Global

Starting around 1500 European countries began to colonize the rest of the world. Each country set up its own colonies and used those people to bring a better life to the colonizer. Using cheap labor they would extract raw materials and manufacture goods at low prices. This provided a good life for those in Europe but at the expense of the colonial countries. European countries would often times steal from their neighboring countries and in particular in times of war which was frequent. In addition pirates roamed the sea stealing from everyone. At the end of WW 2 the American navy was so superior that the United States guaranteed the safety of the seas. Their purpose was to win friends and promote world markets which could be used to control the Soviet Union. This new freedom to ship products around the world without fear of being hijacked opened the door to world trade. Now countries with coal could trade with countries that had food and so on. This new way of doing business on a world wide scale was called globalization. As with all things there were winners and losers. The winners were the more than one billion people in Asia who were brought out of poverty. The losers were Western middle income workers who watched their jobs being sent overseas. Large areas of American and Europe became rust belts as manufacturing jobs moved to areas with low wages and no regulations. Workers with tech skills along with the investor class all got richer with the top one percent getting 54% of the new wealth. When the Soviet Union collapsed there was no longer a need for the United States to protect the seas and there was no need for globalization. The dismantling of globalization started with Bush 41 in the early 90's and continued up to and including Trump. Trump accelerated the process by putting import taxes on China, by dropping out of the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) and promoting bring jobs back home. Biden has continued the Trump policies.