The Future of World Trade: From financial derivatives to a “simple product”
Natalia Taran (Наталья Таран)
The West itself, by its own stubborn and short-sighted policies, and its seemingly organic inability to make the institutions it controls inclusive, has contributed to clarifying the reality of the global economy and trade.
Globalization allowed the U.S. and the West as a whole to gain significant competitive advantages, albeit at the cost of impoverishing its middle class. But other countries have also benefited, above all China, which has used Western investment, technology and markets for its “peaceful rise.” Moreover, over 40 years it has created a middle class of hundreds of millions of people, has taken the lead in a number of areas of artificial intelligence, and digital "wallets" have become commonplace for at least 100 million Chinese citizens.
This ambiguous picture of the distribution of the "tops and spines" of globalization led Americans to a simple decision: to "close" the same China that the West was "opening" in the Opium Wars of the mid-19th century. The need to roll back globalization was discussed at one of the Davos Forums.
