Globalization was sold as progress—the irresistible tide of human cooperation across borders, the dawn of a planetary marketplace, and the triumph of peace through prosperity. “The world is flat,” we were told, and history itself had ended in a liberal dream of open trade, open borders, and open minds. For three decades, the global elite presented globalization not as an ideology but as an inevitability. To question it was to question the future.

But the future arrived, and it was not what we were promised.