At a recent gathering of corporate leaders and US government officials hosted by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, Vice President J. D. Vance presented a strikingly candid analysis of the last fifty years of US economic policy. “The idea,” he said, “was that rich countries would move up the value chain, while poorer countries handled the simpler tasks.”

What he meant by this was that since the 1970s, supporters of globalization assumed that while some workers in places like the United States might lose manufacturing jobs, most would adapt. They would, to use a phrase that became a meme in the 2010s, “learn to code.” By swapping coalfaces for laptops, workers in the United States, where high-value jobs would be concentrated, would occupy a higher position in the global value chain than their counterparts in the Global South. What happened instead, Vance lamented, was that “as they got better at the low end, they began catching up at the high end too.”

Vance’s description of this tendency is, in a sense, more honest than what the world has come to expect from American politicians. Since the Cold War, American leaders have sold globalization in the slick idioms of progress, integration, and modernization — a form of trickle-down economics for nation-states that would both further enrich the wealthy and uplift the “underdeveloped.” And while standards of living have indeed risen since then — most drastically in East Asia — the reality for the rest of the world has been middling growth, accompanied by the disastrous collapse of state institutions and welfare.