The Death of Globalism and the Survival of Humanity

I grew up in Beaver County, Pennsylvania, where the steel mills ran day and night. My father worked at the Aliquippa Works. So did most of his brothers. The air smelled like metal and coal smoke, and the sound of the furnaces was the heartbeat of our towns. Those jobs built the American middle class. They bought houses, put kids through school, and gave working people dignity. Then in 1984, LTV Corporation announced it would close most of the plant. Eight thousand workers got laid off in a single day.

I watched my father and his generation try to make sense of it. These were men who had spent their entire lives pouring steel. They believed if you worked hard and showed up, you would be rewarded. When the mills closed, that promise died with them. Some workers became what people called the Tunnel Rats. They gathered at the entrance to the old plant to protest the loss of their jobs and pensions. Local police arrested them for disorderly conduct. Some of the officers had tears in their eyes because they were handcuffing their own family members.

I was young enough to escape. I moved into technology just as the steel era ended. I believed I had made the right choice. The tech world promised something different. We were building the future. We were connecting people. The message from executives and economists was clear. Globalization would lift everyone. Free trade and open markets would create prosperity everywhere. Some of us believed it.

What actually happened was more complicated. Globalization did lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. Workers in India and the Philippines got opportunities their parents never had. I saw it myself. I worked with smart, capable people on the other side of the world who were hungry for the same security my father once had. The Indian IT and business process outsourcing sector now brings in 350 billion dollars a year and employs over 5 million people. The Philippines has seen growth rates of 40 to 50 percent in outsourcing over just the last three years. For them, globalism kept its promises.

But for people back home, it did the opposite. The tech company I worked for spent years training workers overseas to do the same jobs Americans used to have. I was part of the system. Companies moved code, customer service, and back office operations to countries where labor cost a fraction of what it did in the United States. Executives celebrated the efficiency. Shareholders watched their portfolios grow. The workers who lost their jobs were told to adapt. Get more education. Learn new skills. The reality is that most of them never recovered.

The numbers tell the story. From 1979 to 2013, productivity in the United States rose by over 80 percent. Wages for typical workers went up by less than 30 percent. Middle wage earners saw just 6 percent growth over 34 years. Low wage workers actually lost ground, with a 5 percent decline. The middle class shrank from 61 percent of the population in 1971 to 50 percent by the 2020s. Housing, healthcare, and education costs climbed much faster than incomes. Today the median household earns about 74,500 dollars, but living a middle class life in most cities costs between 120,000 and 140,000 dollars a year. Even in places like Cleveland and St. Louis, once considered affordable, median home prices are now near 300,000 dollars. People are not living beyond their means. They are being priced out of stability.

The anger that followed was not irrational. It was inevitable. People who felt abandoned by the economic system voted for anyone who promised to tear it down. Populism surged across the United States and Europe. Brexit happened. Trump won. The institutions that had managed global trade for decades started to crumble. The World Trade Organization's dispute system has been paralyzed since 2019 when the United States blocked appointments to its appellate body. The rules that once held the global economy together are now just suggestions.

Now I live in Portugal. I moved here because I wanted a different pace of life and a place where I could stretch my retirement savings. From this distance I can see the same tensions playing out across Europe. People here want sovereignty. They want their governments to answer to them, not to distant bureaucracies or faceless markets. The Portuguese are more patient than Americans, but the mood is shifting. The same frustration that swept through the Rust Belt is quietly building in France, Italy, Germany, and even here. Globalism's promise was that integration would make everyone richer and more secure. What people got instead was precarity and inequality.

And now artificial intelligence is accelerating everything. AI is doing to white collar work what offshoring did to manufacturing. In 2025 alone, nearly 78,000 tech jobs have been eliminated, most of them because companies are replacing people with algorithms. That works out to 491 people losing their jobs every single day. The World Economic Forum predicts that 41 percent of employers worldwide plan to reduce their workforce in the next five years because of AI automation. The jobs that once seemed safe, the knowledge work that people were told to pursue after the factories closed, are now at risk.

Entry level positions are being hit hardest. AI can already handle customer service, data entry, basic coding, writing, and design. Companies like Microsoft, IBM, and Meta have laid off thousands of workers and replaced their tasks with software. Anthropic's CEO predicts that generative AI could eliminate up to half of all entry level office jobs within five years. The same pattern is repeating. Productivity will rise. Profits will grow. But wages will stagnate and inequality will deepen.

