The Munk Debates Podcast - Be it Resolved, the Ukraine War has accelerated the rollback of globalization

Episode Date: May 11, 2022

The end of the Cold War marked the beginning of a new, interdependent world. Growing global consensus around trade rules, technology transfers, mass migration and investment ushered in a wave of globalization that was championed as the most effective means of bringing prosperity and stability to big and small countries. Yet lately, a slew of anti-globalization movements have led to a marked decrease in world trade. Some economists predict that the war between Russia and Ukraine will only accelerate the decline of globalization. With supply chains already fractured due to the pandemic and climate change, the war will remind many developed nations that they cannot rely on foreign countries for badly needed resources like wheat or natural gas. China, one of the world's biggest exporters of goods, will likewise see the economic isolation of Russia as a reason to become more independent and protect itself from being vulnerable to similar economic sanctions in the future. Others take a more optimistic view about the future of globalization; with all the comparisons to the 1970's and sustained inflation, many forget that it was a decade that paved the way for a sustained expansion of trade and international migration. And the best way to deal with inflation, these experts argue, is to open economies and increase the flow of goods. The future will see more, not less, economic interdependence, cooperation, and globalization.    Arguing for the motion is Adam Posen, President of the Peterson Institute for International Economics Arguing against the motion is Harold James, economic historian and Professor of History and International Affairs at Princeton University QUOTES: ADAM POSEN “We are moving to a world where division is going to be more evident, and where values in national security are going to determine more of our economic decisions”   HAROLD JAMES “The globalization that's going to follow  in the 21st century is about the globalization of services and the use of information technology. It's a very exciting prospect.”   Sources:  ABC, BBC, PBS   The host of the Munk Debates is Rudyard Griffiths - @rudyardg.   Tweet your comments about this episode to @munkdebate or comment on our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/munkdebates/ To sign up for a weekly email reminder for this podcast, send an email to [e-mail].   To support civil and substantive debate on the big questions of the day, consider becoming a Munk Member at https://munkdebates.com/membership Members receive access to our 10+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, newsletter and ticketing privileges at our live events. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue - https://munkdebates.com/   Senior Producer: Ricki Gurwitz Editor: Adam Karch  Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

These statues have to come down. It's always been a pandemic of the unvaccinated. The problem now is it's a pandemic of the willfully unvaccinated. Falling birth rates are good. They're good for our planet. They're good for our societies. We're not responsible for the escalation with Russia. We're not the ones who invaded Ukraine.

I don't think it's fair to portray people of color as victims. It is a very dangerous time in American politics. Welcome to the monk debates. we provide you with a civil and substantive debate on the big issue of the day to arm you, the listener, with enough information to make up your own mind. Today's debate, be it resolved. The Ukraine war has accelerated the rollback of globalization. The Biden administration faces another crisis amid a growing backlog in the global supply chain. And you can't find lumber to build a new home. Well, you can't find products to stock the shelves of your small business. You can't

find holiday gifts. COVID has brought surging demand, but also closed factories and labor shortages. Ukraine's agriculture minister announced today that the area in which the country's spring crop will be planted might shrink by more than half this year compared with the levels expected before the Russian invasion. The United Nations this week is warning that this fight could cause one of the most disastrous global food shortages since World War II. Hello, I'm your moderator, Rudyard-Griffis. Well, my name is a lot of now we've all been affected by the global supply chain crisis, delays in production and shipping around the world for the result first of the COVID pandemic, but now being exacerbated

by the war in Ukraine. We're all witnessing a steep rise in prices from everything from bread to milk to the gasoline for your car. Some economists predict that the war between Russia and Ukraine is much bigger than the COVID pandemic in terms of its impact. on globalization and the economic interdependence of the world that has brought us years of stability, cheap prices, and prosperity. These same economists argue that the war will remind many developed nations that they cannot rely on foreign countries for badly needed resources. In China, one of the world's biggest exporters of goods, will see the economic sanctions against Russia as a warning and begin to protect itself against similar.

threats of financial isolation. Other economists take a more optimistic view about the future of globalization. With all the current comparisons to the 1970s oil crisis and sustained inflation, many forget that that was a decade that led to a big expansion of international trade and global migration. The best way to deal with inflation, these same experts argue, is to open up economies and increase the flow of goods, services, and people around the world. This means necessarily that the future will see more, not less, economic interdependence, cooperation, and globalization.

