Below, Ben Chu shares five key insights from his new book, Exile Economics: What Happens if Globalisation Fails.
Ben is a policy and economics journalist with the BBC in London. Previously, he was Economics Editor at Newsnight, and at the Independent prior to that.
What’s the big idea?
The urge to retreat into self-sufficiency feels safe, but history and recent crises show it often does the opposite. In a deeply interconnected world, real security comes not from cutting trade ties, but from managing interdependence intelligently.
1. The urge to cut trade links is nothing new.
The idea that we should reduce dependence on foreigners has been with us for thousands of years. Take the ancient Greek Cynics. Diogenes, who famously lived in a barrel in the marketplace of Corinth, believed that self-sufficiency—living with only what you truly needed—was the highest moral state.
When Alexander the Great, the most powerful man of his time, visited Diogenes and asked what he most desired, Diogenes replied, “Stand a little out of my sun.” He needed nothing from the king. This story captures the essence of a very old human instinct: the idea that freedom, virtue, or safety comes from independence and self-reliance.
Aristotle took this ethic of autarky (self-sufficiency) into politics, arguing that city-states should be self-reliant, able to sustain themselves without relying on outsiders. Early Christian thinkers, such as St. Thomas Aquinas, later built on this idea: because God is self-sufficient, humans should strive to be as well.
In the Romantic era, Jean-Jacques Rousseau glorified the “natural” life, associating self-sufficiency with virtue. Across centuries, this idea has appeared again and again: in sixteenth-century China and Japan, nineteenth-century Latin America, and post-colonial Africa.
This instinct that we are safer, purer, or more virtuous alone is remarkably resilient. It appears under every ideological banner: religious and secular, left and right, nationalist and cosmopolitan, capitalist and communist. So it’s no surprise to see it re-emerge today in debates over trade, global supply chains, and “decoupling.”
2. Globalisation has been a source of resilience, not fragility.
Many people argued that crises in the early 2020s proved that globalisation was dangerous. Headlines screamed shortages of masks, vaccines, microchips, and energy.
The pandemic and 2022 energy shock seemed to confirm the fear that long supply chains were unreliable. Public opinion reflected this anxiety as support for globalisation fell sharply in many countries.
“No single nation could have scaled up vaccine or chip production fast enough to meet the demand.”
But the evidence tells a different story. Despite bottlenecks and disruptions, global networks adapted remarkably quickly. Mask production surged within months after the initial shortages. COVID vaccines were a triumph of international coordination: a single plant often used 9,000 materials sourced from 300 suppliers across 30 countries. Semiconductor production, despite the shortages, increased in 2021.
Imagine the alternative—a world where every country tried to produce everything itself. No single nation could have scaled up vaccine or chip production fast enough to meet the demand. A purely national approach would almost certainly have been far less effective.
Global crises do expose vulnerabilities. But they also reveal the flexibility and adaptability of interconnected systems—the ability to innovate, reroute, and recover. That resilience is a direct product of globalisation itself.
It’s natural to focus on the short-term shocks, but the long-term capacity to respond, innovate, and maintain supply in the face of disruption is what really matters.
3. We live in interdependence, not dependence.
We often hear that certain countries “hold others over a barrel”: China with rare earth metals, Russia with natural gas, Taiwan with chips, Brazil with soybeans. The narrative is that these nations have created one-sided dependencies that put others at risk.
But the reality is more complex. These relationships are rarely one-way. China depends on soybeans from the Americas to feed its 450 million pigs, yet Brazil needs fertilizers, including from China, to grow its crops. Taiwan’s microchips rely on U.S. and European manufacturing equipment. The U.S. imports Chinese rare earths, but China needs ultra-pure quartz from the U.S. for its semiconductors. What we see is a dense web of mutual reliance. Interdependence, not dependence.
“When nations attempt to weaponize trade, they often create costs for themselves.”
This distinction is crucial. When nations attempt to weaponize trade, they often create costs for themselves. Simplistic calls to “decouple” misunderstand how tightly integrated our economies have become. Every component, from a microchip to a fertilizer shipment, depends on a complex network. Recognizing that balance is essential if we want to manage geopolitical tensions effectively, without causing unnecessary harm to our own citizens and industries.
4. Self-sufficiency is not the same as security.
In 2022, few countries were more self-sufficient in agriculture than Ukraine. Its black soil made it the breadbasket of Europe. Yet when Russian forces invaded, grain production and distribution collapsed. Some Ukrainians depended on the World Food Programme for emergency food aid. Self-sufficiency did not protect them.
Zambia is another example. On paper, it produces most of its own food. Yet 70 percent of the population experiences food insecurity—one of the highest rates in the world. Mauritius, a small island thousands of kilometres away, imports most of its staples but has a food insecurity rate of just 28 percent.
Why the difference? Mauritius integrated into global trading networks in the 1970s, diversifying from sugar into textiles and later services. Its per-capita income is several times higher than Zambia’s, giving the population access to food even if it’s imported. Poverty, not import dependence, drives insecurity.
“Nations that connect broadly and invest wisely are often the most secure.”
True resilience comes from reliable access to essential goods, through both domestic capacity and international connections, supported by strong economic foundations. Nations that connect broadly and invest wisely are often the most secure.
5. We can strengthen security without cutting off trade.
Some supply chains are genuinely fragile. Advanced chip production is concentrated in Taiwan. Rare-earth metals are mined and refined mainly in China. Governments are right to be concerned. But isolation is not the answer.
Building every critical industry domestically is inefficient, costly, and often impossible. There are smarter ways to manage risk while retaining the benefits of openness. Three policies stand out:
- Map supply chains — understand where key inputs come from, and where vulnerabilities exist.
- Stockpile strategically — holding reserves of vital goods is a form of insurance.
- Diversify suppliers — broaden import sources so no single country can disrupt your supply.
By mapping, stockpiling, and diversifying, nations can increase resilience while preserving the benefits of global trade, which have lifted billions out of poverty and raised living standards over the past 80 years. Striving for self-sufficiency for its own sake is dangerous. The safer path is smart interdependence—a world connected in many directions, resilient because it is interwoven, not brittle because it is isolated.
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