For the longest time, I kept a cartoon from Matt Groening’s “Life in Hell” series hanging above my desk. It features his character Bongo the one-eared rabbit, looking up at a larger, angry, looming rabbit. Surrounding him is a disaster of muddy paw prints and dirt-splattered walls. Bongo is trying to explain. “Mistakes were made,” read the words coming out of his mouth.

I thought about this dark comic reflection on how things can unintentionally go catastrophically wrong more than once while reading Washington Post correspondent David J. Lynch’s worthy and essential book The World’s Worst Bet: How the Globalization Gamble Went Wrong (And What Would Make It Right). It should be a must-read for Democrats as they attempt to navigate Donald Trump’s on-again, off-again tariff pronouncements.

The outlines of the story, which has come to be known as the process of “hyperglobalization,” are so well known that they hardly bear repeating. A series of trade deals and decisions beginning during the George H.W. Bush Administration—including, most infamously, the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) acceptance of China as a full member beginning in 2001—was sold to Americans by Democratic and Republican politicians as well as business leaders. The claim was that they would not just bring prosperity to the United States and developing countries where poverty was rife, but also encourage and entrench democracy in countries such as China.

Things you don’t need me to tell you: This didn’t exactly go according to plan.

In the United States, we did get lower prices, but, in return, free trade made the rich richer and increased inequality as it hollowed out factory towns, taking jobs and upending lives—and, ultimately, our politics. China and other developing nations benefited economically, but it turned out that democracy did not result automatically from more open markets and prosperity. Instead, it’s fair to describe China today as an authoritarian surveillance state—and one that poses an increasing economic and security threat to the United States. Yes, trade deals helped lift 1.5 billion people out of extreme poverty, and that is a very big deal indeed. But if you lived in a suddenly deindustrialized town in West Virginia or Ohio, you were unlikely to care.

Lynch, a longtime global business reporter, cops to the fact that he, too, didn’t immediately understand how the free trade era would reverberate in American life. “The changes in China appeared to validate the forecasts of globalization enthusiasts,” he writes. “The political opposition to globalization often struck me as hidebound and even nutty.” One of the strengths of this book is that Lynch takes the reader on a journey of more than 30 years, allowing us to see why so many—including, sometimes, Lynch himself—saw so much promise in the age of globalization that they either didn’t foresee or didn’t want to admit to the severity of the downsides. Until, that is, the combination of the fallout from the Great Recession and the rise of Donald Trump forced a change.

The deindustrialization of the United States occurred over a longer time frame than generally acknowledged. Many of our manufacturing hubs had been deteriorating since the 1950s, as factories moved to both right-to-work states and other countries where labor was cheaper. (Barbie, which hit American toy store shelves in 1959, was initially produced in Japan.) Automation was also reducing the need for factory workers, while technology and transportation advances were making it easier than ever to manufacture goods far, far away. The combo meant that manufacturing jobs in the United States peaked in the late 1970s, well before the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) or the China Shock.

However, the previous American manufacturing job losses were gradual, occurring over decades. The China Shock was anything but. It can be best described as a sudden deindustrialization. Economists estimate that the China Shock cost the United States upwards of 2.4 million jobs in a period of a little more than a decade. Jobs in rural Obion County, Tennessee, for example, declined by a third between 2001 and 2017. The free-trade policies championed by societal elites hit the least educated workers the hardest. Yes, consumer goods were cheaper than ever, but that hardly mattered if your salary declined by half after the factory closed. At the same time, China, in particular, hardly played fair: The country was repeatedly accused of devaluing its currency, dumping goods below cost, and engaging in mass industrial espionage to gain an advantage.

As manufacturing jobs vanished, they increasingly became swathed in nostalgia. In the immediate postwar period, they had been secure and unionized jobs, and they paid decently enough to provide their holders with a basic middle-class lifestyle. But the rote monotony of the work could be mind-numbing; it’s forgotten now, but heroin use was widespread in Detroit auto factories of the 1970s. Physical pain often went hand in hand with these gigs. Lynch recounts the story of Bob Ulrich, who worked first for Amweld Building Products and then, after Amweld’s production moved to Mexico, at the General Motors plant in Lordstown, Ohio. When GM filed for bankruptcy in 2009, Ulrich was still in his late 50s but, suffering from lung disease and “riddled with arthritis,” he retired and filed for disability.