The data is already showing it. Research confirms a direct link between AI adoption and rising wealth inequality. The top 1 percent have seen their wealth surge while the bottom 50 percent have gained almost nothing. AI amplifies this because it benefits people who own the technology and those with advanced skills, while displacing workers in routine tasks. Worse, 77 percent of the new jobs being created by AI require master's degrees. For millions of people who believed education was the path to security, that door is now closing.

AI is also becoming a weapon in geopolitical competition. The United States and China are locked in what analysts call a digital Cold War. Both countries see AI as central to national power. The United States has imposed export controls on advanced semiconductors to slow China's progress. China is pouring resources into AI as part of what it calls comprehensive national power. The result is an arms race that mirrors the nuclear buildup of the last century, except this time the weapons are algorithms and the timeline is faster. There are no treaties. There are no safeguards. And the competition is pulling the world into rival blocs.

This is where the contradiction becomes dangerous. The only way humanity survives the next century is through cooperation. Climate change does not respect borders. Pandemics spread everywhere. Nuclear weapons and unregulated AI are existential threats that no single country can manage alone. History shows that international institutions can work. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Montreal Protocol prove that nations can agree on shared rules when survival is at stake. But those agreements were built on trust. And trust is exactly what globalization destroyed.

The system that was supposed to bring the world together instead split it apart. It concentrated wealth at the top and left everyone else behind. It offshored jobs without building a safety net. It prioritized efficiency over fairness and profits over people. When workers complained, they were ignored or told they were on the wrong side of history. Now those workers have stopped believing in the system. They have voted for nationalism, protectionism, and isolation. The infrastructure of global cooperation is collapsing at the exact moment we need it most.

There is also the problem of culture wars. The debates over identity, speech, and values have become another fracture line. What started as movements for fairness and inclusion drifted into rigid ideologies that punished dissent and deepened tribal divides. Western governments tried to export these values as part of their foreign policy, which alienated countries that saw it as cultural imperialism. The result is that even when nations need to cooperate on survival issues, they cannot agree on basic principles. Moral crusades replaced pragmatic negotiation. Every policy became a loyalty test. Trust evaporated.

So where does that leave us. I think about this when I walk along the coast here in Cascais and watch the cargo ships move across the Atlantic. Those ships carry goods made in factories that replaced the ones in Beaver County. They are powered by engines built with steel my father's generation might have poured. The global system they represent is falling apart, but the problems it was meant to solve are getting worse.

If there is a way forward, it cannot be a return to the old model. Globalism as it existed was designed to maximize corporate profit, not human welfare. It worked for the people who owned capital and for the emerging middle classes in Asia, but it betrayed workers in rich countries. Any new system has to start with fairness. That means redistribution, not just growth. It means protecting workers, not just markets. It means ensuring that the gains from trade and technology are shared, not concentrated.

It also means recognizing that cooperation is not optional. We are facing threats that will kill us all if we do not act together. Climate change, pandemics, nuclear war, and artificial intelligence are not problems any country can solve alone. The institutions we built after World War II are breaking, but we cannot afford to let them die. We need new agreements, new rules, and new mechanisms for enforcement. We need a global framework that is strong enough to manage existential risks but flexible enough to respect sovereignty and culture.

AI in particular demands immediate attention. If we let it develop without international coordination, it will deepen inequality, destabilize labor markets, and militarize faster than we can control. We need shared standards for safety, transparency, and accountability. We need agreements on how AI is used in warfare, surveillance, and governance. We need to ensure that the benefits of AI do not flow only to a small elite while everyone else is displaced. That will require cooperation between the United States, China, Europe, and the rest of the world. It will require sacrifice and compromise. And it will require rebuilding the trust that globalization destroyed.

The middle class is dying in America and across the developed world. People feel squeezed, betrayed, and invisible. If we do not address that, the backlash will only grow stronger. Populism will turn into authoritarianism. Nationalism will turn into conflict. The systems we need to survive will collapse under the weight of accumulated resentment. But if we can rebuild a social contract that actually works for ordinary people, one that protects them from the disruptions of technology and trade while giving them a voice in how the future is shaped, then maybe cooperation becomes possible again.

My father believed in the promise of hard work. He believed the system would reward loyalty and effort. That belief died in 1984 when the mills closed. I believed in the promise of technology and global connection. I am watching that belief die now as AI replaces workers and inequality grows. What comes next depends on whether we can create something better. Not a return to the past, but a new model that values people as much as profits. One that recognizes we are all connected, whether we like it or not. One that understands survival is not optional.

The ships keep moving. The world keeps turning. But the old system is gone. What we build in its place will determine whether humanity has a future worth living in.