these might stem from their political identity, or their prior concerns about American jobs or about trade with China. In fact, you could end up intensifying their beliefs.”

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China’s representatives respond that they are being unfairly blamed for a failure by American plutocratic elites to protect their working class. Western experts in global finance and trade became what economist Rob Johnson calls “marketing agents for the wealthy and powerful,” not unbiased experts shedding the light of their wisdom. Chinese leaders counter that they had no power or influence over U.S. distributional failures in the adjustment to globalization particularly when, at the starting gate, the per capita income of China was one-fortieth that of the United States. Why, they say, wasn’t China named by the U.S. Treasury as a currency manipulator? Because Walmart, Nike, and other Western corporate giants lobbied to keep the Chinese currency relatively weak. Beijing argues that American corporate selfishness, protected by a compromised meritocratic elite, caused economic injury to so many American working families, not the rise of the Chinese economy. Do you buy the Chinese analysis? Or is this just “spin” given the Chinese by their ubiquitous Washington, D.C., political advisers?

Twenty noted observers offer their views.

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Taking Exception: The Problems with a “Partial Liberal” Order

Aaron Friedberg recently published an important, thought-provoking article in these pages that examines the evolution of the international economy over the last two centuries and possible scenarios for how the current era of globalization may fail or be reconstructed.1 We commend the analysis of past phases of globalization but take issue with the likelihood and desirability of his proposed “value-based” free world trade bloc, which he calls “Globalization 2.5.” Friedberg dismisses the possibility of repairing and updating the current international system to reflect the redistribution of wealth and power from West to East and North to South. While he discusses a region-centric global economic order, his preferred outcome is a U.S.-led “partial liberal” order. However, such a framework would institutionalize a fragmented, conflict-prone world based more on power and less on rules.

The notion of a “democracies only” world order reflects the logic of the Biden administration’s “democracy vs. autocracy” strategy, but with respect to it fashioning a stable and prosperous world, it is a dubious proposition. For starters, China is the world’s largest trading power (its total export-imports were $4.2 trillion in 2021), the leading trade partner of U.S. allies and partners in Europe and Asia, and a major exporter of capital.2 Moreover, the neutral response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by most of the world — including democracies such as India, Brazil, bodog sportsbook review Mexico, Indonesia, and Turkey — shows that these countries are more motivated by interests than by democratic values. Beyond fashioning legal and institutional frameworks for global trade and investment to operate in, the administration’s requirement now is to make sure that such trade and investment favor U.S. interests. The Biden administration, for example, wants to prevent any new trade regimes from hurting the middle class, even though there are inevitably going to be some losers when openings in trade are made.

The United States could do better by closing the skills-job opening gap and helping the American middle class compete by providing improved retraining and more life-long learning opportunities, as well as a stronger social safety net, including portable healthcare, universal daycare, and more generous unemployment insurance linked to retraining. Of course, trade politics include a significant amount of market intervention and managed trade — imposing quotas and voluntary export restraints, or putting in place tariffs when another’s trade practices are deemed to be unfair or in order to protect strategic industries — and demonstrate clear results from such measures.3 Yet, there seems to be an increasing temptation among foreign policy strategists to believe that China will either acquiesce to perpetual U.S. primacy or that it can simply be isolated from U.S.-led political and economic structures. This implies that the United States and its allies can redesign the world to please their preferences for democratic liberalism without regard for other countries. But when, over the past several centuries, has there been a stable world order absent the inclusion or a considered balance of the major economic and military powers, particularly China and Russia?

Technology, Economics, and Politics

To our minds, the proposal for a “partial liberal trading system,” is inconsistent with Friedberg’s elegant summary analysis of how periods of globalization over the past 200 years have come about and operated: namely that economics, in terms of market trends and other forces such as technology, has historically been the driver of globalization. Politics, on the other hand, may have established a favorable framework for globalization, but it has been unable to orchestrate it fully.

We take the point in Robert Gilpin’s prescient assessment, cited by Friedberg, regarding the reciprocal relationship between politics and economics, wherein economics redistributes wealth and power, which leads to political changes and reordered politico-economic relationships. But this model overstates the role of politics and underestimates the role of technology. Politics does create the framework in which economics operates, but within that framework — the enabling security structures and sets of rules and regulations — economics is driven by its own imperatives that redistribute wealth and power. In Britain in the 19th century and the United States in the 20th century, economic expansion led to the development of external markets for Western exports and imports of commodities and other essential goods. These economic exchanges helped America’s trading partners — including China — to grow and compete. Some forecasts anticipate that China will outgrow the United States as measured in market exchange terms by the early 2030s.4 China’s stunning ascendency since 1978 is testimony to how economic growth upsets power balances,5 in this case triggering a U.S. backlash and a corresponding shift of U.S. views of China that Friedberg ably chronicles.

Economics has also driven calls in the United States and, to a degree, other Western countries, for changing how globalization operates in order to better protect their interests. In a sense, having pressed liberalization on everyone else and then lost the agency to run the global economy after World War II, Washington wants to re-work who’s in and who’s out to ensure continued hegemony. Friedberg’s solution to the problems with the current trading system would be a “world in which the advanced industrial democracies of Europe, Asia, and the Western Hemisphere band together to form a free trade area and perhaps a full economic bloc.” This is wishful thinking. Such an alternative to the current global economy is unrealistic and would be disruptive, ultimately undermining U.S. and Western prosperity and potentially increasing the risk of great-power conflict — a risk that is already unacceptably high.

