World Supply Chain Was Fragile Even Before The Pandemic Or The Ukraine War

One jolt to a place like this can send the world 50 years back (Creative Commons)

There’s a lot of talk about how fragile the supply chain is today, but it was never any different.

Our entire planet is integrated like a giant factory. Energy, resources, and products flow in all directions. Only through this frantic activity that the entire world participates in, we are able to have and keep our lifestyle and comforts today. From computers to food.

This is so because it’s difficult to produce and maintain the products that we use. Even for the most simple product, a large part of the world’s industry and its supply chain must take part in order to bring that product to us and to make it affordable.

We have to have it this way because otherwise, we would have to go decades back in regard to our living standards, maybe fifty years or more, if we decided that every country should be entirely self-sufficient. And many, many countries would never be able to be entirely self-sufficient because it’s impossible to create and maintain some industries that are needed for some products — from high-tier electronics to heavy industry — if a country is smaller than a certain size.

So, in a ‘de-globalized’ world, the countries that decide to be entirely self-sufficient would need to accept going back 50 years, and many countries would have…