PETER CLACK: Globalism meant Western factories closed, borders opened, and jobs relocated to wherever it was cheaper and convenient. The industrial worker in Vienna, the Ruhr region, or Ohio became unemployed or was pushed into low-wage service sector work.

The West gave China everything, including its 2001 admission to the WTO, even though China lacked a true market economy or rule-of-law system. It was a voluntary technology transfer: anyone who wanted to produce in China was forced to hand over their intellectual property.

The West dismantled its own industrial base and rebuilt it in China. The West financed a totalitarian surveillance state that now uses Western money to rearm, buy up strategic ports, monopolise raw materials, and exercise leverage over us. --Peter Clack

Globalism was sold with a promise of prosperity. In reality, it was the greatest redistribution of wealth in human history.

Globalism meant Western factories closed, borders opened, and jobs relocated to wherever it was cheaper and convenient. The industrial worker in Vienna,… pic.twitter.com/3qMxQOhdMp

— Peter Clack (@PeterDClack) September 20, 2026

Globalism was sold with a promise of prosperity. In reality, it was the greatest redistribution of wealth in human history. Globalism meant Western factories closed, borders opened, and jobs relocated to wherever it was cheaper and convenient. The industrial worker in Vienna, the Ruhr region, or Ohio became unemployed or was pushed into low-wage service sector work. At the same time, profits ballooned for the middlemen who produce nothing. Financial conglomerates, importers, logistics giants, tech platforms, and consultants have pocketed the margin between cheap production in Asia and expensive sales in the West. The result is a super-rich global elite and a left-behind, indebted proletariat. The middle class—the backbone of every free society—was crushed. This represents the greatest surge in inequality in a century. Without globalism, China would never have risen. The West gave China everything, including its 2001 admission to the WTO, even though China lacked a true market economy or rule-of-law system. It was a voluntary technology transfer: anyone who wanted to produce in China was forced to hand over their intellectual property. The West looked the other way on forced labor, state subsidies, currency manipulation, and technology theft. Capital on a scale of trillions of dollars has been pumped directly into China. The West dismantled its own industrial base and rebuilt it in China. The West financed a totalitarian surveillance state that now uses Western money to rearm, buy up strategic ports, monopolise raw materials, and exercise leverage over us. China did not rise despite the West, but because the globalist West built it that way. Short-term profit was prioritised over national security, industrial sovereignty, and local workforce stability. A rootless, stateless elite in New York, Brussels, Berlin, and Shanghai feels at home everywhere and takes responsibility nowhere. In its wake are stranded communities, stripped of industry and upward mobility, entirely dependent on supply chains controlled by a foreign power.

This was no mistake. It is how the system was designed to work.