Britain’s Lonely Future in the Age of Clashing Empires

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.