What Trump is doing is ending Globalisaton. Globalisation came in with Thatcher, Reagan and the Friedmanites and was based on one of the simplest economic theories that I learnt in my first weeks as a student studying economics.
Essentially this theory says that every country should specialise in producing what it can do easier/cheaper/faster than another country. If one country can produce 2 cars and 20 aeroplanes and another can produce 2 aeroplanes and 20 cars then it makes sense for each country to specialise and one produce 40 cars and the other 40 aeroplanes.
The downside of this is that what works in theory on a piece of paper or on a computer screen, doesn't work as well in the messy complication that is the real world. Mrs Thatcher was happy to see manufacturing destroyed in this country because other countries (China, SE Asia) could do it better and cheaper. She believed that we were much better, and better placed, to provide services to the world, financial, engineering, medical etc.
Except, that having little or no manufacturing has led to high unemployment, a lack of job security and far too many people having to work in the gig economy. The same is true of the USA. Huge previously wealthy, cities ike Detroit and Chicago have been destroyed, the car industry that provided their wealth, has disappeared to countries that can build cars cheaper - Like China, in fact manufacturing generally has moved to China, an enormous country with an enormous population, and because it dominates world manufacturing, it has a stranglehold on most countries and as we have seen recently because it makes most of the world supply of mobile phones, computers telephone systems, theycan use these to infiltrate national security systems.
I am beginning to understand where Trump is coming from and why he has the support he has. It is taken a maverick like him, to play on the real worries of Americans of lost jobs, lost opportunities, fear for a future and old age of poverty, to say that globalisation has not worked as it is meant to have.
It has pulled many in developing countries out of poverty, it has taken technology and manufacturing to many populous countries previously too dependent on agriculture and exporting raw materials. But it also enables individual countries to wield ecoomic power over others.
Colonisation and empire building in the modern age does not require occupying territory. All you need is economic power, look how the Chinese have been colonising Africa by loans of money for infrastructure, built by the Chinese so there is no technology transfer, to local people, now they are signing up mineral rights as a way for African countries to repay those loans, and using the power of these loans to get African countries to support it by voitng with them in the United Nations.
Do not get me wrong I deplore Trump as a person, and for everything he stands for, butI am beginning to understand the wheres and whys of his support and of the swing to the right politically throughout Europe. Globalisation has lifted many people out of absolute poverty, but made many people poor. It has brought immense wealth, but that wealth is concentrated in too few hands. It has stopped countries in Africa from developing a more industrial base and the political stability and prosperity that goes with it.
I suspect the world does actually need a period of protectionism, so that countries can balance their economies, so that large power blocs cannot dominate the world because other countries are dependent on them, for the basics of everyday living. We need a period when the welfare of individuals and indivdidual countries is put ahead of acquiring wealth.
And actually it needs a catastrophe like Trump to do it.
Sorry for a very long post.