The historical cases that Friedberg supplies illustrate the importance of economics and technology over politics. This is strengthened if one considers the first cycle of economic globalization that took place more than two millennia ago under the Han dynasty, a case that Friedberg omitted: the Silk Road, which connected Asia and the Middle East to Europe with variations (e.g., Venice’s maritime empire) until roughly 1500.6 There were minimal rules in this system, and it was driven mainly by power, ambition, and the desire for profit. Friedberg’s “Globalization 1.0,” (1815–1914), facilitated as much by rapid technological change (the telegraph, railroads, steam engines) as by a post-Napoleonic political framework, was largely based on Britain’s and other Western countries’ comparative advantage and thirst for the raw materials that were provided by Europe’s colonies in Africa, Asia, Caribbean, and other regions. It was the politics of nationalism and anti-colonialism more than redistributed wealth that produced World War I, thus ending that period of globalization.

The post-World War II Bretton Woods system was a wildly successful partial-liberal order centered in the United States, Western Europe, and Japan. The crafters of this system were intent on learning from the mistakes of hyper-nationalism and protectionism that characterized the inter-war period. The system had a rules-based architecture that was open and mutually beneficial and that worked to no small degree because of relatively open U.S. markets and a hegemonic enforcer that underpinned the system. The self-imposed separation by the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact countries helped set its limits. As John Ruggie argues (which Friedberg cites), one reason for the post-Cold War resilience of the Bretton Woods system, current problems notwithstanding, is that even absent a hegemon, if there is a sense of common purpose and shared interests, a multilateral structure can still function.7 Bretton Woods partners felt they were receiving enough mutual benefit to sustain the system, regardless of whether a hegemon was involved. But as Europe and Japan rebuilt and became industrial competitors by the 1980s, the generosity of America’s relatively open markets became increasingly problematic for Americans who saw those whom they had defeated gaining economically on the United States. Washington struck back, as showcased in the 1980s U.S.-Japanese trade wars in which Japanese auto companies were pressured into investing their profits in building new factories in America.

As globalization took off at the end of the Cold War, the Bretton Woods trade and financial system, fueled by the IT revolution and global supply chains, expanded exponentially to former Warsaw Pact nations and to emerging economies like Brazil, India, and East Asia writ large, as well as China and even Russia itself. The result was a new global middle class, but also new vulnerabilities that manifested in financial crises in Latin America (most pronounced in the 1980s but episodic and ongoing in Argentina and several other countries), the 1998 Asian financial crisis, and eventually the meltdown of the whole system in the 2008 Western financial crisis.8 All of this affirms Gilpin’s point about trade redistributing wealth and, in turn, leading to changes in political fortunes, such as America’s relative decline. While it is still a work in progress, we have seen some change in the character and scope of globalization. Capital controls are one such shift, as well as a proliferation of regional and extra-regional trade arrangements. A polycentric world also faces unprecedented uncertainty about the future of the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) role as the arbiter of global trade, as the failure of the Doha Round of global trade liberalization underscored.9

At present, the Fourth Industrial Revolution and rapid digitization have shown that economics tends to race ahead of governance. This was illustrated by China’s unprecedented economic success in recent decades, outgrowing the political framework of the trading system, going from $150 billion in GDP in 1978 to $18 trillion in 2021 with an average 10 percent annual growth from 1978 to 2021.10 China’s gaming of the system led to a shattering of U.S. myths that economic reform leads to wider liberalization and a realization that China’s state-centric model was a different type of capitalism, something that President Donald Trump called out.11

Repairing the Current System

Instead of proposing an improbable strategy for a return to a partial globalization centered on the “free world,” Friedberg may have done better to show that the current, flawed system of globalization can be repaired. This would preserve, if not boost, current benefits for the United States and the rest of the world. In Friedberg’s account of the breakdown of “Globalization 2.0,” China is largely at fault. Nobody denies that China has never fulfilled the promises it made to liberalize its internal market at the time of its 2001 accession to the WTO. Beijing is also, as Friedberg charges, engaged in rampant intellectual theft to help it become a tech giant, but this is not the most important factor in its rapid technological ascent. Missing in Friedberg’s analysis are U.S. causes for America’s disenchantment with globalization. As Adam Posen has argued in a recent Foreign Affairs article, the “United States has, on balance, been withdrawing from the international economy for the past two decades.”12 The jobs lost to Chinese competition have, in fact, been relatively small — namely, two million jobs lost between 2000 and 2015 out of a workforce of 150 million, or roughly 130,000 workers a year.13

So why the public backlash against globalization and China? Part of the reason, Posen argues, concerns the “fetishization of manufacturing jobs.” The United States has been steadily losing manufacturing jobs, with many of the losses coming from electorally important states, giving the issue more prominence. But why shift all the blame onto China? While Beijing bears much of the blame, the United States has been woefully remiss in helping redundant workers find new employment through retraining. Policies encouraging U.S. offshore investment in global supply chains until very recently also contributed to the problem. According to a 2021 study by the American Enterprise Institute, U.S. “federal spending on worker training has fallen over the past few decades as a share of GDP.”14 U.S. states have traditionally played an important role in trade adjustment, but in the aggregate, there has also been a decline in trade funding assistance since the 1980s. Other advanced economies do much better in terms of funding both social safety nets and skills training: The United States is second to last in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s ranking of countries that provide public spending to support job readiness and matching skills to jobs.15 Fashioning a more robust social safety net and better equipping the workforce with the skills needed to advance in a rapidly changing 21st-century workplace might restore trust in freer trade.

It is not only on trade that the United States has turned against the rest of the world. Anti-immigrant feeling has also exploded, although there is little evidence that unskilled immigrants are going to take away highly paid jobs.16 In fact, the U.S. economy can’t run without immigrants. The turn inward and opposition to globalization is as much cultural and psychological as it is based on rational interests. Disregarding history and the distributive effects of trade, Americans always tended to assume that their country would be an outright winner of globalization.

