The dream in the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall was that we would replace the rigid power blocs of the Cold War with the interconnected world of globalisation and the internet. At the heart of that were global supply chains. Thomas Friedman, a New York Times columnist, talked about the “Dell theory of peace”, arguing that no countries that were connected in a supply chain, such as the ones to make Dell computers, would go to war with each other. And no two countries were more connected than China and the US. Their complementary economies were so tightly bound that we came up with an aggregate name to describe them: Chimerica. But today, they are locked in a global competition for influence and are “decoupling” their economies rather than bringing them together.
In 2016 Britain held a referendum about independence in a world organised around cooperative nation states and free trade, before falling into a long and solipsistic Brexit dream or nightmare (depending on your perspective). When it awakes and prepares to leave the European Union, Britain will be exiting into a totally different world, one defined by competing blocs and protectionism rather than cooperating states.
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