Friday at 9am eastern time I’m going to do a live video chat with Katelyn Jetelina of Your Local Epidemiologist talking about bird flu, RFK Jr., the chaos Trump has unleashed this week on the world of public health and more. Tune in if you can, and if you can’t I will post the video later.
A quarter century ago, I took a class in college called “Globalization and Its Discontents” that was taught by an all-star team of New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, celebrity political theorist Michael Sandel, and the very serious Franco-Austrian international relations scholar Stanley Hoffmann.
The class was, as you can tell from the roster, not primarily about the economic aspects of global trade (though it, of course, came up) but about the consequences for politics. Friedman offered the kind of Pollyanna-ish views that you can see in this 1999 column. He felt that despite the repression at Tiananmen Square, the future of Chinese democracy was fundamentally bright. Either the Chinese Communist Party would fail to deliver on Chinese people’s rising expectations for prosperity, in which case its grip on power would falter, or else China would continue to grow and develop, which would mean integrating into the cultural sphere of liberalism and democracy. “Everything from American contract law to accounting standards to cultural messages is now winning here more each day,” he wrote, “what is driving change here is the educational, commercial, entertainment and Internet interactions between millions of Chinese and the outside world, and that must never be aborted.”
To Friedman, the biggest risk was that the US would slam the door in China’s face, breaking those interactions.
Sandel and Hoffman were rightly skeptical of this utopianism. But the specific grounds for skepticism that they advocated, and that I remember from the discourse at the time, were largely at odds with what happened. In his 2002 essay “Clash of Globalizations,” for example, Hoffmann dwelled on the then-pressing question of whether the United States would actually accept global governance or resort to unilateralism. And he writes that “international and transnational cooperation is necessary to ensure that globalization will not be undermined by inequalities resulting from market fluctuations, weak state-sponsored protections, and the incapacity of many states to improve their fates by themselves.”
In a more mass politics sense, union members, environmentalists, and activists joined together in the Battle of Seattle to protest a vision of globalization that they thought used this talk of integration and democratization as a rationale for corporate exploitation. The end stage of world trade, according to its critics, was that western countries would use the third world (especially China) as a low-wage, low-regulation manufacturing platform to undermine the social safety net at home.
And precisely because the proponents of globalization were proven wrong, there’s been a tendency to assume the skeptics were right. But if you look at last week’s news about DeepSeek, you can see that what’s actually happened is a third thing, something that experts and pundits didn’t adequately consider as a possibility:
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