On this installment of the monk debates, we challenge the essence of these arguments by debating the motion, be it resolved. The Ukraine war has accelerated the rollback of globalization. Arguing for the motion is Adam Pozen, president of the prestigious Peterson Institute for International Economics. arguing gains the motion is Harold James, economic historian and professor of history and international affairs at Princeton University. Adam Harold, welcome to the Monk Debates. Thanks for having us. It's good to be with you. I'm very much looking forward to this discussion today.

So many factors and variables to think about in terms of the impact of the Ukraine war, not only the tragedy unfolding in Eastern Europe, but its reverberations around the planet, around. the globe. We are seeing all of us soaring commodity and other prices pushing up inflation, challenging the global economy in ways that few of us expected. Supply chains are snarled, that's for sure, but there's also a hope, a hope that beyond this war, that globalization, that idea that through more interdependency we can prosper together will come out stronger, that the common human project will renew itself devoted to shared interests in our own, ideas that underpin the philosophy of globalization. So the opportunity to have a focused debate, a pointed debate on the impacts of globalization

coming from this war with the two of you is a privilege indeed. Our motion today, be it resolved. The Ukraine war has accelerated the rollback of globalization. Adam, you argued in favor of the motion, so let's have your opening statement first. Thank you. And thank you for letting me join the Monk debates along with my good friend and longtime colleague, Harold. I think the reason to think about it in terms of rollback or not is because there's not going to be one end point or one start point to globalization.

I fear that we have reached a point where the rollback or the corrosion of globalization is accelerating because of two long-term factors and two immediate factors. First, that the U.S., through not just Trump, but through Democratic and Republican administrations for more than 20 years, has been withdrawing from globalization. While the rest of the world has continued to integrate, the U.S. has cut back on trade, on foreign investment, on international flows of ideas and people, and on immigration. And again, Trump made it worse, but it wasn't just that. It's 20 years plus of data on our Peterson Institute website, people can see the facts. The second long-term issue was that China was increasingly, has been increasingly perceived as a threat in economic as well as other terms by not just the U.S., but primarily the U.S. And I think with the changes coming out of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the sense that China is a threat has gone up in other countries beyond the U.S. in the so-called Western Alliance, which of course includes Japan and Singapore. in South Korea and Australia and others.

So those two long-term factors were pushing, but Europe, parts of Asia, we're also still globalizing. I think COVID has provided an excuse and additional fuel for people to say, hey, maybe we overdid it with global supply chains, hey, maybe we need to be more resilient or diversified or localized. And then, of course, Russia's brutal invasion of Ukraine puts to forward issues of national security and human rights, which may indeed be the right things to worry about and more important than economics,

but which will unfortunately lead to bad economic effects in terms of de-globalization. So I think we are at a turning point in history. It's not all for good reasons, and even if the extent it is, I think globalization is going to move backwards with increasing speed in coming years. Adam, thank you for that opening statement. Okay, Harold, your opportunity now. let's put two minutes on the show clock and get your response in opposition to our resolution. The Ukraine war has accelerated the rollback of globalization.

Well, thank you, Radia. And it's good to be with you and to be discussing with Adam. And I share many of Adam's worries about the position of the United States and the position in the Trump period, but the position beyond the Trump period. But I'm fundamentally optimistic, and I wanted to lay out those grounds for optimism. First of all, looking back in a very, very long-term context at the whole history of globalization, we know that globalization isn't a process that goes just in one direction. There are setbacks, but there are also accelerations of globalization.

