It's interesting to me that you find this surprising or view it as bad behavior.
It's not surprising in the sense that it fits the definition of a "nation state".
It's surprising because one would think that in XXI century, people understood that global problems require global coordination; competition of selfish actors fails spectacularly in such cases.
Then again, who's ready the first time they do something? This pandemic has made obvious a lot of places where our attempt at globalization doesn't work. I hope our societies will learn from it and do better next time.
I mean, imagine if all of AWS was just a single data centre labeled us-west-1. Imagine something happened to it. This is comparable to how Wuhan shutting down impacted the global supply chains.
(I lack a good web comparison for what happened afterwards - the EU, and recently the US, shutting down, hitting the global supply chains again, this time on the demand side.)
A dependency is something you own (a checked-out copy of). A better comparison is with services. So you may be using a payment gateway in your product, and maybe you need just a single one - but at the very minimum, you should have a plan in place to switch to a different one at a moment's notice. That's reasonable redundancy.
I think I've come up with an analogy for demand-side supply chain issues though. Imagine you have a web service that's constantly under 90% load during normal operations, and that eats almost exactly as much money in the infrastructure costs as it earns. Imagine that service gets mentioned on Hacker News. It almost immediately fails due to increased demand, you can't provision new instances because you don't have enough money in the bank, and then when suddenly the demand drops, you can't afford to keep it on at all.
Only a series of very bad decision would cause the above scenario to happen, and yet it's almost exactly like how supply chains operate in physical space.
Depending on services is where the fragility starts. They're single points of failure, unless you have a plan to quickly switch to an equivalent competitor.
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[0] - Unless they have a time-limited commercial license. Then they're essentially a service.
We are also not getting there anytime soon.
the majority of the time, the problems you speak of were caused by the big western powers in the first place
Wether it cleanly fits into your political ideology or not, The United States is the most powerful country in the world, and in the coming years as less powerful countries work to stamp this out, we are going to be doing a lot to help them.
As the US goes, so goes the world. The US restricting medical supply exports looks bad on the short term, but it will end up being a net benefit to the planet.
It's not a matter of my ideology. I recognize that the US was the most powerful country in the world before the pandemic, but looking at the news about the US response, I have a feeling it will no longer be once the coronavirus is finally dealt with. Then again, maybe I'm just biased by the disproportionate amount of headlines the US is taking in international media.
I think you need to look at individual US states vs the US as a whole. The federal government doesn't really have authority to do everything that other country's federal governments do. For example its generally accepted that the federal government cannot force every citizen to be in lockdown while the states can.
The lack of a social net and out of control capitalism are also massive issues.
The president was downplaying the virus.
The US doesn't look like the most powerful country in the world, nor as a leader.
Besides, China would need to grow its power a lot to even be able to fit the same tier that US does today. And if they can't or don't want to, then the end result is likely a more decentralized world. Not every era is "Pax ..." - there are long gaps in between the fall of the old empire and the rise of a new one.
People still remember Soviet-style "social harmony" and there's a big allergy for that path.
Rapid growth is not exactly popular too for multiple reasons.
Growth-over-ecology brings bad memories from soviet era
Growth-over-labour-rights brings bad memories from 90s and somewhat soviet era
Rapid change itself brings bad memories from 90s and 00s too
OP was claiming "The US doesn't look like the most powerful country in the world, nor as a leader.". If US doesn't count for him.. I'd say China is 3rd world country compared to US.
(A simple thought experiment: imagine there are 10 equally capable competitors, each needing 2 units of resources to survive, and there are only 10 available globally. Under cooperation, 5 competitors will need to be sacrificed, but 5 will live. Under competition, all 10 will perish, each holding their hard-won single unit of resources.)
Otherwise, this is what peaceful cooperation looks like (I’ll give you this in exchange for that, where obviously the one with more desireable goods or services to trade will survive).
Most cultures have very strong social mores that sanction against hoarding or even general unwillingness to share. It's not THAT beyond the pale. What makes it hard is when society becomes disconnected enough, and community bonds get weak enough that social mores no longer bind behavior.
And from the perspective of the victors, it will be a better result, because winning guaranteed survival, whereas cooperation is essentially a lottery. So anybody who has a better chances to win a conflict than a lottery would choose conflict, if they are deciding solely on utilitarian rather than ethical grounds.
More globalists isn't going to solve globalism.
American politicians answer to their constituants, not the China or India. If it looks like policitians didn't first and foremost prioritize the need of their own citizens who elected them then it's treason.
> competition of selfish actors fails spectacularly in such cases.
The irony, it's the very definition of economic liberalism and what led to the current paradigm, globalism. The pandemic is only global because trade is global and people can easily travel between countries.
So no the solution isn't "a world government", the solution is to take back western industrial force from China.
Today, This is just the bill coming due, this is the real cost of the last 40 years of western industrial policies.
It doesn't mean it's the only path to a global economy.
> The pandemic is only global because trade is global and people can easily travel between countries.
The pandemic wouldn't be anywhere near as severe if there was a coordinated global response.
> the solution is to take back western industrial force from China
For that, you'll have to shut down economic liberalism, because otherwise the forces that caused the move of western industrial force into China will still be present, and will cause it again once the public forgets about the pandemic (i.e. in a year), and beancounters everywhere will be free to optimize the corporate balance sheets once again.
In a way? Taiwan has less than 350 cases. They didn't wait for the WHO recommendation. Hundreds of thousands of people are going to die because of greed and bureaucratic incompetence.
Giant centralized institutions are not the solution to humanities' ills and dealing and cooperating with corrupt foreign powers isn't either.
You have bodies like Germany or the US, which function as a federation of states. Looking at Germany and EU, you essentially have states within a state within a sort-of state. You can stack governments recursively, so it's possible and in some ways desirable to have a single one at the top level.
In a global crisis, selfish actions help nobody.
This isn't limited to international relations, of course. The federal stockpiles of PPE are nearly depleted [0]. If the virus situation in America worsens, some states will be extremely pissed that the early states got a large chunk of the federal stockpiles, leaving none later on for them. Were the federal government to reserve supplies for states that were affected later, they would face anger from those that are peaking now.
> In a global crisis, selfish actions help nobody.
This is untrue. Keeping supplies does help some people, the ones with whom they are kept. It may hurt others, but it does help people.
I wonder if this is something like a prisoners' dilemma situation. A co-ordinated global response might be the best option, but it would require a sacrifice from each nation. Even if they might benefit in the end, in the days of non-stop media coverage, no government is willing to take the heat for making that sacrifice.
[0]: https://nypost.com/2020/04/09/federal-government-stockpile-o...
Officials are elected to serve the need of their own constituants first and foremost, not foreign interests. There is nothing selfish about that. The American government doesn't have to consult with Canada or Mexico before taking a decision in times of crisis. This is the very core idea behind a representative democracy.
Where politicians failed is with their lack of foresight when it comes to stocking masks and ventilators, they didn't fail because they were "selfish" toward other nations.