Three Ways to Read the ‘Deglobalisation’ Debate

Adam Tooze argues that there are three ways to reconcile “the feverish talk of deglobalisation and decoupling” with statistics that “show an inertial continuity in trade and investment patterns: business as usual, insofar as nothing has changed and the deglobalisation talk is empty; a new Cold War in which the US is trying seriously to reconfigure its own and the world economy to counter China; or a new form of globalization that mixes old and new aspects. The third option includes considerable confusion as registered by the term polycrisis.