And the thing that really pushed globalization at two critical moments in the way, the middle of the 19th century when what we think of as the first era of globalization started, and in the 1970s in the period of the oil price shocks, was acute shortages, shortages of food in the 19th century, shortages of energy in the 1970s. And the reaction to that was initially a kind of protectionism as well. But then very, very quickly, a realization that protectionism doesn't cut it and that you need to move beyond that. And so you saw, particularly after the oil price shock, I think is a really good illustration of the principle, that there's a vast acceleration of global trade after the 1970s. But the second reason for, I think, cautious and obviously in light

of the tragic circumstances in Ukraine, a very guarded optimism, is that what we're seeing in Ukraine is the end of a particular vision. Mr. Putin is in a way the pinnacle of anti-globalism. He's the person who, I think, more clearly than anybody else, has laid out a vision of the world which sees it in terms of a zero-sum game. that if I win, you lose, and it's a destructive game. It's a struggle for preeminence. It's a kind of realist vision of how politics works. And what we're seeing now is that that vision is just crumbling with the desperately

incompetent and mismanaged and ill-thought-out attack on Ukraine. that this is a kind of turning point. And I think in the longer picture, Putin will go down in history, really in the same way as the great dictators of the 20th century have gone down, as an excoriated, reviled figure. His doctrines are wrong and immoral and unhelpful. The leadership of that kind of person offers only a negative model, a pattern of how not to behave and how not to be successful.

And you can see, I think, how already Putin has galvanized multilateralism, that the EU has responded effectively to Putin. It's responded effectively to COVID. NATO, which I think was crumbling, is also now being recast. and in general for the world as a whole, I think Putin is doing exactly the same thing for the vision of a multilateral connected world in which peace and prosperity, the vision of the mid-1940s, are inseparable from each other. Thank you, Harold.

Great opening statements from you both. Now an opportunity for rebuttal. So a chance here to react, Adam, to what you've just heard from Harold. Again, a couple minutes on the show clock. give us your initial response. Well, Harold, of course, as I hope your listeners all realize, wrote the definitive book, The End of Globalization, about what happened with World War I. And he's absolutely right that there have been these cycles and at times that national security

or horror of an oppressive power have deepened globalization. But I think, unfortunately, we're coming off a period. where the assumptions that were made and the neglect of globalization, in particular by the U.S., have undermined our ability to do that right now. I think it much more likely that we will see a deepening integration within Europe, within the European Union, which will have various good effects, economic and beyond, but which will probably not be helpful to globalization in the sense of it being included. inclusive, open, evenly applied.

I in particular worry, and I hope Harold could convince me that I'm wrong, that we're going to retreat back into even worse treatment of developing low and middle income economies in the world in the place we're getting to, not because necessarily the U.S. or Europe, let alone China or Russia, have been good to those economies in recent years. They haven't. We can see the shortfall in vaccine distribution, for example. But because I think when we get into a world that's less globalized, this is what I argued in my recent piece in foreign affairs,

that you end up having more unequal, more politicized treatment of businesses and, for that matter, economies access to markets and to financing and to standards. And so if you're Argentina, maybe at times you can play this out and say, oh, China's going to bail me out. And the Americans say, oh, I don't want China. and then bail you out, and then you say, well, then the IMF has to give me Argentina a better deal, and you get it. So there will be occasionally these bidding wars. But mostly, I think, we're going to see less cooperation than is absolutely needed on climate change, on pandemics,

on aid and financing for developing economies. And more and more developing economies will either have to make a choice to be in sort of the China camp or the U.S. camp and be neglected if they don't choose. And that's a, again, I say all this because it is ultimately reversible, but for the next few years, I fear at least this is the direction we're on. Thank you, Adam, for that rebuttal. Our motion today, be it resolved, Ukraine war has accelerated the rollback of globalization. Herald, you're opposed to the resolution. Let's get your rebuttal to Adam now. I mean, there's obviously a lot of truth in what Adam just laid out. And the world isn't a very nervous. moment and the kind of behavior that you can see about politicizing energy supplies is infectious

and other countries will do this. I think spectacularly at the moment you can see how Algeria has threatened to cut off the gas supply to Spain through the Meg pipeline in response to the conflict in the Western Sahara and the threat that if Spain gives a single molecule to Morocco, then Algeria is going to cut off the supply. So these disputes are contagious and we saw it already. And I think it is one of the things that actually creates the incentives for Putin to do what he did in Ukraine is the kind of nationalism that the COVID crisis initially produced and the vaccine nationalism. And Adam is right about this. this issue that the Europeans and the United States didn't behave well in terms of supplying the vaccines

