The Global Hierarchy

Vance's Admission and the True Intent of Globalization

The recent comments by United States Vice President J.D. Vance represent an extraordinary moment of candor from a high-ranking American official. His admission that globalization was designed to maintain a global hierarchy—where wealthy nations would "move up the value chain" while poorer countries remained confined to low-value manufacturing—reveals the underlying colonial mindset that has shaped American economic foreign policy for decades.

Vance's explanation frames globalization's failure not as a disappointment that poverty persisted, but rather that countries like China refused to accept permanent subordination in the global economic order. In his view, the system broke down because developing nations had the audacity to pursue advanced economic development beyond the limited role assigned to them by Western powers.

This revelation invites a profound reassessment of the narrative that has dominated international economic relations. The Washington Consensus was marketed as spreading market principles that would eventually lift all nations, yet when China successfully navigated this system to advance its economic position, the response from Washington was not celebration but alarm. This reaction exposes the contradiction at the heart of American-led globalization: it was never truly about global prosperity but about preserving economic hierarchy.

The current wave of American policies targeting China—from semiconductor export controls to investment restrictions—can thus be understood not primarily as security measures but as attempts to enforce this hierarchical vision. These actions represent a strategic pivot away from market fundamentalism toward something more nakedly protective of Western advantage. When examined closely, China's primary threat appears to be its refusal to remain economically subordinate.

There exists a striking irony here: a global economic system allegedly designed to spread market capitalism is being abandoned precisely because it worked too effectively for nations outside the Western core. When China and other developing economies began succeeding beyond their assigned parameters, the response was not to acknowledge the system's success but to rewrite its rules. This clearly signals to the developing world that the existing economic order views their advancement as a problem rather than a triumph.

Yet Vance's analysis misses a crucial dimension. The issue wasn't merely that globalization created pools of cheap labor that undermined productivity incentives. Rather, what failed was the necessary redistribution of gains within advanced economies. The productivity growth that did occur primarily benefited capital owners rather than being shared broadly across society, creating the domestic discontent that politicians like Vance now channel.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Redistribution Crisis: Capital, Labor, and the Fracturing Social Contract

The second dimension of this globalization paradox concerns the internal dynamics of advanced economies themselves. While Vance focuses on the international hierarchy, he overlooks how the same economic system reconfigured power relations within Western nations, particularly the United States. The globalization era didn't just create an international division of labor; it fundamentally altered the relationship between capital and labor domestically.

As manufacturing shifted overseas, the promised transition to higher value work materialized unevenly. Corporate profits and executive compensation soared while median wages stagnated. The economic gains from increased global trade and investment flowed disproportionately to capital rather than labor, accelerating inequality within advanced economies. This wasn't merely a side effect but a feature of how globalization was structured and governed.

The intellectual foundation for this arrangement was a particular version of neoliberal economics that promised that liberalized markets would eventually benefit everyone. The narrative held that short-term displacement would lead to long-term prosperity through the invisible hand of the market. But this framework systematically undervalued the importance of deliberate redistribution mechanisms—progressive taxation, robust labor protections, and social safety nets—that had previously ensured broad-based prosperity during the post-war era.

What we witnessed was not simply economic evolution but a deliberate political project that systematically dismantled the institutions that had previously ensured that productivity gains were widely shared. Trade agreements protected intellectual property and capital mobility while leaving labor protections as secondary considerations. Tax policies increasingly favored capital over labor income. Antitrust enforcement weakened, allowing corporate concentration to accelerate across sectors.

The regional devastation of deindustrialization wasn't inevitable. Other advanced economies—particularly Northern European social democracies—maintained stronger redistribution mechanisms and industrial policies that helped buffer workers and communities from globalization's harshest effects. These nations demonstrated that global economic integration didn't inherently require abandoning social cohesion.

The American approach instead created a dual economy—one featuring dynamic, high-productivity sectors alongside increasingly precarious work with diminishing opportunity for mobility between them. This bifurcation generated profound social consequences: declining life expectancy, family instability, substance abuse epidemics, and eventually, political polarization. These trends ultimately produced the populist backlash that helped propel figures like Trump and Vance to power.

