Technology and trade
dominance of the vulnerability narrative is unsurprising given the public’s widespre ad aversion to globalization, which is corroborated rather than challenged by journalism due to its teleological nature, deciding first what the public wants to hear and then finding the facts to fit the story, driven like all enterprise by the profit motive that necessitates increased viewership. Consequently, governments are forced to act on the insidious sentiment that our interconnected economies are a vulnerability that needs to be addressed. Moreover, the economic resilience that diversified global supply chains have the potential to provide is severely undervalued, as resilience is invisible until it is laid bare in a crisis. 18 The inevitably inaccurate nature of counterfactuals to demonstrate how we would have suffered in the pandemic if it weren’t for global trade makes it hard for politicians to mobilize support to further invest in free trade agreements. This is compounded by the myopic political tendency of democracies: in the face of imminent geopolitical concerns and the seductive allure of protectionism, the unquantifiable stability that free trade may offer in a future crisis is widely disregarded. Moreover, due to humanity’s availability bias, we diminish the perceived danger of rivalrous trade and take for granted the benefits that our unity offers because we haven’t felt the pain of a fractured global order since the Cold War. Thus, it is only once crisis strikes that we will recognize the true value of free trade and crave the stability it provided, by which time it will be far too late. Arguably the greatest catalyst of a mounting anti-globalization zeitgeist was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, which was marked by a mutual weaponization of trade. In their desire to revoke Russia’s access to free trade to curtail its ability to fund its war with Ukraine, and to warn other nations against seeking war over peace, the w est’s ban of high -tech exports to Russia, reinforced by secondary US sanctions on Chinese tech exports to Russia, is forecasted to cause an inexorable long-term decline in Russian production of advanced military and consumer goods, depressing living standards and suppressing Russia’s ability to exert influence on a global scale. Consequently, economic sanctions have laid bare to autocratic regimes and the BRICs that world trade and a reliance on the west is a vulnerability that constrains their ability to defy western ideals, intensifying a transition towards autarky and an alignment of anti-western agendas. Furthermore, the damage that our dependence on the geopolitically unreliable Russia has wreaked on our economies, epitomized by gas prices skyrocketing 111% in the Eurozone 19 due to Putin’s retaliatory constriction of supply, may accelerate a transition from an era of indiscriminate blanket globalization, when the cheapest and highest quality supplier was chosen no matter their country, towards selective globalization where governments create a network of tariffs that render non-aligned countries uncompetitive. Illustrated by the Trump a dministration’s tariffs on Chinese imports of up to
https://www.piie.com/blogs/trade-and-investment-policy-watch/covid-19-chinas-exports-medical-supplies- provide-ray-hope. 18 Nadia Calvino and Minouche Shafik LSE Lecture 3.3.23 ‘Towards a New Economic Paradigm?’ See Towards a New Economic Paradigm? (lse.ac.uk). 19 Euronews, 4/4/23: https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2022/11/07/gas-and-electricity-bills-nearly-double- in-all-eu-capitals-new-data-reveals.
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