[nixpulvis]

Just as America would like to reduce its dependence on external production, so to do other countries want to reduce their own. We used to live in a world converging toward maximal international trade, when in fact it was exploiting underdeveloped nations. As we progress globally, and as the development gap shrinks, we have noticed power dynamics which weren't well guarded against in the old way.

So now what? How do we preserve a lot of the efficiencies of the past, while strengthening the resilience and redundancy. How can multiple nations create policy which drives business on partially compatible protocols?

If I allow myself to be optimistic, I'd be hoping for more international lawyers and trade agreements. Protectionism is natural, but taken too far, isolationism is a death sentence.

[dmix]

> we have noticed power dynamics which weren't well guarded against in the old way

The clearest example is a dependency on a single wealthy nation for military and world policing. It's a good thing for individual countries to be able to project their own foreign policy goals like containing Russia without having to rely on the whims of another country's politics. Even here in Canada we should be able to defend their own arctic border reliably and be able to project power to China/India beyond strongly worded letters.

> I'd be hoping for more international lawyers and trade agreements.

Ignoring the US's recent moves there does seem to be more trade deals than ever between 'middle powers'.

> isolationism is a death sentence

The best way to maintain global relationships is to offer tons of value. Similar to how China can get good trade deals and influence simply because they have so much to offer economically. This isn't just issues of diplomacy.

[nixpulvis]

Well said.

One of the USA's greatest exports is intelligence and higher education, and what has been happening with that and the general anti-intellectual atmosphere is to me the most concerning as an american. Ironically, public education in america has been pretty bad for a while. But I'm going to start rambling here... way too many problems, and no damn leadership.

[FpUser]

>"like containing Russia"

I think at the moment Canada faces way bigger problems from the south.

[littlestymaar]

> like containing Russia without having to rely on the whims of another country's politics

That's true, but at the same time it was probably already the case before invasion of Ukraine, and it is definitely the case now.

The main issue is political fragmentation: would Paris and Berlin risk lives of French and German people (soldiers and civilians due to retaliation) to save Vilnius?

But if the answer is true (as obligated by the Treaty of Maastricht, independently of NATO) then Russia stands no chance with conventional weapons against the whole Western Europe, the balance of military, demographic and industrial power is ridiculously lopsided (involving nuclear weapons would also raise the same political question about the French willingness to nuke Russia in retaliation to Russia nuking Poland but if the answer is yes, Russia cannot win a nuclear war either (which everyone would lose)).

[michaelt]

> Just as America would like to reduce its dependence on external production, so to do other countries want to reduce their own.

If anything, I'd say for other countries it's more urgent.

If China embargoes deliveries of light bulbs to Europe, all the light bulbs already in place keep working. The pain would grow over time - giving a grace period, to ramp up local production.

If America embargoes AWS, Google, Apple and Microsoft? The pain would be instant and severe.

[agubelu]

That would be as close to a declaration of war as you can get without firing a bullet.

The immediate and obvious response would be for the foreign branches of those companies to be declared "of national interest", nationalized and forced to keep operating.

[nixpulvis]

I'm absolutely not an expert, but critical things for power and food production not to mention medical supplies and emergency equipment are also tied up pretty deeply in international trade.

The world would break pretty quickly if we all just stopped trading with each other.

[hilbert42]

In case of war AWS, Google, Apple and Microsoft and others would be immediately directed by government to adopt its war strategy—like it or not—just as US manufacturing was forced to retool for war production during WWII.

[bborud]

It is risky to believe that the development gap alone makes for higher economic efficiency when manufacturing things in China. There are very real structural differences in how various industries are organized. Not least in terms of geography.

This is an aspect the west seems to have missed entirely as there are no attempts to learn from it or emulate it.

Everyone knows about Shenzhen. Not everyone knows that this is how every major manufacturing industry is clustered in China in various cities and regions.

