Axel de Vernou
In 1989, Chinese Communist Party (CCP) tanks rolled across Tiananmen Square and the West’s hopes of Beijing’s political liberalization. Two years later, the collapse of the Soviet Union would draw American investors and politicians to Russia, in an attempt to prop up a wobbling economic giant and steer the country toward Western-friendly reforms enabled by its then president, Boris Yeltsin. Although these two pivotal events pointed in opposite directions, Washington applied the same strategy to both China and Russia in order to integrate them into the global economy. Approximately three-and-a-half decades later, the results are in—and they are none too reassuring.
In Goodbye, Globalization: The Return of a Divided World, Elisabeth Braw traces how the West’s business and government leaders of the 1990s and early 2000s dismissed how economics-driven globalization might paper over unbridgable political differences between countries now locked in financial partnership. This first major experiment in globalization, as defined by Braw, was “an effort by all manner of politicians and business leaders to create an interconnected world” that would improve the lives of almost everyone in the world economy. However, the architects of this globalization failed to take note of the warning signs that these newfound economic ties were paradoxically accelerating the shift to a fractured global arena. Drawing from a plethora of interviews with the individuals who were first optimistic, then skeptical, and finally disillusioned by unconstrained international partnerships, Braw’s investigative work offers a timely analysis of today’s geopolitical landscape.
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