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Agreed. On economics I'm quite conservative in the traditional, Chesterton's fence sense of the word. Re-routing the irrigation ditches with a nuclear explosion and still expecting the crops to get watered is a very risky bet.
What’s traditional about offshoring a nation’s manufacturing base to a foreign (and potentially hostile, like China) country? The EU couldn’t produce a fraction of munitions needed to keep pace with Russia during the beginnings of the Ukraine war. Visit American post-industrial hovels like Youngstown or Detroit and compare those images to the protectionist bogeymen of 100 years ago. And ask yourself why nations dependent on free trade have significantly low fertility levels.
Chesterton’s fence was demolished decades ago, and the rich beneficiaries of free trade policy are finally forced to notice thanks to Trump.
The collapse of Detroit proper is a story of conventional urban decay and long precedes the decline of "Detroit" the auto-industry cluster. The factories were in the suburbs (Dearborn for Ford, much more widely distributed for GM because so much of the early growth was by acquisition). Some of the auto suburbs are post-industrial wasteland (e.g. Flint) but most of them aren't - notably including Dearborn.
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Ah yes, notoriously high fertility... East Asia?
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It was a dumb idea to let China into the western trade networks in the late 90s. There I agree with you. But that doesn't change the fact that reversing course on a ship this size is not something that can be accomplished overnight. Trying to do so will simply sink the ship.
I think it's easy to loose site of how much we still have to loose. The poor people in Youngstown or Detroit are still better off than their counterparts from 100 years ago. At least nobody is starving on the street in the present day US.
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Fertility rate collapses have occurred in countries as diverse as North Korea and Saudi Arabia, Cuba and Iran, Argentina and Zimbabwe. It is unlikely they are the consequence of free trade.
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