to the rest of the world. But I think the critical thing, and Adam raised this, is what China is going to do. And I think you saw a moment at the beginning of the Ukraine conflict when it might have been possible if Ukraine had been rapidly subdued and turned into a puppet state of Russia, that China might have been encouraged to do the same thing with Taiwan. What you see now, I think, is that this kind of way of operating is not really productive in the slightest. And, you know, China and the Chinese leadership, President Xi has been talking for a long time about making China, and more resilient and more self-sufficient,

but actually you see in the last two years that the share of Chinese trade has been increasing, and China is more dependent on a multilateral order. And so when you're thinking of how to rebuild multilateralism, it's got to include China, it's got to include the United States, it's got to be genuinely global. And China, I think, is reflecting very, very intensely on this issue and is seeing the way in which the most obvious version of anti-multilateralism is being incredibly destructive and dangerous and harmful, harmful also to China.

Thank you, Harold. Now, let me join the debate and think up some questions that are top of mind to our listeners, tuning into this fascinating conversation about the future of globalization in the shadow of the Ukraine war. And Adam, let me come to you first and try out this argument. Let me get your thoughts. You know, people are looking at the response of the Western world. You could say effectively the liberal international order. It is deeply opposed to what it is seeing in Ukraine right now. I think it's fair to characterize that response is remarkably united, remarkably coherent.

It is a response that to a certain extent has surprised people at its substantiveness, at its seriousness, the real risks that Western nations are running in terms of the possible escalation of this conflict with Russia should not be underestimated. And when you take that all together, when you look at it in total, that unity, that intention on the part of the West, why isn't that a sign that we should in fact be very optimistic about globalization, about the underlying values and commitments that much of the world, the world, that Canada, the United States and Europe is part of, to living and free and open societies, to interchanges of people, services, and ideas. Why isn't the Ukraine war, in fact, a proof point that globalization's best days could lie ahead?

I wish I could sign up to the sort of spirit of your question. I completely agree. I was pleasantly surprised by, as you rightly described, the solidarity, the unity, the scope and the duration of the liberal democracies and market economy's response to Putin's barbaric invasion. But I think we have to confront two facts that make me worried this will not result in a rallying around globalization. The first is underlying all this is the idea that Europe, and for the United, for that matter, the U.S. treated very differently when Russia invades Ukraine than when Russia

invaded Syria or when China is expansionary in the South China Sea or other acts of military violence. There's a lot of good reasons for this. But the simplest reason and the most important reason is it is on the border of Europe and it involves primarily white-looking people. and therefore it is motivating the U.S. and Europe in a way that I'm not sure we can count off for a broader, more consistent global response. The second reason I'm not as hopeful that we're going to end up in a good place for globalization, despite the real success of this coalition, is that ultimately, as I said when this all started, Russia in the end is a very small economy in the world. And because this is sort of similar to what Harold was saying about Xi's China, because under Putin, Russia tried very hard to be self-reliant and get its finances out of the U.S.

and in the West and only doing commodity exports that they could control, it ended up being much less important to the rest of the world. economically. So there clearly is some damage for Austria, Germany, Netherlands, Italy, if natural gas cuts off from Russia. But the actual impact of shutting down Russia from the rest of the world economy is quite small. There are a number of other economies and obviously China foremost among them where the costs of reacting the way this coalition has would be enormously two orders, three orders, literally, well, not three orders, two orders of magnitude. I should be careful. Two orders of magnitude higher. And so I hope that the ideals keep us together, but I'm not sure

that will hold. Thank you, Adam. Harold, come back on some of the points that Adam just made. Two points really. One is are the principles that we're using to defend the territorial integrity of Ukraine applicable throughout the world? And Adams write about the way in which Syria set a precedent for this. And I think people will look back and think that this was one of the triggers. that really created the Ukraine tragedy, that the West was remarkably ineffective in responding to the tragedy of Syria and to the very, very similar style of military operations, the bombardment of cities, the mass civilian casualties, the torturing the use of skill.

and brutal mercenaries. And also, there's a kind of parallel, I think, between Syria and Ukraine, in that from the point of view of Russia, from the point of view of Vladimir Putin, the refugee flows that were created were not an unintended consequence, but an intended consequence of the action,

and they were intended to destabilize Europe. So we need to learn from that. And we need to think about a, really a global system. And I think, you know, if you think of the stories with other historical precedence, of course, you know, part of the tragedy of the Second World War is that France and Britain, in 1938, let Czechoslovakia be dismembered. And, you know, that's in effect the story of. Syria, that we let that happen, and that is a consequence we got something much bigger coming up.

