Should we fear this trade war?

The routing and dumping of cheap foreign goods through the US/EU by local traders and corporates are a real concern

- VISHWAPRASAD ALVA

THE MEDIA, TRADE bodies, industry, and economists are busy discussing the impact of tariffs, reciprocal duties, and reversal of globalization. The Ponzi scheme of uncontrolled globalization has come to its dead end. Like any pyramid scheme — real estate, stock market speculations, or Bitcoin — the bubble must burst someday.

Europe and the US taught and forced the world to adopt a free market economy. Russia's Mikhail Gorbachev and his glasnost/perestroika took the bait in the 80s and moved away from communism, and the country is still struggling to come to terms with it. It lost control over its economy, people, and territory, and didn't get much out of the western open economy. China, on the other hand, quickly jumped into a controlled globalization in its signature style. It leveraged the US and Europe to the limit and is now paying back in the same coin.

India, with its much-prized democracy, an electoral system with a huge ignorant, freebie-driven voter base, lost out on decision-making, economic and social reforms, infrastructure, and industrialization. Here we are now endlessly debating trade tariffs, and fence-sitting in our true non-aligned deadlock.