[naasking]

Yes, he's of the opinion that the alliances in security and trade have not been a net benefit to the US. Is that shocking to you? He's literally been saying that for years. And thus, he's acting to change those agreements to make them more advantageous and to stimulate domestic production to compete with foreign labour (that's ultimately what tariffs do). He's going about it in his usual bombastic and ham-fisted way of course, but he's doing exactly what he's always said he wanted to do.

[mrtesthah]

Well that’s certainly the opinion, but the point is that no evidence has been presented to support it.

[naasking]

It's completely self-evident that lots of manufacturing has left the US due to trade agreements. This has resulted in certain classes of cheap goods but also made the US vulnerable in key goods (like electronics), and inhibited automation.

It's also not at all obvious that the US has been more secure in its role as world police. Arguably, it led directly to 9/11 and decades of pointless death in the Middle East.

All of the arguments that the status quo was more secure and better economically are weak, at best, given the complexities of the counterfactuals.

[mrtesthah]

I think the arguments in favor of a globalized economy, as well as the transition to a knowledge economy, are abundant and pervasive. I’m not going to argue in favor of them because they are already so powerful and obvious.

If people conflate their current economic misfortune with a US foreign policy of encouraging global cooperation and participation, then they haven’t thought much about cause and effect.

Someone who cared to address the newfound lack of upward mobility in our society would insist on domestic policies that ensured economic surplus was explicitly invested toward the public good.

[naasking]

It has nothing to do with "current economic misfortune". It's simply a fact that globalization makes a country more vulnerable on many dimensions. This was clear during COVID when all of the supply chains collapsed upon countries closing their borders.

While globalization certainly has advantages that have been espoused at length, little thought has been given to their clear downsides, like decimating domestic production and the vulnerabilities inherent to distributed supply chains.

As for the "transition to a knowledge economy", this too entails similar problems. The previous trajectory was simply untenable.

[mrtesthah]

I’m against these vulnerabilities as much as anyone, but if we want to move the world forward as a whole, nationalist protectionism cannot take us there. If every country wasted its resources building up its own fully independent industrial supply chain, and kept it fully modernized abreast of other nations, the average citizen’s standard of living would have a very low ceiling indeed. There’s a reason why corporate mergers happen.

If you want to see truly prosperous societies then you have to maximize peaceful international cooperation through shared democratic values. That takes educated citizenry with post-material values who will be invested in the stability and longevity of such an international system.

And they need to cooperate against authoritarian bad actors like Putin, who seek to divide and conquer.