So, you know, on that thing, I think there is really a need for a global vision again. And the China point, yes, that's right. I mean, China is part of the world order. And we shouldn't think of China as necessarily a threat to the world order, but it's a big country with big interests and also common concerns over the pandemic or over climate change. And in the end, those overriding issues, I think will help to produce a new vision of globalization. Hi, Rudyard Griffiths here, your host and moderator. I have a favor to ask you, please consider becoming a monk member.

Membership is free and you get access to a series of great benefits, including a 10-plus-year library of some of our best debates, dialogues, and podcasts. You also get a free monthly newsletter featuring the debates that we're watching around the world. And you get a specially curated Friday weekly monk members online. podcast that focuses on the big international events and trends shaping our world. All of that, again, free at www.w.w.munkdebates.com. I hope you'll consider joining and becoming part of our community. Now, back to our program. Well, let me build on what you just said about China with Adam. Because Adam, I think we're all familiar with this idea that much of globalization in the last quarter century has been powered by the remarkable industrialization of China, the extent to which

China and America have, for better or worse, entered into some kind of symbiotic relationship. Vis-a-vis China spending its savings on American debt and Americans relentlessly consuming Chinese manufactured goods, the so-called Chimerica thesis. One thing we've seen coming out of this war is seemingly a realignment of China around not just Russia and its interest, as surprising as that might be, but a sense of China under threat by the United States, a growing suspicion on the part of the Chinese leadership that the American agenda is not simply to thwart a rising China, but possibly to permanently denude and undermine China's power and global influence. So give us a sense of how you see the China piece of globalization plan.

playing out in the next period of time. And why do you think your views on this important subject are supportive of your perspective on our resolution today? I have spent a lot of the last 10-plus years trying to fight against the demonization of China or at least the demonization in the U.S. debate of China's economic impact. I believe that the talk about costs or dependence of the U.S. on China is vastly exaggerated and the benefits understated. And the extent to which Chinese economic capacity makes them more of a threat to the U.S. or to Western values is also exaggerated. But what has happened is, first, despite my and many other people's best efforts,

That's not what's believed by both parties in Congress and many influential people in the U.S. But second, it has to be said that since President Xi took over China's leadership in 2012-2013, China has pursued a different course. It has been more aggressive externally in both foreign policy and economics. It has been more oppressive internally. Obviously, the human rights violations of Muslims and the Uighur people, specifically in Western China, the treatment of Hong Kong accelerating the takeover there versus the two systems

pledged the threats to Taiwan, but also inside China. So that materially changes the game. And if we look at a world where President Xi, is as demonstrated by the zero COVID tolerance policy that's clearly his initiative and his alone to decide when to stop it, we're looking in a world where a quite autocratic person is running the world's largest or second largest economy,

and that matters. But I think the other piece of it that we have to consider here is the fact that we've all messed up in the economic sphere. And the, as Harold has written about, as I've written about, you know, the errors in policymaking and in lack of enforcement that led to the global financial crisis,

which is really the North Atlantic financial crisis of 2008-12, that also unsettled things fundamentally. It unsettled our domestic politics in the U.S. and in Europe, as well as making it less appealing for people in China and people around the world to sort of follow an American or Western European model. So there's some very real things that have happened in the last decade and a half that I think changed the nature of, the China relationship with the large democracies.