[nixpulvis]

My point was that the development gap is what lead to the current situation, not that it's just cheap labor that makes Chinese stuff cheap.

My point about maintaining higher economic efficiency is actually the same point you're making. How can the globe (not just the west vs the east) learn from the past and build for the future. We live in a magical world with translation services available to billions of people, how can we empower them to organize around the right ideas. How can we preserve culture and art while flooding ourselves with technologies developed globally? Who pays for security and research? Intellectual property law in general?

So many big issues and questions still need a lot of work.

[SoftTalker]

The US did this with automobile and steel industries concentrated around the Great Lakes. It's not some kind of profound insight on the part of the Chinese.

The downside is that it decimates entire regions if/when the demand for what they produce drops.

[pyrale]

> How do we preserve a lot of the efficiencies of the past, while strengthening the resilience and redundancy.

Open source with clear international governance and maintainer/contributor base, in such a way that a geopolitical rift leaves both sides with working software.

That works for tech and the infrastructure, of course, but not for the corporations built upon them.

> more international lawyers

I don't see that as a significant source of safety in our current world.

> isolationism is a death sentence.

The current US admin isn't isolationist, it's merely reverting back to 19th century imperialism.

[s3p]

>Just as America would like to reduce its dependence on external production, so to do other countries want to reduce their own.

Conflating the president's desire and projecting it onto ordinary people. Most people don't care about this issue, it's the current president who is hellbent on destroying free trade.

[RobotToaster]

> If I allow myself to be optimistic, I'd be hoping for more international lawyers and trade agreements.

One of the issues with the current system is that the WTO appellate body, which is effectively the court of world trade, requires USA approval for any appointments, which both Trump and Biden have refused to give. This effectively makes the WTO completely impotent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appellate_Body

[direwolf20]

Didn't the rest of the world form their own WTO without the USA in it?

[hilbert42]

Trade agreements, the WTO, its rules and appellant system, only work if nations are at peace and that peace is sustainable. We've just lived through a remarkably stable period of 80 years (since WWII) without which WHO, free trade and trade agreements could not have existed as we've known them. That era is seemingly now over, and the WTO is falling into irrelevancy.

Unfortunately, in the decades since the 1970s laissez faire economics/capitalism with its immediate need for quick profits, short-termism, a penchant for deregulation and ignoring traditional business ethics has meant that governments have ignored their long-term strategic interests. Despite the dangers of these policies being blatantly obvious dangers from the outset many Western governments encouraged such practices. Now it's payback time, and it'll be expensive—likely more than if the old order had been retained.

Anyone with a sense of history could see the headlong rush to deregulatate markets, indiscriminate reductions in tariffs and free (and indiscriminate) trade, would ultimately result in leaving many countries strategically vulnerable and open to exploitation by others.

We're now witnessing the true cost of these policies and what it means to have lost critical industrial infrastructure, loss of production know-how along with the loss of skilled workers, and an ongoing deskilling of the workforce all of which took decades if not centuries to build up.

With more nuanced policies much of the pain could have been avoided.

Rebuilding a strategic manufacturing infrastructure to insure resilience and independence in an increasingly uncertain and divided world will be costly and difficult.

[isk517]

Even without national protectionism we are still experiencing isolationism, expect instead of it being done by nations in the interest of their citizens it is being done by corporations in the interest of their shareholders and it's leading to a dangerous amount of centralization as well.

Compatibility protocols are probably the best answer, allow individual countries to develop software they trust to interact with internationally accepted protocols and formats. As you said, good luck getting anyone to agree to anything. If email didn't already exist I don't think it would even be possible to implement today.

[FpUser]

>"but taken too far, isolationism is a death sentence"

I would argue that few large countries have everything to be self sufficient. For the rest - they would have to band together to avoid being at the mercy of their bigger overlords.

As for efficiencies of the past: I think they lead to a complete monopoly / near monopoly in few critical areas. The result - the monopoly power becoming a political weapon and or critical vulnerability.