America's Greatest Mistake

Globalization left millions behind as a policy and transformed the world politically, a new book argues.

by Siddhartha Mahanta October 3, 2025

The World’s Worst Bet: How the Globalization Gamble Went Wrong (And What Would Make It Right)

By David J. Lynch

PublicAffairs

For a time, globalization was synonymous with utopia: the untrammeled flow of capital across borders, new markets waiting to be opened, the growth of developing nations flaunting their comparative advantage in manufacturing jobs. If you covered the chaotic end of Suharto’s rule in Indonesia, the ruble crisis in Russia, China’s integration into global markets, and the plight of abandoned American workers, however, you may be convinced globalization is the single-best explanation for the economic upheaval and political polarization of our current age.

This is where David J. Lynch, a longtime global economics reporter for The Washington Post, has landed. For years, he has covered every major trade agreement and its impact on workers around the world. In The World’s Worst Bet: How the Globalization Gamble Went Wrong (And What Would Make It Right), he delivers a new history of the euphoric rise and eventual backlash of this era of the connected world.

SNIP
Lynch structures the book as a narrative autopsy of each presidential administration’s respective failures to shield the American worker from globalization’s most backbreaking consequences. Anchored in exhaustive reporting and dozens of interviews with those who built or challenged the system, it is a Greek tragedy of messianic, world-shaking hubris, starring an elite class of politicians whose betrayal of working-class Americans helped trigger a populist surge that has engulfed the world.


SNIP
WITH A FEW INEFFECTUAL EXCEPTIONS, the Republican Party under George W. Bush showed little interest in either trade enforcement against China or trade adjustment assistance for impacted workers. By the mid-2000s, Washington was spending a smaller share on education and training than it did at the end of the Cold War. Even the halting efforts toward protectionism were ill-fitting. Bush, heeding the lessons of the Democrats’ fallout with West Virginia steelworkers, tried to use tariffs to protect their industry, only to have the WTO rule them illegal.
https://prospect.org/culture/books/2025-10-03-americas-greatest-mistake-globalization-lynch-review/

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