Thank you, Adam. Harold, I want to come to you now on the China question. Can you respond to what Adam just said? But I'd also like your thoughts on this other argument. You're familiar with it. It's that we're witnessing a cleavage of the world into two. On one hand, a camp of democracies with one set of technologies, one set of rules, laws and social mores, one security architecture. And then on the other side, the other camp, we have a collection of autocracies, developing their own technological platforms for their societies, developing their own security resources and apparatus and regime. Even musing now, Harold, about an alternative to the U.S. dollar, a non-democratic, non-Western reserve currency for this so-called autocratic system. When you think about this,

and you put together the effects of the Ukraine war on how these trends are accelerating, it's hard not to walk away with a pessimism about globalization's prospects, not only in the near term, but going forward in the decade to come. Part of the danger, I think, and it was actually laid out in Adam's opening statement very nicely, is how the U.S. is going to react to this. if the United States thinks that it can only deal reliably with democracies, that democracies are only friends and that you need to reconfigure the supply chains. Treasury Secretary of Janet Yellen laid this out very, very neatly in a speech just a couple of weeks ago,

that friend shoring was supposed to replace offshoring or onshoreing that we would get reliable supply chains from democracies. But this seems to me actually to be problematical. And that's the concept that I would like to push against because you need to deal with many people. And the question about reliability of supply chains isn't just a question about politics. It's also question of, is there a particular geographical disaster somewhere? Is there a particular harvest failure or failure of an airport or any of the things that can disrupt supply chains? And if you if you tie in countries, you know, they will think, well, you know, you need to modify a policy a bit and you need to go more in the multilateral direction.

And I think exactly that is actually happening for the reasons that Adam just pointed out in the last response to the COVID crisis, that what's happening in Shanghai and Beijing is really a challenge to the way that China has been handling COVID. And that put together with the obvious failures of autocracy in Russia, in Moscow, where you see how the problem of autocracies, the fundamental problem of autocracies, is that the leaders don't have access to the best advice because people are frightened to tell the leaders the truth. It seems to me that a challenge of this kind also recasts the model. I don't think we should be preaching to China about more democracy,

but we should be thinking about how China can do better things for people in China. But that will also be better for people throughout the world. I mean, and that is actually the fundamental vision that I think was laid out very, very clearly in the big conferences in 1944 and 1945 in Bretton Woods in San Francisco. And it's a lesson that's still relevant today. Thank you, Harold. That's a perfect segue to my last question before we go to closing statements, which is to challenge both of you to turn to history and give us an example of a historical period that you think capture. this moment we're in now that supports your arguments pro or con the future of globalization as an ordering principle in our civilization. So Adam, I want to come to you first. Is there

a historical period that you would draw on to help us understand why globalization's best days may not lie ahead? I guess the time I would look back to is the early 70s, and that partly is because the inflationary environment were in, but also because of the political divisions within the U.S. and the sort of height of the Cold War and especially what became known as the non-aligned movement of countries who didn't want to be part of either the U.S. or the USSR camp at the time. And also that it was a period where there was a slowdown in productivity growth, and that had political implications as well. So I think there are many other times in periods you could pick, but I worry about us falling down that line of internal division and therefore international

division. Thank you, Adam. Now a similar question to you, Harold. You've written arguably the definitive book on globalization in the context of the Great War period. Where do you think we are right now if you cast your mind back to recent human history because you know far better than most the optimism about an earlier version of globalization that existed prior to world war one and what happened next well that's right and i wouldn't really go back to the 1930s i think if we if we did think that we were back in the 1930s uh we would indeed be at this moment of the rolling back of globalization and so I actually would choose exactly the same moment that Adam chose and think of the 1970s as a model. Yes, the 1970s was full of conflict and full of chaos and full of very, very bad politics.

But in the end, really more and more you saw what the consequences of those bad policies were. So, for instance, there was a discussion, do you need to keep down energy prices in order to cushion the impact on vulnerable people, on low-income annas? And the initial reaction in the United States was, yes, you need to do that. But the consequence of that was that we didn't adjust the fuel consumption quickly. and the United States was more vulnerable. In the end, though, that vision comes back and you see, when you do need to do fuel economies, you need to let the price signals work there.

