“What the hell happened? “
At the end of WWII we were terrified of Stalin’s army. He occupied much of Europe. The rest of Europe was not able to defend itself. We bribed up an alliance to fight the cold war. Everything was thrown into making Europe and Japan functional again. The Marshal plan. We threw open the US market, the only functional one to survive the war. We patrolled the seas so that everyone could play. For the first time in history any country could go anywhere, buy a raw good, bring it home and make it into a product. Those products came to America and they beat the price of our union made products. Even if they were more cheaply made, many people buy on price. This exported our jobs. Then, after the Soviet Union talked about nuking China Nixon saw an opportunity to finish the Soviet threat once and for all. China had, essentially slave labor. The West thought that they’d liberalize, but they stayed hard core communist.
On the good side, sort of, America is reshoring and friendshoring everything we exported. We’ll build out the industrial base again. The price may be a world that collapses into a bunch of sequestered empires but their wars will be nuclear. The Russian Ukraine war is a result of Russia trying to use an economic model from the nineteenth century rather than joining the globalized model of today. The war is the result of that order breaking down. The Order is gone. We’re trying to reestablish it but there are huge, huge problems in the way. Russia is doing this because a bunch of oligarchs who rape money from Russia take it out of Russia to keep it safe from the kleptocratic government. The average Russian is arguably as bad off as they were under Stalin. Governments like communism and Putinism survive by taking over their neighbors and raping away their wealth. China is trying to do this to avoid collapse. So is Russia. Had Russia gone into a market economy like the rest of the West instead of developing Denmark Disease this wouldn’t be happening.
“Animal Farm” was required reading when I was a kid. Now the opposite is what is taught. Somewhere America went off the rails, there is no logic to it since every socialist and communist country has been a disaster except China, which our industrial and government officials have enabled to become our biggest threat. American labor was just too expensive easier to ship stuff overseas for .50 an hour peasants to assemble and ship back.