European countries have been much less enamored with globalization, fearing that their industries would lose out. As Friedberg points out, globalization was sold in the mid-1990s by President Bill Clinton as the motor for achieving the “end of history.” But there was little understanding of how globalization leads to more — not less — strategic competition. One reason for this may be that America’s rise to become one of the great economic powers by the end of the 19th century came about because of Britain’s embrace of free trade and its support for globalization. A better appreciation at the outset of the challenges of economic competition might have pushed the United States toward a Sputnik-like “self-improvement” program, rendering it better prepared for the inevitable competition from China and other emerging markets.

Instead of throwing the globalization baby out with the bath water, America can still try to repair the flaws in globalization’s workings. What’s wrong with putting pressure on China by rounding up allies to force Beijing to mend its ways on IP theft and lack of market access or risk losing global markets? China’s growth remains dependent on trade, and China is the biggest trading partner of many U.S. allies.

Sacrificing Globalization 2.0 and trying to build a partial replacement anchored in the “free world” carries a number of risks. For starters, it is not a given that the United States can harmonize its views on trade and regulation with those of the European Union, which has been integrating its trade with Asia and Latin America. Globalization 2.0 has also been the vehicle for many developing countries to enrich themselves, reduce poverty, and build middle classes, which, over time, can bolster the chances of democratization and liberal market reforms. A partial liberal trade system that leaves out a good part of the world would increase the chances of conflict and make authoritarianism more likely, leaving the developing world more dependent on China.

In all of this, there needs to be a better understanding of the limits of America’s power to impose its will. It may have worked for Dean Acheson, but that time is long past. It is U.S. hubris and concern over America’s unreliability that has prompted Europe and much of Asia to hedge against the United States. Look at E.U. trade and investment deals with Japan, China, and other Asian and Latin American states,17 and consider Asia, with its new Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership accord,18 which does not include America. Though Friedberg minimizes the effort required to achieve consensus, he is right about the importance of mobilizing democracies and other like-minded states to forge a common position on trade issues, but that should not be an end in itself. Precisely because of the limits of U.S. agency, working with allies and partners makes sense in order to maximize America’s leverage to shape global rules and norms, but it should not be a substitute for global rules.

With only 18 percent of the world economy, is it not possible that China would alter its policies to sustain access to global markets,19 particularly now, as it faces unprecedented challenges due to a state-centric, investment-driven economic model that no longer works?20 The same Chinese Communist Party of the Great Leap Forward disaster and the maniacal cultural revolution self-corrected by enacting Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms. It is worth exhausting diplomacy to test this idea before concluding that there is no difference between China’s grandiose ambitions and what it is willing to accept. That’s where coordination among democracies and the like-minded can build leverage to test the proposition. Friedberg is too quick to eliminate any role for the United States and its partners working together to update global trade and tech rules, as well as the WTO. At present, however, the bodog sportsbook review mutual demonization between China and the United States, and America’s assumption that China can’t change, render such an effort difficult.

Domestic Obstacles to a Value-Based Globalization

Friedberg also ignores the growing domestic obstacles when he calls for a return to a partial, value-based globalization. President Joe Biden may have eased Trump-era steel and aluminum sanctions against European allies, but he angered those allies with his Buy American rule, using federal procurement to support American manufacturing. Biden also dismayed America’s United States-Mexico-Canada-Agreement partners, when he proposed electric car subsidies for unionized U.S. carmakers,21 although it’s unclear how the subsidies will be implemented in the recently enacted Inflation Reduction Act. The episode has left a bad taste in the mouths of America’s closest trade partners, such as South Korea and Japan, who have been encouraged to build auto factories in the United States, and it reinforces the impression that the United States is becoming more protectionist, even with its allies.

Moreover, the Biden administration is so divided it is hard for it to make any move on trade. A recent Politico article describes the difficulty plaguing administration efforts to develop a trade strategy with Asian countries, despite the eagerness of America’s Asian allies and partners for the United States to take a more active role in trade.22 In one corner of the three-way administration division are the trade expansionists who want to tie Asian nations closer to the United States with trade deals. Then there’s the more labor-friendly faction, which wants to use tariffs and quotas to protect U.S. workers. The third camp worries that scrapping with China economically could undermine administration priorities to ease inflation and decrease supply chain bottlenecks. Even smaller trade deal ideas, such as a digital trade agreement, have met with opposition. A U.S. Trade Representative plan to launch a trade case against China’s use of industrial subsidies has also been dropped.

Then there’s Congress, which is increasingly anti-trade. Trumpist Republicans and progressive Democrats oppose any effort to resurrect the Trans-Pacific Partnership and would block America’s entry into the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership. Both parties are fighting the last war, blaming foreign trade as the main cause of the decline of union workers and the loss of manufacturing jobs, when technological change is a major driver of job gains and losses. The problem is more the mismatch of skills to labor, one reason why the United States has some 10 million unfilled jobs.23

Administration paralysis in moving forward with any trade initiative combined with growing protectionism make it hard to envisage a “free world” free trade agreement being workable. While such an accord would seem to be in line with the administration’s anti-China and pro-democracy focus and popular with the growing anti-China congressional consensus, it would mean crafting a trade agreement that is larger than any of the administration’s smaller initiatives. Friedberg has rightly focused on the problems that China poses to the functioning of the world trading system. Yet, the current political disorder at home is as much the issue when it comes to remaking the global trading system. The fundamental problem with Friedberg’s advocacy for a free world trading system is that we cannot just wipe the slate clean and start anew.