And that's a way of adjusting things. You know, the 1970s is also the moment that China learned from the failures of the past and the big opening under Deng started to do that. the end of the 1970s, very much as a response to the, the, the, the, the, the, the 70s, the melez was the word that Jimmy Carter used. It was exactly the right word that we can get out of that. And in the 1970s, there was a way of getting out. Thank you, Harold. Well, let's go to closing statements on this fascinating debate. Our motion today, be it resolved, the Ukraine

war has accelerated the rollback of globalization. Harold, you've been arguing against our motion. Let's put a couple minutes on our show clock and turn the program. over to you, leave our audience with the key arguments or points you'd like them to take away from this fascinating conversation. Many, many people have been skeptical about globalization and worried about the effects of globalization, worried the effects on wage earners, on manufacturing workers in the big industrial countries. I think we're also at a stage where we're worrying about the globalization of services and what that means for people who work in services. Every era of globalization is different. In the 19th century, there was a version of

globalization that depended on the exchange of commodities from non-industrial countries for manufactured goods from just a handful of industrial countries. In the 1970s, what was created was a world in which the supply chains were complicated and lots of countries were doing manufacturing and more and more countries were brought into this globalization pattern and it raised incomes throughout the world. It's very, very important to think of that story of globalization as reducing poverty and creating more opportunities for more people throughout the world. The globalization that's going to follow, I think, in the 21st century is about the globalization of services, of the use of information technology. It's potentially a very exciting prospect. And the failure at the moment of the big

anti-globalization vision associated with Vladimir Putin, I think actually clears the way for a sense in which globalization ties necessarily people together. And we think now of the way in which Syria led to bad consequences elsewhere. We need to think globally in order to respond to a very, very acute crisis. Thank you, Harold. Now, same opportunity to you, Adam, to wrap up this debate. You've been arguing in favor of our motion. Be it resolved.

The Ukraine war has accelerated the rollback of globalization. Bring this debate home for us. Again, it would be nice to sort of make it neater or hotter by saying it's the end of globalization, it's the start of globalization. It is a rollback. It is something that can be opposed. It is the result of human activity. It is not inevitable. But it is momentous.

It has momentum. And it is accelerating. And I think one running theme of your questions and of Harold's statements in mind is that you cannot disentangle globalization from politics, which is an obvious statement, but also from liberal values. That ultimately globalization is not an unalloyed good, but it is reflective of the unalloyed good of free interaction among people and openness to different kinds of people and openness to individuals not being determined by where they live. That in the end is the direction that real globalization is

would go. And I hope by making the statements I've made and engaging with people like you and Howard and your listeners, Harold and your listeners, is to remind people that a lot of unthinking knee-jerk reactions or even seemingly logical reactions are eroding things we've taken for granted for a long time. And it may be, to turn around some of Harold's last remarks, it may be that we need to go through a period of corroded globalization, of building up of alliances, of even confrontation, to get us back on track. But I think it is very clear that we are moving to a world where division is going to be more evident, where values in national security for good and bad reasons, is going to determine more and more. of our economic decisions and in which solidarity is possible on a pretty universal basis of the values we talk about in opposing Putin's invasion of Ukraine, but the West, the U.S., Western Europe, have not shown that solidarity. And while hypocrisy is par for the course, if you only show the solidarity for Ukraine and not for Syria and not for others,

ultimately that has consequences. And that's what I fear we're going to see for the next few years. Thank you, Adam. Thank you, Harold, for a terrific debate. This conversation did everything that I hoped it would. We explored the historical antecedents of globalization, its challenges and opportunities today. We've looked at some of the different key players around the world and how they're reacting to this push and pull over the future of globalization, from China to Russia to the West. This has been such an enriching conversation. Thank you both for spending this time with the Monk Debates community and sharing with us your hard-won knowledge and insights. I very much appreciated hosting you both on the program.

Thank you so much, Rodgers. Thank you very much. Well, that wraps up today's debate. I want to thank our participants, Adam and Harold. They certainly gave us a lot to think about it. If you have feedback or reflections on what you've just heard, please send us an email to podcast at monkdebates.com. Reminder that our Friday members-only podcast delved deep into the issues and ideas

driving the week's news comes out every Friday and is yours free to listen any time as a perk of our complimentary membership. You can get that right now at triple-w monkdebates.com forward slash membership. Listen to more debates on everything from COVID to the future American democracy to the war in Ukraine, all on our website, triple W monkdebates.com. Thank you for lending your time and attention to our efforts to bring back the art of public debate, one conversation at a time. I'm your host and moderator, Rudyard Griffiths.