The COVID-19 pandemic has completely exposed the underlying flaws of globalism as an ideology. It has shown China to be the culprit behind the biggest biological warfare attempt in human history. The total calculated costs exceed $16 trillion and untold human pain, suffering, and now more than 6 million deaths worldwide.
As a system of thought, globalization is an understanding of a hyperconnected world built not only on technology, international trade, and movement of labor but also on a liberal, postnationalist eschatology.
Although globalization is a Western form of historical determinism, China is central in this worldview as the major engine of economic growth, especially through the offshoring of manufacturing capacity. Globalist assumptions hold that the benefits of free trade, economic cooperation, and enhanced transnational connectivity erode traditional attachments to the nation-state. Over time, world populations will be socialized into the post-national norms of global governance, universal rights, and redistributive justice. Transnational and regional institutions such as the United Nations, World Health Organization, and the European Union will, it is assumed, constitute the vehicles through which the happy end of polyarchy will one day soon be reached.
Chinese Supremacism
The Chinese Communist Party has other ideas. It asserts a different form of globalization than the one promoted in many Western societies and universities. Its vision is one that is supremacist. It views the world in terms of national and political struggle and wishes to see China at the epicenter of the international system. For the Chinese state, the processes of globalization are not the route to a harmonious liberal end of history but a sphere to be ruthlessly exploited for national gain and domination.
In this goal, China is facilitated by globalist idealists in Western policymaking circles, the media, and the intelligentsia, who turn a blind eye to China’s gross human rights abuses, the establishment of a network of client states, theft of intellectual property, and its infiltration of international agencies and Western institutions. Invariably, they prefer to focus their energies on domestic political opponents who are skeptical of their utopian aspirations.
While some countries have awoken to the threat of China’s strategy, including Australia and the United States under the Trump Administration, other establishments, including the Biden regime, have underestimated the extent to which their naiveté renders them vulnerable to Chinese state influence. Biden himself appears to be compromised and a beneficiary of Chinese bribery and payments to his family.
The ideology of globalization was seriously threatened by COVID-19, however. China, with the help of Anthony Fauci, who funded gain of function research in China, tried to cover up the contagion that originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and did little to stop its worldwide spread from the initial source. The World Health Organization, beholden to Beijing, was complicit in failing to pass on adequate warning of the seriousness of the pandemic. At minimum, it covered up facts and repeatedly lied.
Italy was particularly affected, having a large Chinese community since it joined President Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road initiative, with the virus almost certainly spread by workers returning from the Lunar New Year festivities. Furthermore, the claim that the infection began at a traditional “wet market” was a convenient narrative for the Chinese authorities, masking an accidental or even a deliberate leak from the bat coronavirus laboratory in Wuhan as a form of biological weapon.
As nations rushed to close their borders, restrict travel, and looked to their own resources to escape the enormous crisis which ensued for well over two long and costly years, including lockdowns and vaccine mandates, the follies inherent in globalist ideology were revealed. Its precepts have been thoroughly discredited. Western leaders have intimated that there will be repercussions from the crisis. These include debt cancellation for poorer countries and compensation for the dire economic damage caused by the drastic lockdown on people and businesses across the world. Reparations for damages and deaths incurred.
The key point, however, is that while the pandemic was made in China, the conditions that gave rise to the “Year of the Bat” arose also from the assumptions of globalist thinking in the West itself. These have resulted in extraordinarily poor policy choices. A resetting of the international order is sorely needed, not a statist one manufactured by the elites in Davos, but one that fixes the present situation and makes the Chinese pay for their vast crimes against humanity.
Where Do We Go From Here?
There are, of course, many features of globalization as an economic and technological manifestation that cannot be radically changed or altogether altered. They will continue to be a feature of our world and few would necessarily wish otherwise, be it our capacity to travel easily or the ability to access communications technologies that enable us to retrieve every conceivable form of information at the touch of a computer screen.
What can be changed, however, is the conceptual and philosophical interpretations placed upon these developments, and to recognize that there is nothing inevitable about our final political destination or how we must lead our lives and who controls us. These are the product of deliberate choices often freely, if sometimes unthinkingly, given.
The aftermath of the COVID-19 crisis demands a mix of practical policy responses but perhaps, above all, it requires a real change in disposition and outlook, in particular the way we think about what we term globalization. Ultimately, the most serious requirement is to reflect upon the values that need to be defended in order to sustain a genuine and workable world order made up of nation-states. It is from these reflections that policy responses should flow. With this in mind, the following general and specific suggestions are offered as the U.S. Congress and other bodies conduct this investigation and the legislation to accompany it once the U.S. midterm elections allow for such, on an honest and forthright basis, not as a hide-away of facts or a Democrat ploy to prop up Chinese hegemony.
