Alcatraz Island
Article by Richard Fernandez in "PJMedia":
As the northern hemisphere
begins to emerge from the worst of the pandemic, political punditry is
focusing on two issues: how to reopen the economy and how to decouple
from China. The two subjects are related because a large part of the
Western economy is joined at the hip with Beijing. To a substantial
degree, China produces what America consumes. Each country's holdings in
the other are enormous. They are bound by innumerable contracts, deals,
projects and cross-posted personnel that are not easily severed.
This
system of cross-dependency was consciously pursued to vaccinate the
world against a repetition of the two world wars. However, globalization
also significantly eroded the independence and freedom of action of
individual nations, though not each to the same degree. It permitted
asymmetries to arise between the more aggressive and secretive regimes
at the expense of those which, perhaps naively, adhered more closely to
the posted rules.
The Great Firewall of China, currency manipulation, the infiltration of network equipment, island grabbing in the South China Sea and technological espionage
are examples of asymmetry which the great economic interests were
willing to turn a blind eye to to preserve existing deals, though the
populist uprising in the West served notice that things could not
continue that way forever. When the coronavirus erupted in Wuhan in
mid-December 2019 and Beijing misled the world
to catastrophe, the model was no longer viable. "Dr. Anthony Fauci says
that human-to-human transmission of COVID-19 diseases erupted in China
in mid-December, yet the communist regime told the U.S. and the world
that the virus was only transmitted animal-to-human."
Dr. Fauci, an influential member of President Trump’s coronavirus task force, told the Fox News show “Watters’ World” ... the Chinese government said that human contagion was minimal, a fact that shaped for weeks the outside world’s sense of the danger and the appropriate response ... “clearly not correct … misinformation right from the beginning”.
It was a
lie too far, but there's no easy way to quickly distance from China.
Undoing current arrangements is tantamount to rolling back decades of
policy. However, the system will start to reopen in the direction of
subsidiarity, where the interests of the component take precedence over
maximizing the system as a whole. Under pressure from an enraged public,
politicians will be driven toward an economy that is
globalism-compatible, not globalism-dependent. Things are moving to a
new normal. The coronavirus lockdown has made the Internet a key enabler of socially distanced business.
In fact, far from bringing networks to their knees, covid-19 is driving the most rapid expansion in years. To make sure they meet demand, internet giants like Netflix and Equinix, which operates 200 data centers around the world, are rushing out upgrades as quickly as possible. Equinix is in the middle of upgrading its traffic capacity from 10 to 100 gigabytes. The work was going to have been carried out over a year or two—but it is now being done in a few weeks.
But
adaptation is also making a renegotiation of globalist integration
imperative. Single points of failure are no longer acceptable.
If supply chains break down, internet companies may also find it hard to get hold of equipment and hardware. China is the largest producer of optical fiber and other essential hardware, such as semiconductors, for example. An interruption in supply could mean that plans to install new broadband connections to rural parts of the world are put on hold.
The
failover capability, with clustering and load-balancing in their supply
chains necessary to prevent a repeat of the 2020 catastrophe, requires
establishing a component-centric accounting system where the guiding
principle is reciprocity to maximize the welfare of the members first
and only secondarily the "system as a whole." Only by componentization
can the danger of the whole system being brought down by the most
ruthless members be averted.
The club must be
run for its members and not the other way around. At a moment of gravest
danger, the states became more important relative to the federal
government than they had been in a long time. Nor was it a coincidence
that the members of the EU acted like individual countries when survival
was at stake. Far from being retrograde and bigoted, component logic
supervened because globalism had magnified the dangers of the principal–agent problem
to an intolerable degree.
International organizations like WHO proved
vulnerable to capture, forcing national populations to turn in
desperation to elected leaders who at least spoke their language.
Perhaps
nothing will prove more difficult to salvage from the train wreck than
individual rights, the fundamental building block of subsidiarity, which
are being eroded at an unprecedented rate. The need to track the
whereabouts of literally every citizen in the name of "contact tracing"
the public means government will demand to know exactly where you've
been and who you've ever met with. Scrupulous records will be kept on
the public's biometric profile to make offices habitable again. Moscow will "gradually’" introduce a pass system controlling movements based on viral status. A similar scheme is being considered by American authorities. "Dr.
Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and
Infectious Diseases, revealed Friday the federal government is
considering issuing Americans certificates of immunity from the
coronavirus, as the Trump administration works to better identify those
who have been infected and restart the U.S. economy in the coming
weeks."
Perhaps the only
response to the trend toward mass surveillance will be to treat personal
information as protected speech and property, whose use must be paid
for at a price to be later negotiated. By this and other efforts
populations can gradually emerge from confinement and rebuild autonomy
and prosperity. The tragic irony is that our attempts to innoculate
ourselves against the horrors of the 20th century led to an
unanticipated nightmare in the 21st. The promise of a world without
borders turned into indefinite detention with the most ruthless regimes
in the world for cellmates.
Let us admit it fairly, as a business people should,We have had no end of a lesson: it will do us no end of good.Not on a single issue, or in one direction or twain,But conclusively, comprehensively, and several times and again,Were all our most holy illusions knocked higher than Gilderoy's kite.We have had a jolly good lesson, and it serves us jolly well right !-- Rudyard Kipling
https://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/planning-the-great-escape/