Conclusion

There is much uncertainty about the future of the global trading system, and Friedberg nicely sketches possible alternative futures. The WTO’s role will almost certainly be diminished. There may be sector-specific global trade liberalization to come, but most likely no future global trade rounds. Trade liberalization has become more region-centric and trans-region centric, such as is the case with the U.S.-Japan Economic Partnership Agreement.24 Nonetheless, because of its near universal membership (it covers 96 percent of global trade), and its role as the only over-arching dispute settlement mechanism, the WTO remains critical to maintaining a rules-based trade regime, although both aspects of the organization are in need of major reform if the WTO is to remain relevant.25

Recent trends of regional trade clusters and the reorganization of supply chains suggest that the most probable scenario is one in which the WTO and U.N. standard-setting bodies create a loose global umbrella over regional accords. But continued trade and financial fragmentation cannot be dismissed. Protectionism — managed trade in key sectors like steel and aluminum — is on the rise. For the very reason that Friedberg highlights via Gilpin — that economics alters politics — we cannot rule out that today’s authoritarians could become tomorrow’s market-oriented democracies, as internal forces, such as growing middle classes, push for more political participation and liberalization over time.

Apart from the inertia of U.S. trade policy, market forces pose a strong obstacle to any effort to reorder trade along ideological lines that cuts out the world’s largest market and trading power. We are already seeing hints of a prospective mirror-image response to “democracies only” efforts in the February joint statement from Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin, promising closer affiliation between Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union and China’s Belt and Road Initiative.26 Similarly, Beijing has proposed a new Global Security Initiative.27

There is a complex network of trade and investment with China. U.S. corn and wheat farmers are attracted to the Chinese market, and shale producers welcome selling to the Chinese liquefied natural gas market. Boeing enjoys the Chinese commercial airline market, and Qualcomm and others like selling low-end chips for Chinese cellphones. None of this necessarily poses national security risks. A circumscribed, partial liberal trade order would defy market forces that benefit American businesses and consumers.

Strategic competition is leading to decoupling by both the United States and China where national security interests are deemed at risk, particularly in the tech sector. Fixing a global system that economics has overtaken, however problematic, still seems the most sensible strategy. Finally, with regard to the broader systemic consequences, it is worth recalling a recent cautionary note from Henry Kissinger: “Differences in ideology should not be the main issue of confrontation, unless we are prepared to make regime change the principal goal of our policy.”28

Dr. Mathew Burrows serves as director of the Stimson Center’s Strategic Foresight Hub and is a distinguished fellow in the Reimagining Grand Strategy program and Red Cell project at the Stimson Center. He retired in 2013 from a 28-year career at the CIA, serving the last 10 years as counselor at the National Intelligence Council.

Robert A. Manning is a distinguished fellow in the Reimagining Grand Strategy program and the Red Cell project at the Stimson Center. He was a senior counselor to the undersecretary of state for global affairs from 2001 to 2004, a member of the U.S. Department of State policy planning staff from 2004 to 2008, and a member of the National Intelligence Council strategic futures group from 2008 to 2012. Follow him on Twitter @Rmanning4.

Response to Mathew Burrows and Robert A. Manning

I appreciate the many thoughtful points that Mathew Burrows and Robert Manning raise in their reply to my article, and I am grateful for the opportunity to continue this important discussion.

In the interest of concision, I will sum up my main points in response to their arguments as bluntly as possible. First and foremost, I believe that the authors misunderstand the motivations and strategy of China’s Communist Party regime and, as a result, understate the dangers that its economic policies now pose to the welfare and security of the United States and the other advanced industrial democracies. The approach that Burrows and Manning propose, which is essentially a continuation of the one that the West has been following for the past three decades, cannot achieve the objective they set for it. The narrowing gap in power between Washington and Beijing, and the yawning divergence in their interests and values, mean that “reglobalization” is infeasible, at least for the foreseeable future. In the meantime, clinging to past policies and continuing to pursue the dream of a truly open, integrated global economy will only lead to mounting costs and risks for the United States and its like-minded partners. Creating a partial (as opposed to an all-encompassing global) economic subsystem that operates on liberal principles will have costs of its own, and its construction will require overcoming significant domestic political and diplomatic obstacles. Under present circumstances, however, it is the best available alternative.

International relations theory and the last 200 years of economic history suggest that the creation of an open global trading system requires the presence of a liberal hegemon; that the normal functioning of such systems will result in uneven rates of growth and a redistribution of wealth and power among the states that comprise them; and that the hegemon’s relative decline will give rise to pressures that can lead to an open international economy’s collapse or its fragmentation into blocs.29

Scholars have also pointed out that it may still be possible to sustain openness “after hegemony,” as Robert Keohane famously put it, provided that there is a convergence of outlook and interest among the leading powers and, in particular, a shared commitment to liberal economic principles.30 If China’s full incorporation into a globalizing world economy after the end of the Cold War had led to its political and economic liberalization, as the advocates of engagement promised and believed it would, then such cooperation might be possible.31 But that is not how things have turned out. The rise of an illiberal China and America’s relative decline are already starting to fragment the global economic system. The only questions now are exactly where the lines will be drawn and how deep the divisions will be.