Politicians of both parties (not to mention business leaders, again) were either oblivious to the job losses, cavalier, or both. Bill Clinton knew that without robust aid and job retraining programs (themselves all too often of “dubious value,” as one study later noted), Americans could turn against trade deals. Still, his Administration repeatedly failed to push hard enough for adequate funding for such help. Unions often prioritized attempts to raise pay in other countries—so as to make American manufacturing more competitive—over job retraining programs. When then-Senator Joe Biden voted in 2000 to grant China permanent normal trade relations status, a necessary precursor for admitting the country to the WTO, he didn’t understand how quickly China was changing from a poor, agricultural society to an industrialized one; he claimed that he could not “see the collapse of the American manufacturing economy as China…suddenly becomes our major economic competitor.” The George W. Bush Administration, terrible in so many ways, was dreadful here too, failing to protect American industries and jobs from Chinese competition.

It didn’t have to be this way. France and Germany each spent about five times as much as the United States did on programs and other assistance to help displaced workers. Strategic thinking wasn’t exactly prioritized, either. Outsourcing occurred no matter how vital a product was to the American economy or our long-term interests. The United States, the wealthiest and most powerful country ever known, can no longer produce many of the basic and necessary things it needs for its survival or defense—something that was evident to those in the know long before the supply chain snafus of the pandemic period made the situation clear to almost everyone. Never mind the steep decline of North Carolina’s furniture and textile manufacturing hubs. Pharmaceutical shortages were increasingly common in the years leading up to 2020.

Lynch was reporting on the ground—both in the United States and abroad—for almost the entirety of the period the book chronicles, for publications including USA Today, Bloomberg, and eventually, The Washington Post. He was there for the rise of hyperglobalization, and he saw, in real time, the gains and losses from it. Lynch spent time with suddenly jobless factory workers here in the United States, more than a few of whom trained their overseas replacements, and he observed these employed counterparts suddenly lifted out of poverty in developing nations across the globe. The World’s Worst Bet unfolds mostly in chronological order from the time of NAFTA onwards, with a twist: Lynch pays more attention to the early and prescient critics of free trade, and he takes their criticisms more seriously than almost anyone in a position of real authority did when doing so might have made a substantive difference.

As Lynch recounts in some of his most memorable chapters, there were more than a few people who saw that the age of hyperglobalization was not going according to plan. Lori Wallach helped orchestrate the massive protests of the WTO that took place in Seattle in 1999, demonstrating that Americans were much more concerned with the negative consequences of free trade than those in power wanted to acknowledge. (Here I need to make a disclosure and say that Wallach is now a colleague of mine at the American Economic Liberties Project.) Matt Pottinger, who served on the National Security Council during Donald Trump’s first term in office, started to become disillusioned with China while based in the country as a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal in the years immediately after the nation joined the WTO, as he saw—and personally experienced—its surveillance state tightening. A few years later, as a consultant investigating Chinese companies for investors, Pottinger was horrified to discover, in his own words, “greed run amuck,” and he came to believe China was a country that would violate seemingly any trade or economic norm in an effort to gain an advantage. Venture capitalist Tim Draper, initially enthusiastic about China, learned that lesson firsthand after he came to believe he was pressured by Chinese regulators into selling off a promising start-up to a state-connected company for a fraction of its value.

But all of this was mostly ignored and brushed aside until public pressure made it impossible to push it under the rug any longer. The immediate catalyst was the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a trade deal promoted by Barack Obama that would have created a single commercial zone encompassing 40 percent of the global economy. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton was among those who swore the TPP was needed, calling it the “gold standard in trade agreements.” Even as Wallach declared the deal “NAFTA on steroids” and the usual suspects lined up to oppose it, there was little reason to believe this time would be different—until it was.