Vance's critique of globalization, then, contains an unacknowledged irony. He correctly identifies that the system failed to deliver on its promises for many Americans, but fails to recognize how his own party's policies—tax cuts for the wealthy, opposition to expanded healthcare access, hostility toward labor unions—reinforced precisely the dynamics that exacerbated inequality. The Republican approach has been to redirect justified economic frustration toward foreign competitors and immigrants rather than addressing the domestic power imbalances that shaped how globalization's benefits were distributed.

This historical context reveals the fundamental contradiction in contemporary American economic nationalism. It correctly diagnoses that globalization produced domestic losers, but its prescription—retrenchment from global markets while doubling down on capital-favoring domestic policies—offers little genuine remedy for the working and middle classes whose interests it claims to champion.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Reimagining Global Economic Relations

The confluence of Vance's admission and America's shifting economic strategy points toward a profound restructuring of the global order. As emerging economies increasingly recognize that the existing system was designed to constrain rather than facilitate their development, we are witnessing the acceleration of alternative economic architectures that bypass Western-dominated institutions.

The BRICS expansion, the proliferation of bilateral currency arrangements that circumvent the dollar, and China's Belt and Road Initiative all represent attempts to construct parallel systems of economic exchange less subject to Western control. These aren't merely tactical maneuvers but represent a fundamental questioning of the post-war economic consensus that placed American interests at its center. The Global South increasingly views American-led globalization not as a neutral framework for mutual prosperity but as a sophisticated mechanism for maintaining hierarchical advantage.

This recognition is producing a legitimacy crisis for Western economic leadership. When the Vice President of the United States essentially confirms what critics of neoliberal globalization have long argued—that the system was designed to preserve inequality rather than overcome it—it undermines the moral authority underpinning American economic diplomacy. Nations pursuing development now have explicit confirmation that playing by American rules means accepting permanent subordination.

The implications extend beyond economics into geopolitics. American security strategy has increasingly framed China's economic rise as an existential threat, conflating economic competition with national security. This perspective transforms what should be normal economic development into an adversarial zero-sum contest. When Vance suggests that China's ascent up the value chain represents globalization's failure, he reveals a worldview where other nations' prosperity is inherently threatening rather than complementary to American interests.

This mindset represents a profound misreading of history. The most stable and prosperous periods in the modern era have occurred when rising powers were accommodated rather than contained, when economic development was broadly distributed rather than concentrated. The post-war economic miracle that benefited both Japan and Western Europe was possible precisely because American policy at that time recognized that prosperity abroad created markets and stability that served American interests.

A genuinely forward-looking approach would recognize that global challenges—from climate change to pandemic preparedness—require collaborative solutions that are incompatible with colonial thinking. Rather than attempting to preserve hierarchies of advantage, American policy might instead focus on ensuring that economic development everywhere proceeds in ways that benefit workers, protect environments, and strengthen democratic institutions.

The alternative—doubling down on containing development abroad while failing to address distributional problems at home—risks accelerating America's relative decline. Vance's admission inadvertently highlights this strategic shortsightedness. By explicitly framing globalization's purpose as maintaining inequality, he reinforces precisely the perception that drives nations to seek alternatives to American economic leadership.

The path forward requires transcending the colonial mentality that Vance's comments reveal. A more productive approach would recognize that genuine prosperity is not zero-sum—that rising living standards globally can complement rather than threaten American well-being. This would require abandoning the reflexive equation of economic nationalism with national interest, and instead pursuing a model that ensures technological advancement and productivity growth generate widely shared benefits both domestically and internationally.

Until American leadership embraces this more capacious understanding of prosperity, we are likely to witness the continued fragmentation of the global economic order into competing spheres of influence. Vance's candid admission may well be remembered as a marker of this transition—the moment when America's claim to lead a universal economic order gave way to the naked pursuit of advantage in an increasingly multipolar world.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​