- Acknowledgment that the world is not embarked on an inevitable transformation to a harmonious global order.
- Recognition that the liberal conception of the international system needs to be defended by strong, independent nation-states, not multinational institutions. Stopping the Davos Reset is paramount.
- Acceptance that the Chinese state should be regarded as a rival ideological power, not as a friendly nation, and the United States should certainly not regard itself as China’s “best partner in the West.”
- Economic relations with China should be subordinated to the maintenance of key values of national security and humanitarian ethics.
- Broader networks of relations should be deepened with China-skeptic powers, particularly in East and Southeast Asia.
- Governments should abandon the decision to let Huawei participate in the development of any 5G network.
- Governments should consider introducing counter-interference laws similar to those in Australia that force all current and former politicians, officials, public and private bodies (including media companies and universities) to register all links with, and funding received from, foreign entities.
- All commercial contracts/buy-outs by foreign-registered companies should be based on a reciprocity convention, i.e., foreign companies cannot take over enterprises or bid for contracts in economic sectors if they are not permitted in their home jurisdiction.
- Chinese companies listed in the United States must follow our laws, reporting formats, and accounting procedures or be delisted.
- The United States and other governments should ensure that the indigenous capacity to manufacture vital medical supplies and pharmaceuticals is treated as a national security issue.
- Incentives should be provided for the broader repatriation of manufacturing capacities to the United States.
- Universities should cease links with, and/or dissociate from all Confucius Institutes and like policy/language centers.
- Universities should be placed under a formal remit to pursue their basic educational functions rather than engage in foreign policy “freelancing” that seeks to curry favor with autocratic regimes.
- China and the World Health Organization should be investigated for their handling of COVID-19, particularly in the earliest stage of the contagion.
- The WHO should be pressed into redeeming itself by enquiring into organ harvesting in China and clearly stating that such human rights abuses cannot be tolerated. The United States should leave the WHO without substantial changes and totally new leadership.
- We should charge the Chinese with crimes against humanity, prove the origin of their biological warfare, and legally assess them the full amount in damages, which must be paid in full.
What we now know is that as an ideology, globalization is like a stool. The round, flat surface represents a unified world standing on three legs:
1) Harmonization of the world order via global institutions and regulations, boosting trade and preventing conflict, but overriding national sovereignty.
2) Common humanity: wherever they are, people have the same fundamental rights, including the freedom to travel, work and live in any part of the world.
3) Political hegemony: globalization is proselytized, and critics are dismissed or vilified as nationalists or populists.
Since the end of the Cold War, a convergence has arisen between self-anointed progressive political elites, multinational corporations, and business interests. They imagined the emergence of a “borderless world” that would render the nation-state increasingly outmoded.
The rapid development of the Internet after 1990 gave added tangibility to the era of transnational connectivity, enabling instant contact with people anywhere in the world and rapid transfers of capital between continents. The social effects of this transnational connectivity were also transformative because they were perceived to be leading to processes of integration: towards the creation of an integrated economic system and towards a single world politically.
In other words, globalization is a force for homogenization, eroding distinctive cultures and customs. This was taking place both involuntarily as a process of economic convergence as transnational capitalist corporations reduced citizens to global consumers and by design as national identity and time-honored local traditions were consciously abandoned, particularly by idealistic younger generations, schooled by the world’s universities in the practices of woke global citizenship and social justice.
The COVID-19 pandemic has raised serious questions about globalization, not only about the virus and its rapid transmission around the world, but also about its source, China, its bioweapons program, and its central place in a global system that it has begun to dominate.
We need to come to grips with the fact that the conditions for this crisis were created by Chinese totalitarianism and the ideological naiveté of the West. Globalization combines mega-capitalist enterprise and the post-nation pursuit of multiculturalism and moral relativism.
How the world has come to pay the price for this hubris should be the focus of a thoroughgoing inquiry that has teeth, answers hard questions, and makes China pay for the consequences of its doings. Beijing regularly externalizes the costs of its rapid economic growth and authoritarian control so we cannot rely on international courts to judge China. Because it holds over $1 trillion in U.S. securities debt, the first place to start is to cancel that debt. The next step would be to get all countries to renege on their own Chinese debt. By further seizing Chinese property and imposing the highest possible tariffs the world could both collect much of its pandemic damages and more importantly, decouple from the Chinese menace.