China has profited greatly from the openness of its advanced industrial trading partners — it could not have developed nearly as rapidly as it has without access to their technology, capital, and markets. Instead of embracing liberal economic principles, however, China’s communist regime remains deeply committed to a set of mercantilist trade, industrial, and technology promotion policies whose market-distorting effects have now been magnified by the sheer size of the nation’s economy.32 The Chinese Communist Party has succeeded in sustaining growth without surrendering its exclusive grip on domestic political power, at least thus far, and it has no intention of changing course. Rather than let market forces and the principle of comparative advantage shape the evolution of their economy, China’s planners aim to use various forms of state intervention to undercut foreign competitors and propel their own companies to positions of dominance in semiconductors, robotics, artificial intelligence, and all of the other sectors that comprise the so-called “Fourth Industrial Revolution.”

Burrows and Manning call repeatedly for “repairing and updating” an open global economic order, but they do not explain how China could be compelled to play by the rules of such a revitalized system any better than it does at present. The authors are onto something when they suggest, in passing, that the United States should try “rounding up allies to force Beijing to mend its ways on IP theft and lack of market access.” But, if such a plan is to have any chance of success, it will take time and it will involve more than a few rounds of trade talks, or a few more ineffectual legal cases brought before the World Trade Organization. In fact, sustaining significant collective pressure will require creating an advanced industrial trading bloc of precisely the sort to which the authors so vehemently object. As I explain, one of the main functions of such a grouping would be to enable its members to “work together to exert leverage over Beijing, threatening to deny or restrict its access to their common market if it refuses to modify its mercantilist … policies.”

The authors make virtually no mention of geopolitics or the intensifying “systemic rivalry” that is now underway between China, the United States, and its democratic allies.33 Yet, it is impossible to make sense of Beijing’s economic policies, or to respond to them effectively, without acknowledging that their purpose is not merely to create wealth, but to enhance the power of the Chinese Communist Party and of the state that it rules. China is not just a normal trading partner that needs to be cured of some bad mercantilist habits. It is a hostile great power pursuing policies that threaten the security of the United States and the other democracies.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping has made clear his intention to reduce China’s reliance on the West for technology, capital, and markets. His stated goal is to achieve greater “self-reliance,” using any means necessary to acquire and “indigenize” foreign technology, and deploying massive subsidies and all the other tools of industrial policy to help Chinese firms gain advantage across an array of new and emerging sectors.34 Through his “dual circulation” strategy, Xi aims to boost the role of domestic consumption and exports to non-Western developing nations as drivers of China’s future growth, while reducing the country’s dependence on the markets of the advanced industrial nations.35 Even as he does this, Xi has called for efforts to maintain and deepen the democracies’ dependence on China for a broad range of products and materials.

Xi likes to present himself as the defender of globalization against the forces of protectionism. What he clearly has in mind, however, is a very lopsided version of the concept, one in which Western countries remain open for as long as possible while China constricts their access to its economy and builds up a trans-regional subsystem — or bloc — with itself at the center, that extends across much of eastern Eurasia and large swaths of the global South. The purpose of all these policies is not simply, or even primarily, to enhance China’s prosperity, but rather to maximize its power: enabling it to build superior weapons and other strategic systems, but also reducing its vulnerability to foreign sanctions, technology “blockades,” or other forms of pressure, while enhancing its ability to exert leverage over others.

Contra Burrows and Manning, responding to these challenges by recreating a liberal economic bloc would not mean building a “‘democracies only’ world order” entirely decoupled from China and excluding the global South. As was true during the Cold War, I argue that a new liberal subsystem would be “nested within a larger global economy.” In contrast to the past, however, “trade and investment flows between China and the democratic bloc would continue, but they would be constricted and more closely monitored and regulated.” Among other things, the advanced democracies need to work together to maintain their edge in key technologies by coordinating more stringent policies on investment screening, export controls, and scientific and industrial cooperation. To reduce vulnerability to strategically motivated pressure or disruption, the United States and its allies will have to create incentives for private companies to restructure supply chains, minimizing dependence on China for select critical products and materials and constructing resilient networks of trusted producers in friendly countries. Taking the European Union’s new counter-coercion instrument as a model, democratic governments in Europe, Asia, and North America should develop a strategy of collective economic defense, making clear in advance how they will respond if Beijing tries to isolate and target one of their members.36 In bodog casino addition to these measures, the advanced industrial democracies should promote their own long-term growth and make it less dependent on China’s by lowering remaining barriers to trade and investment among themselves. The democracies should also compete more vigorously with China for markets and investment opportunities in the global South, expanding two-way trade with the fastest-growing parts of the developing world.

Nevertheless, I do agree with Burrows and Manning on several points. At least for the moment, policies that would increase foreign access to the U.S. market, even for friendly countries, are political nonstarters. In part for this reason, a new economic strategy for competing more effectively with China should include measures to offset whatever negative effects it may have on American workers, consumers, and producers, and to make sure that the burdens of transition, as well as the long-term benefits, are distributed equitably across society. Even where interests and values converge, harmonizing economic and technology policies with allies will not be easy. Finally, there can be no denying that a segmented global economy will be less efficient than the unachievable ideal of a fully integrated system. Enhanced security will come at a cost. Rather than concluding that these barriers are insurmountable, however, analysts and policymakers should be working on ways to minimize and overcome them.

Burrows and Manning warn that trying to create a partial liberal order would “institutionalize a fragmented, conflict-prone world based more on power and less on rules.” But, like it or not, and despite our best efforts, that is the world in which we now find ourselves. The reason for building an economic subsystem based on liberal principles is to carve out a domain in which those principles, and the rules that derive from them, can survive, and to generate the wealth and power necessary to defend it.

Aaron L. Friedberg is professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University. His latest book is, Getting China Wrong (Polity Press).

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As world leaders gather at the 77th Session of the United Nations General Assembly and at International Monetary Fund (IMF)/World Bank Annual Meetings in October, strengthening global cooperation should be a top priority.

