Last updated on April 26, 2026
Interdependence is inescapable. Pretending otherwise may make things worse.
On Friday, April 17, U.S. crude oil fell 11.4 percent in a single day. The trigger was one sentence from Iran’s foreign minister: the Strait of Hormuz, closed since February’s conflict, would briefly reopen to commercial vessels. The next day, Iran reversed itself. For six weeks, roughly a fifth of the world’s oil and natural gas could not move, and gas prices rose everywhere — including in the United States, the world’s largest oil producer.
That is the starting point of “The World Is a Village. Can You Opt Out?” — the first essay in a ten-part series on The Critical Post about globalization, concentration, and strategic de-risking.
The core argument: globalization is not an ideology to adopt or abandon. It is the condition of modern life. A village with one blacksmith, one miller, one doctor, and one farmer cannot function if every household tries to do all four jobs. Scale that logic to eight billion people, and you get the world we actually live in.
The real question is not interdependence versus self-reliance. It is how to find the right balance — enough interdependence to enjoy what the global network offers, enough self-reliance to avoid being held hostage. That balance is what the series calls de-risking, and it is where business and government part ways. Businesses drift toward what rewards the next quarter. Governments, whose job is the long view, should de-risk deliberately.
Most provocatively, the post argues that the real risk is not foreign versus domestic, but concentrated versus distributed. When Abbott’s Michigan plant went offline in 2022, half of America’s baby formula disappeared overnight — a concentration failure entirely inside the national border.
See the original article on Bernard’s Substack: https://thecriticalpost.substack.com/p/the-world-is-a-village-can-you-opt