Globalism: The Short-Sighted Ideology

 I'm nearly 60. With that sort of maturity (I hate to say age, I'm still a teenager in my head) comes a certain perspective.

I tend to think more in strategic terms, rather than tactically. More long-term.

So to me, globalism seems very short-sighted, very tactical, very short-term. Why?

Well, because over the long term there will always be something that happens to eliminate the a short-term gain.

Hence we have the absolute global shitstorm after Covid. Something that we haven't recovered from six months or more after restrictions were lifted. Either countries are holding onto outdated medical advice and restricting travel and imports while other countries have opened up and are gobbling up the world's resources as their consumerist needs re-emerge.

During Covid, a lot of old container ships were scrapped. During the lull, companies preferred not to pay wages and mooring fees for hulls that were not earning. Instead they scrapped the least efficient ships and made their crews redundant.

Now we're all better and we want to buy stuff, there isn't enough capacity to bring it to us. So now instead of £1500, a 40ft container will cost £20,000 to £30,000 to ship from the far east to the UK. Supply and demand. You can't pay less because shipping it by rail across Asia would still be more. 

If what you're shipping is large and you can't get many of them into a container, that a massive price hike per unit. Even if you're shipping 30,000 items in that container, that could in effect be an extra £1 per unit on the landed price of the item. 30,000 items in a container: they can't be that big and by extrapolation that expensive. So you may have doubled the landed price per item of your product. 

Hence inflation. 

This is where Globalism falls down. Removing whole industries from countries and relying on a single country like China, or even a small handful of countries on the other side of the globe to make everything you consume is a risky strategy. Not risky for the manufacturer: they will move on to the next product, not risky for the shipper, they will just ship something else and still be paid, not risky even for the seller in the West: they just put the price up. It's the poor sap at the end of that supply chain that gets handed the shitty end of the stick. All the price increases get handed to the consumer. 

So Inflation.

Globalism also falls down when it comes to security. The Globalist mantra is we all trade together, so we can't go to war with each other. But look at what's happening in China: with vast amounts of money coming into the country for goods being shipped to the rest of the World, they are now investing that money in ever more capable military assets. They are not buying from abroad. They are making their own assets in-country. They can do that, because they have all the production capacity right there.

If the UK wanted to make a bespoke microchip in quantity in the UK, could it happen? I doubt it. Could we produce and supply ALL of our military assets in the UK? Nope, not a chance. 

Think we can? I'm sure all the chips in the electronics in our military kit are made in the UK. I'm sure the missiles our aircraft are armed with are made in the UK. I'm sure the sensors on the engines in our tanks and Army vehicles are not made in...China.

This is important. If it ever comes to a shooting war, logistics are key. EVERY general and field-Marshall in every historical war knows the importance of logistics. 

If the supply of sensors for our diesel engines or the supply of components to solder to our UK-made circuit boards dries up, then we cannot fight. 

Globalism hamstrings countries. It make them reliant on outside sources of supply. It works, until that source of supply is cut off by your enemy, or worse still your enemy is the source of supply. Or even of that source then becomes the sole source on the planet and increases prices.

Globalism doesn't work.