The COVID-19 crisis

Long before the COVID-19 pandemic, the deficit in multilateral cooperation was palpable. Growing discontent with globalization has been associated with the failure of the multilateral system to stem the tide of rising inequality, social fragmentation, job insecurity associated with technological change, and offshoring in advanced countries, among others. The rising disillusionment with the multilateral approach has prompted bilateral deals or groupings of like-minded or geographically proximate countries.

Just as countries were turning inward, the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the necessity of a global effort to eradicate the virus. That necessity was largely ignored as countries implemented anti-COVID measures unilaterally, including border closures and other restrictive policies. The lack of cooperation is also reflected in the differentiated policy stimulus to manage the pandemic. While advanced economies (AEs) deployed on average 20 percent of their GDP in stimulus, that number was 5 percent for emerging market (EMEs), and a meager 2 percent for low-income countries (LICs).

The Special Drawing Rights (SDRs), which represent perhaps the single most important instrument in the global financial system’s toolkit to respond to global shocks, were not approved until 18 months into the pandemic. With the distribution of the SDRs linked to country quotas, the countries most in need of support received only $21 billion or 3 percent of the $650 billion in SDRs, and the IMF is relying on the goodwill of AEs to either donate or loan their SDRs. The lack of adequate resources along with inequitable access to vaccines resulted in an asynchronized global economic recovery. Indeed, even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the economic recovery around the world was highly uneven. To date, while the vaccination rate exceeds 75 percent in AEs, it is only 30 percent in LICs, well below the threshold to achieve herd immunity.

The global value chain and inflation crisis

Global value chains turbocharged globalization, and economies have become highly dependent on them. An estimated 70 percent of international trade involves global value chains, as services, raw material, and parts and components cross borders—often numerous times. For all the benefits, global value chains make the global economy vulnerable to disruptions or delays in production in any country participating in the value chains or in transport and shipping logistics. The uncoordinated response to the pandemic, along with the repurposing of some factories to produce essential goods for domestic consumption, disrupted global value chains. The release of pent-up demand, particularly for goods, from the nascent recovery in the advanced economies against the backdrop of shortfalls in supply due to labor shortages, continue to clog and disrupt value chains, such as obstructions to shipment and transport logistics, which generated significant price pressures and caused a broad-based increase in inflation. These price pressures emerged before the Russian invasion of Ukraine and were exacerbated with further disruptions to food and energy markets.

Global interest rates, financing for development, and looming sovereign debt crises

The increase in inflation rates to levels not seen in decades in most countries, notably in AEs where the economic recovery from COVID-19 was more consolidated, prompted major central banks to begin raising interest rates even as the recovery remains fragile elsewhere. The higher interest rates triggered large capital outflows from emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs). With one-third of low-income countries’ sovereign debt contracted on variable interest rate, the increase in global interest rates is raising the debt service costs, adding to fiscal pressures and, more generally, constraining options for development financing.

To be sure, the sovereign debt buildup in low-income countries precedes the pandemic. It began in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis of 2008/09 as fiscal balances deteriorated and countries took advantage of the ultra-low interest rate environment to issue government debt. The reach-for-yield behavior by global asset managers facilitated access to private capital markets for sovereign debt for LICs, in many cases, for the first time. However, the devastating impact on the economies exacerbated the debt buildup and, by some estimates, about 60 percent of all LICs are now either in or at risk of debt distress.

Global cooperation to establish a Debt Service Suspension Initiative (DSSI) has been helpful in alleviating the fiscal pressures on LICs but it expired in late 2021, and the newly established Common Framework for debt restructuring has run into operational challenges. Although some countries—Chad, Ethiopia, and Zambia—have submitted requests for debt treatment, the process has run into protracted negotiations with creditors—notably China and the private sector. The expiration of the DSSI will add an estimated $10.9 billion in debt service cost for LICs this year. Calls for global solidarity to extend this initiative have so far been unsuccessful.

Overseas development assistance (ODA), an important source of financing for LICs, is in jeopardy. Unplanned expenditures on defense, refugees, and other humanitarian needs in Europe, are squeezing resources for ODA from some large donors. For example, as Germany boosted its defense budget amidst the Russia-Ukraine war, it proposed a 12 percent reduction in development aid, with cuts as deep as 50 percent for U.N. agencies such as the World Food Programme. Similarly, reductions are in the offing in the U.K., Norway, among other countries.

This environment presents a perfect fiscal storm for developing countries and will, undoubtedly, impact their ability to finance development agendas and sustain progress on the Sustainable Development Goals. Already, an estimated 75 million additional people have fallen into extreme poverty since the onset of the pandemic. Reductions in health and education budgets will have both short- and long-term adverse impacts on human capital development and the economies.

Geopolitical, food, and energy crises

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in late February 2022 could not have come at a worse time for the global economy. It was a culmination of unresolved issues in global cooperation since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dislocation of the Soviet Union. While it is unclear whether a “better” or more reasonable form of global cooperation could have deterred Russia from invading Ukraine, stronger cooperation, particularly on security matters, may have reduced the odds of the Russia-Ukraine crisis.

It remains unclear when and how the war will end. What looks increasingly certain is that the war signals the beginning of a new world order. Many countries in the Global South are concerned about the prospects of another “Cold War” era with acute tensions between a Western bloc and a heterogenous bloc consisting of China, Russia, and a few other countries. Such concerns led the Southern African Development Community to reaffirm its position of non-alignment, and other countries, including India, have also refrained from taking sides in the conflict. The invasion has been divisive. It has already dealt a severe blow to global cooperation. Tensions are palpable in global organizations and processes such as the United Nations and the G-20.

