It worked as long as everyone played fair (which they didn't).

For a while, globalization was sold as a kind of secular gospel: Open the markets. Lower the barriers. Let capital, goods, labor, and production move wherever they can move most efficiently, and prosperity will follow. 

The promise was simple: The world will grow richer, countries will grow more interdependent, and conflict itself may even become less likely because nobody will want to disrupt the golden machine.

It didn’t work. And it didn’t work because it didn’t account for human nature. People don’t always play fair, which anyone over the age of five should know. Corporations don’t always play fair, either. But most do follow the law. Without good laws governing globalization, it was bound to end in disaster.

As it has.

What we got instead of the promised globalized utopia was over-globalization without adequate regulation: a system that widened inequality, hollowed out domestic industry, encouraged environmental abuse, and showered extraordinary gains on the wealthiest, thinnest sliver of humanity. It worked, to the extent that it worked at all, only under the fantasy conditions imagined by global elites: that everyone would play nice, everyone would play fair, and governments would somehow retain control over the consequences. 

None of that was true.

The ultra wealthy did spectacularly well under this system. Not the ordinary professional class. Not even the merely affluent. The real winners were the people at the very top: the transnational investor class, the multinational executives, the financiers, the asset holders, the people positioned to profit from labor arbitrage, regulatory arbitrage, and tax arbitrage all at once. 

They could move money, production, and legal exposure across borders far more easily than workers could move their lives. They were global. Everyone else remained stubbornly local.

That asymmetry mattered.

Factories could leave. Capital could flee. Supply chains could be reorganized overnight. But the people whose communities had been built around steel, auto parts, furniture, textiles, mining, shipping, or manufacturing could not simply “transition” on command into the gleaming knowledge economy the experts kept promising. Whole regions were told that what was happening to them was unfortunate but necessary, and that cheaper consumer goods at Walmart somehow made up for the loss of stable work, civic confidence, and social cohesion.

It did not.

And while this was happening, the environmental costs were treated like background noise. The same system that promised efficiency also encouraged a race to the bottom. 

Production migrated toward places where labor was cheapest, rules were weakest, and environmental enforcement was most pliable. Corporations could enjoy the public relations language of global citizenship while outsourcing the dirtiest parts of their operations to countries where rivers, air, forests, and workers were all considered expendable inputs. Consumers in wealthy countries enjoyed lower prices while much of the ecological damage was pushed out of sight.

This was not a bug. It was part of the model.

Globalization in its purest form rewarded whatever was cheapest in the short term, even if that cheapness depended on pollution, repression, weak labor protections, or hidden strategic risks. It treated resilience as inefficiency. It treated domestic capacity as backwardness, or worse — nationalism. It treated national self-sufficiency in key sectors as a relic of the Cold War.

Why make it at home, the theory went, when you can make it more cheaply abroad?

That logic held right up until reality intervened: COVID exposed the fragility at the heart of the system. 

Suddenly it mattered very much where medicines were made, didn’t it?Where protective gear was made, where critical components were made, and how quickly a nation could secure the essentials needed to keep its people alive — these became paramount. 

Supply chains that had been celebrated as marvels of modern optimization turned out to be brittle, overextended, and dangerous. Not to mention completely dependent on fossil fuels.

During COVID, national health became inseparable from national production. What had been treated as an abstract economic arrangement became a direct matter of public safety.

Then came Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which drove the point home with even greater force. Economic interdependence had been supposed to restrain conflict. Instead, in some cases, it created leverage for aggressors. 

Europe’s dependence on Russian energy did not make war unthinkable. On the contrary. 

It complicated the response to war. A global economy deeply entangled with authoritarian powers did not civilize those powers. It often enriched them, strengthened them, and gave them reason to believe their customers would hesitate before imposing real costs.

That is one of the great unspoken failures of the globalist era. Too many policymakers assumed that trade would make bad actors better. Often it simply made them richer, more technologically capable, and more deeply embedded in systems the West had become too dependent to disrupt without harming itself.

Over-globalization without proper regulation was always doomed to be a fair-weather system. It could function, more or less, so long as no one tested it too hard. So long as pandemics did not shut down shipping lanes. So long as hostile powers did not weaponize energy, minerals, manufacturing, migration, or strategic commodities. So long as nations refrained from cheating, stealing intellectual property, subsidizing domestic champions, dumping cheap goods, or exploiting the openness of others while protecting their own markets. 

In other words, it worked only so long as the world behaved in ways the world has never behaved. That is why the backlash was inevitable.

The problem was never international exchange itself. Trade is not the enemy. Global cooperation is not the enemy. Cross-border commerce is not the enemy. 

The problem was the utopian belief that ever-deeper integration, pursued without sufficient guardrails, would somehow produce peace, fairness, and shared prosperity on its own. It did not. It produced extraordinary concentrations of wealth, a dangerous dependency on far-flung production, political rage in communities that felt sacrificed, and an environmental bill that somebody else, somewhere else, was always expected to pay.

What failed was not merely globalization. What failed was the conceit that markets alone could govern a world of rival states, unequal power, and human greed.

That era is over. So, what comes next?

The question now is whether the West will learn the right lesson. Not isolation. But balance. Strategic production at home where it matters. Real labor and environmental standards. Trade rules with actual enforcement. Supply chains designed for resilience, not merely maximum short-term efficiency. And above all, an economic order that serves nations and citizens, not just the .01 percent clever enough to game a borderless system while everyone else pays the price.

That would not mean the end of globalization. It would mean, at long last, growing up about it.

(Contributing writer, Brooke Bell)