Congress, skittish after the job losses attributed to previous trade agreements and amid the ongoing slow recovery from the Great Recession, did not vote in favor of granting Obama the ability to fast-track negotiations for the controversial trade deal until June 2015. This delay effectively thrust the issue into the presidential race, where both Bernie Sanders on the left and Donald Trump on the Republican side seized on it, and free trade in general, to channel the discontent so many Americans were feeling about both the national and their own personal financial trajectory. Clinton, now the front-runner for the Democratic nomination, backtracked, but it was too late. (That she often seemed to have trouble comprehending why Americans were so angry didn’t help matters.) We all know what happened next.

Since then, we’ve lived in Trump’s world. As President, Biden disappointed many Washington economic insiders and kept almost all of the tariffs Trump imposed during his first term, added some of his own, and pursued policies and legislation such as the CHIPS and Science Act and Inflation Reduction Act, designed in part to rebuild the United States’s manufacturing prowess for twenty-first century priorities and needs. Biden was determined to avoid a second China Shock, and his Administration, like Trump’s, sought out advice from hyperglobalization critics like Wallach, even as more conventional Democratic economic figures carped. (Former Clinton Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, for one, claimed the China Shock research was “misleading” and that it underplayed globalization’s positive impact on the American economy.) Biden also ignored environmentalists—a longtime Democratic constituency—when he imposed a 100 percent tariff on Chinese electric vehicles in 2024. It was a major shift in economic thinking, but it was a shift that voters, concerned about post-pandemic inflation, didn’t give him much credit for embracing.

And now Trump is back in office, bringing with him the chaos of “Liberation Day” and on-again, off-again tariff pronouncements that are hardly strategic or finely targeted, but are giving corporations an excuse to once again indulge in greedflation.

The World’s Worst Bet is not a perfect book. It is much too long and too repetitive. Lynch’s prose is workmanlike, and he can’t resist getting into the minutiae of Washington back-and-forth when a broad overview would serve readers better. He spends too much time with Washington insiders, even as some of the most gripping reading in the book comes not from the endless political negotiations but from how the trade fallout was experienced by people working in the factories and plants of places like rural Tennessee. I wanted more of that, and for Lynch to discuss their past and current political beliefs with them. Nonetheless, The World’s Worst Bet is a valuable read, especially with the United States potentially on the verge of another job shock, this one courtesy of artificial intelligence.

Lynch concludes by pointing out that we can’t redo the past; we can only learn from it. Technology-related job shocks are a recurrent feature of the industrialized world, going back as far as Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin. Over time, they create more prosperity, but in the short term they hit many workers hard—and those harms need to be addressed. The current form of globalization will create a new crop of winners and losers, and so will the advance of AI. The people experiencing the most harm will need help. And when they’re able to find a new place in the economy, it can work out very well. Take Bob Ulrich’s son, who was in his thirties and working for Amweld like his dad when the company’s U.S. plants closed up shop. He went to nursing school and now earns more money than he ever would have had he remained on the factory floor.

Lynch brings it full circle in his introduction. “What’s required now is the sort of policy nuance that was lacking in the 1990s,” he writes. “We have embarked on a new era of a la carte globalization. It will be at least as difficult to manage as the original. But if we ignore the lessons of the past, it may not be manageable at all.”

It’s hard to be hopeful when you close the book and turn on the news. As anyone reading this publication almost certainly knows, the Trump Administration is currently cutting back the nation’s social safety net even as job losses mount, and strategic thinking is still rarer than it ought to be. As I was writing the concluding lines of this review, Trump announced new 25 percent tariffs on Japan and South Korea, but by the time we went to press, that number had been reduced to 15 percent. The situation remains in chaotic flux. Meanwhile, many Democratic pols, seeming to oppose anything Trump embraces, can sound like they are bashing all tariffs as unnecessary taxes that raise the cost of living for Americans with little gain, leaving it to people like Wallach to insist otherwise. Mistakes, you might say, continue to be made.