Invasion has wreaked havoc on global energy and food markets as well as caused further disruption to the global supply chains. Consequently, countries around the world are experiencing an energy crisis that is adding to the inflationary pressures, and many countries in the developing world also face food insecurity. The difficulty in gaining access to fertilizers due to the disruption in Ukraine, a major producer alongside Russia and Belarus, portends future food shortages and higher food prices for the vulnerable countries if proactive corrective measures are not taken.

Climate crisis

Many countries’ policy responses to the higher energy cost have included relaxing restrictions on the use of fossil fuels. The relaxation of these restrictions, while understandable, challenges the global aspiration to phase out or phase down fossil fuels. Beyond the short term, it is conceivable, and even likely, that the crisis can be a catalyst for faster transition toward renewable energy. However, that is yet to be seen. The biggest blow to the climate agenda stems from the geopolitical tensions and their impact on global cooperation. The joint Glasgow declaration by the U.S. and China—the world’s largest emitters of CO2—to enhance climate actions in the 2020s, including the reduction of methane emission, was a welcome boost to global cooperation and ambitions.

Notwithstanding some progress over the past decades, collective action to address the looming climate crisis has fallen significantly short, and there is growing consensus that the next years present a critical last-chance window of opportunity to ramp it up at all levels. Given divisions between the U.S. and China on the Russia-Ukraine crisis and, importantly, the heightened tensions surrounding Taiwan, it is unclear whether cooperation between the two countries can be strong enough to sustain their joint commitment to climate mitigation. It is encouraging that U.S. climate envoy John Kerry urged Beijing to resume talks even as geopolitical tensions escalated.

The imperative of rebooting global cooperation

Just as the deficit in global cooperation and coordination contributed to or amplified the multitude of shocks that the world is currently grappling with, restoring and strengthening global cooperation will be crucial to successfully navigate these challenges.

First, the global community must sustain its efforts to complete COVID-19 vaccine distribution and ensure that a critical mass of the global population is vaccinated. As long as one country lags, the world will remain at a risk of another variant that is potentially deadlier and immune to current vaccines. In addition, global value chains remain vulnerable to additional lockdowns such as the case in China demonstrates.

Second, policymakers should prioritize cooperation and coordination to fully restore global value chains and address the transport and shipping logistics that are impeding global commerce. Supply shortages will subside as a result and, along with them, price pressures for core goods and inflation. The containment of inflation and inflation expectations will, at a minimum, slow the pace of monetary policy tightening in AEs if not outright stop or reverse the rate increases, which will help contain the debt servicing costs and the risks of sovereign default in LICs.

Third, the G-20 should reinstate the DSSI until at least the Common Framework is fully operational. The unpleasant experiences of Chad, Zambia, and Ethiopia could deter other countries from requesting sovereign debt treatment under the framework. The issue of holdout creditors has always been a thorny one in debt restructurings. With strong support from its major shareholders, the IMF has the option lend into arrears to the requesting countries, which will incentivize recalcitrant creditors to compromise.

Fourth, beyond these immediate actions, policymakers should seize the opportunity to radically reform the global governance system. One compelling proposal to fix the global financial architecture is outlined in a brief produced for the G-20 to set up a Global Liquidity Insurance Mechanism, a market-based facility that will institutionalize and broaden access to short-term foreign exchange liquidity for EMDEs. The Brookings Institution’s Global Economy & Development program has also compiled essays with proposals from experts in the Global North and Global South to significantly reform the multilateral system.

The interconnectedness of seemingly unrelated shocks that the world economy currently faces highlight one main reality: The more interconnected the world becomes, the more likely it is that the shocks will be either global in scale or reverberate worldwide. It is time for a radical reimagination of the multilateral system to strengthen global cooperation commensurately. It must be an approach that is built on strong global leadership as the U.S. exemplified in the aftermath of World War II. Will the world’s leaders seize the opportunity and step up to the challenge? Only time will tell.

Brahima is the Vice President and Director of Global Economy and Development at The Brookings Institution.

The author acknowledges without implicating, very useful comments from Kemal Dervis. Wafa Abedin provided outstanding research support.

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Among the proposed responses to these problems are to “reshore” or “friend-shore” production and to enact “industrial policies to increase country capacities to produce.” Gone are the days when everyone seemed to be working for a world without borders; suddenly, everyone recognizes that at least some national borders are key to economic development and security. 

For one-time advocates of unfettered globalization, this volte face has resulted in cognitive dissonance, because the new suite of policy proposals implies that longstanding rules of the international trading system will be bent or broken. Unable to reconcile friend-shoring with the principle of free and non-discriminatory trade, most of the business and political leaders at Davos resorted to platitudes. There was little soul searching about how and why things have gone so wrong, or about the flawed, hyper-optimistic reasoning that prevailed during globalization’s heyday.

Of course, the problem is not just globalization. Our entire market economy has shown a lack of resilience. We essentially built cars without spare tires – knocking a few dollars off the price today while paying little mind to future exigencies. Just-in-time inventory systems were marvelous innovations as long as the economy faced only minor perturbations; but they were a disaster in the face of COVID-19 shutdowns, creating supply-shortage cascades (such as when a dearth of microchips led to a dearth of new cars).

As I warned in my 2006 book, Making Globalization Work, markets do a terrible job of “pricing” risk (for the same reason that they don’t price carbon dioxide emissions). Consider Germany, which chose to make its economy dependent on gas deliveries from Russia, an obviously unreliable trading partner. Now, it is facing consequences that were both predictable and predicted.

