All Ship Lanes Lead to the New Rome

Free trade undermines sustainability because it prioritizes cheap global production over local, durable, and environmentally responsible industry. Neoliberal free trade rules make it nearly impossible to build the infrastructure needed for a green society.  

Every nation that successfully industrialized did so behind tariff walls. Free trade strips nations of the ability to protect and nurture domestic industries that could build renewable energy systems, efficient housing, and sustainable transport.  Without protection, green manufacturing (solar panels, wind turbines, efficient machinery) gets outsourced, leaving societies dependent on foreign supply chains.

Free trade encourages production in countries with the lowest environmental and labor standards. This makes it cheaper to pollute and exploit workers abroad than to invest in clean, durable systems at home.  As a result, sustainable practices are undercut by cheaper, dirtier imports. It's a race to the bottom.

Here comes neoliberalism, or financialization over infrastructure. Neoliberal markets are hopelessly corrupt, shortsighted, and technologically illiterate. Free trade accelerates financial speculation rather than long-term investment in green infrastructure.  Instead of valuing the hardware of sustainability (efficient grids, clean energy plants), markets chase quick profits from global arbitrage.

I mean cases like Chinese solar panel dumping, where foreign producers flood markets with cheap products. While this lowers prices temporarily, it destroys domestic capacity to innovate and build resilient green industries. Once local producers collapse, societies lose the skilled workforce and institutional knowledge needed for sustainable transitions.

Free trade agreements often override national policies to the detriment of democratic control. I see this as stripping communities of the ability to enforce environmental protections or industrial strategies. Green planning requires coordinated public investment, but trade rules lock nations into dependency on global supply chains.

The alternative consists of producerist solutions, empowering engineers, builders, and farmers to design durable, efficient systems. Sustainability requires protectionist policies to shield green industries from predatory global competition. The technological strategy is to solve several problems at once, especially the shift from fossil fuels (energy capital) to renewables (energy income).

Neoliberal austerity discourages public investment in green infrastructures at home and abroad. It has led to a classic imperial system which exploits cheap labor and ruthless resource extraction from what Immanuel Wallerstein called the World System.

In his framework there are core states - Wealthy, industrialized, technologically advanced, politically stable. They dominate global trade and exploit weaker states.

These weaker states are Wallerstein's "periphery states" - poorer, less developed, resource-exporting, often politically unstable. They are exploited for cheap labor and raw materials.

In between are the semi-periphery states - transitional economies. They are exploited by core states but also exert influence over periphery states. They often show industrial growth, regional power, and aspirations to challenge the core.

The biggest challenge is BRICS.

Brazil & South Africa: Often classified as semi-periphery. They have industrial bases and regional influence but remain vulnerable to core exploitation.

India & China: Clearly semi-periphery, though China is increasingly seen as approaching core status due to its technological and economic rise.

Russia: A special case. Economically semi-periphery, but militarily and politically it projects near-core power.

Together, BRICS functions as a coalition of semi-periphery states seeking to challenge the dominance of Western-led core institutions (IMF, World Bank, G7). Their collective project is to reshape the global order by reducing dependency on the core and creating alternative financial and trade structures.

The reason for their classification as semi-peripheral rather than fully peripheral:

Economic diversification: BRICS economies are not narrowly dependent on raw materials; they have manufacturing, services, and technology sectors.

Political influence: BRICS states wield significant geopolitical power (UN Security Council seats, nuclear arsenals, regional leadership).

Global integration: They are central players in global trade, not marginal suppliers.

Periphery countries, by contrast, are typically small, unstable, and locked into one-dimensional economies (e.g., raw resource exporters with little industrial base).

In Wallerstein’s terms, BRICS embodies the semi-periphery’s ambition to ascend toward core status. Their alliance dramatizes a mythic threshold: a collective attempt to invert the exploitative hierarchy by building alternative institutions and asserting sovereignty against the entrenched core which has prospered in spite of its domestic austerity due to its network of supply chains of which it is the center. All ship lanes lead to the new Rome.