08.09.26: The World Turns Inward
The World Turns Inward
08.09.26: The World Turns Inward [Almost Daily Note Series]
I read an essay this morning about the end of the American-led world. Its argument stayed with me because it gave a larger shape to things that can look like separate stories in the news: tariffs, hostility to immigration, demands to bring factories home, arguments over energy, rearmament and the growing distrust between allies.
They may all belong to the same movement. Countries, and many ordinary people, are withdrawing their confidence from the bargains that sustained globalisation.
For decades, political and business leaders told us that openness would make nearly everyone better off. Capital could move freely. Companies could manufacture wherever labour was cheapest. Governments could lower tariffs, welcome workers from abroad and bind rival countries together through trade. Consumers would receive cheaper goods, companies would become more efficient, and the benefits would eventually spread.
Some of that happened. But the gains and losses were never shared evenly. A country could become richer on paper while a town lost its factory. A company could cut its costs while its former workers lost secure jobs and bargaining power. Goods became cheaper, but many people came to feel that the important decisions affecting their lives were being made elsewhere, by people who would never suffer the consequences.
Then came the shocks. The financial crisis showed that governments would rescue the financial system even after millions of people lost homes and work. The pandemic revealed how much essential production had moved abroad. Wars turned energy dependence into a strategic danger. Inflation reduced living standards. Large movements of people placed new pressure on housing and public services that were already strained.
Each shock exposed another weakness in the old promise.
Cheap foreign production looked less attractive when medicines or computer chips could not be obtained. Trade with rivals no longer seemed certain to make them peaceful. Open borders became politically explosive when governments appeared unable to house or care properly for the people already living within them.
The reaction now takes several forms. Economic nationalism promises tariffs, subsidies and the return of factories. Strategic nationalism demands domestic supplies of energy, food, weapons, medicines and technology. Cultural nationalism promises control over immigration and the recovery of national identity and borders.
Populism joins these grievances into one accusation: your leaders cared more about global markets, foreign institutions and mobile elites than they cared about you.
The accusation is sometimes crude, opportunistic or simply false. But it works because it touches a real wound. Many people did lose something, even when economists could show that the economy as a whole had grown.
What interests me is that nationalism is no longer confined to politicians described as populists. Mainstream governments now speak about industrial policy, economic security, strategic autonomy, critical minerals and protected supply chains. Leaders who reject nationalist language are often adopting nationalist economic policies.
I therefore doubt that we will return to the globalisation we knew. But countries cannot become completely self-sufficient either. Modern economies remain deeply entangled. Europe needs foreign energy and minerals. America needs goods manufactured abroad. China needs foreign markets. Almost everyone relies on technologies, capital or resources controlled by someone else.
What seems to be emerging is selective openness. Countries still want access to foreign markets, labour, capital and technology, but they also want the ability to close the door when dependence becomes dangerous.
That is the contradiction of the new period. Every country wants the benefits of interdependence, but fewer countries will accept the vulnerability that comes with it.
The old order asked: what arrangement is most efficient? The new politics asks: who controls it, who benefits, and can they use it against us?
I do not think this movement guarantees greater safety. A world of protective states may become less trusting, more expensive and more dangerous.
Tariffs, anti-immigration politics, rearmament and the fight over resources are not separate stories. They are signs of the same retreat: away from trust in an open world and towards protection in an uncertain one.
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