As Adam Smith recognized in the eighteenth century, capitalism is not a self-sustaining system, because there is a natural tendency toward monopoly. However, since US President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher ushered in an era of “deregulation,” increasing market concentration has become the norm, and not just in high-profile sectors like e-commerce and social media. The disastrous shortage of baby formula in the United States this spring was itself the result of monopolization. After Abbott was forced to suspend production over safety concerns, Americans soon realized that just one company accounts for almost half of the US supply. 

The political ramifications of globalization’s failures were also on full display at Davos this year. When Russia invaded Ukraine, the Kremlin was immediately and almost universally condemned. But three months later, emerging markets and developing countries (EMDCs) have adopted more ambiguous positions. Many point to America’s hypocrisy in demanding accountability for Russia’s aggression, even though it invaded Iraq under false pretenses in 2003.

EMDCs also emphasize the more recent history of vaccine nationalism by Europe and the US, which has been sustained through World Trade Organization IP provisions that were foisted on them 30 years ago. And it is EMDCs that are now bearing the brunt of higher food and energy prices. Combined with historical injustices, these recent developments have discredited Western advocacy of democracy and international rule of law.

To be sure, many countries that refuse to support America’s defense of democracy are not democratic anyway. But other countries are, and America’s standing to lead that fight has been undermined by its own failures – from systemic racism and the Trump administration’s flirtation with authoritarians to the Republican Party’s persistent attempts to suppress voting and divert attention from the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol. 

The best way forward for the US would be to show greater solidarity with EMDCs by helping them to manage the surging costs of food and energy. This could be done by reallocating rich countries’ special drawing rights (the International Monetary Fund’s reserve asset), and by supporting a strong COVID-19 IP waiver at the WTO. 

Moreover, high food and energy prices are likely to cause debt crises in many poor countries, further compounding the tragic inequities of the pandemic. If the US and Europe want to show real global leadership, they will stop siding with the big banks and creditors that enticed countries to take on more debt than they could bear.

After four decades of championing globalization, it is clear that the Davos crowd mismanaged things. It promised prosperity for developed and developing countries alike. But while corporate giants in the Global North grew rich, processes that could have made everyone better off instead made enemies everywhere. “Trickle-down economics,” the claim that enriching the wealthy would automatically benefit all, was a swindle – an idea that had neither theory nor evidence behind it.

This year’s Davos meeting was a missed opportunity. It could have been an occasion for serious reflection on the decisions and policies that brought the world to where it is today. Now that globalization has peaked, we can only hope that we do better at managing its decline than we did at managing its rise.

To read the full article by Project Syndicate, please click here. 

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While public sector unions have thrived because the public sector itself has grown, private sector unions have been annihilated by a bipartisan force: globalization. While much of our political debate over organized labor has focused on the effects of Right to Work and related laws, the evidence suggests that these types of reforms have minimal effect. Wisconsin, for instance, is a Right to Work state and Ohio is not, yet workers in Ohio have not fared obviously better (or worse) than those of Wisconsin.

That’s because on a national scale, the jobs that supported a good union wage have become less common or disappeared altogether. Economist David Autor has found that from 1999 to 2011, 2.5 million good manufacturing jobs were lost to import competition from China alone. We’ve also lost millions of jobs to other countries like Mexico. Combined, the effects of globalization have hollowed out America’s industrial core.

These policies have made our country far less self-sufficient economically. Just remember last year, when the Chinese Communist Party threatened America with a loss of critical pharmaceutical ingredients at the height of a global pandemic. But they’ve also destroyed millions of middle-class livelihoods. As Autor also found, when the manufacturing jobs moved out, a host of social problems moved in: family divorce and breakdown, child abuse and neglect and opioid addiction. Ohio suffered more than most states from the decline of manufacturing jobs.

Some blame the disappearance of these manufacturing jobs on unions themselves. And while there are undoubtedly examples of inflexible unions that made it harder for their companies to keep factories in America, many countries have far higher union participation rates but suffered much less of a decline in manufacturing employment.

Far more important than any individual union was the cheap labor overseas and the fact that our government did nothing to stop U.S. companies from exploiting it. Indeed, policymakers often encouraged offshoring through bad trade deals and tax policy.

As we now know, China gives companies who relocate their factories a massive advantage: cheap workers with no expectations and no rights. Some of our biggest corporations (like Apple) have benefited from literal slave labor in China.

That our biggest companies have taken their businesses to places like China is shameful, but our government policy shouldn’t depend on our biggest companies doing the right thing. In fact, during the Trump administration (where one of us served in the Cabinet), our country imposed tariffs on many goods coming into the United States from China. These policies had the effect of offsetting China’s unfair economic advantages and sending a clear signal to U.S. companies that the time has come to bring jobs home and reduce our dependence on China.

We should continue those policies and expand upon them. Instead, some in Congress and the Biden administration seem desperate to turn the clock back. Under influence from many American multinational companies, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and others want to reduce or eliminate tariffs that were part of a long overdue effort to combat China’s industrial warfare on the United States.

It would be regrettable if the Biden administration were to cave to this pressure and sell out the very workers it claims to champion. As we’ve learned the hard way over the last decades, there is no more important foundation for American workers than a strong manufacturing base.

Politicians will talk big about fighting China or standing up for the American worker. But unless they’re willing to impose real economic costs on the Chinese and stand up to the American CEOs who work with them, Labor Day will be little more than a reminder that we once lived in a country where the American worker was thriving.

Republican J.D. Vance of Cincinnati is a candidate for the U.S. Senate, and Robert Lighthizer is a former U.S. trade representative who has endorsed Vance’s candidacy.

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