Will the biggest exporters stay the biggest exporters in the near future?

screenshot from X

These are massive figures no doubt. More than 23 trillion dollars worth of goods crossing national borders. What bothers me, however is this situation. China exports 3 trillion dollars and we all accept this as a fact of life. As if once a factory is built in China it's just going to sit there forever. Because that's how the world works. Except that we know it isn't how the world works.

Just so you know, Mexico has now surpassed Canada and China as America's number one trading partner. Not because the Mexicans have overnight become better at engineering than the Chinese. But because it's become too expensive and too slow to ship goods from Shenzhen, so companies have built their factories closer to home, that's all. There was no great national decoupling. It was just a matter of dollars and cents and might I add, patience.

This visual graph I shared at the beginning of the article only accounts for goods, not services. This is why the United States appears smaller on this map than it probably should. Because American cloud computing and software aren't included on this map. I'm not sure if this is a shortcoming of the visual or just the nature of how we track trade data. But it does create a somewhat distorted image of American economic power in the modern world.

What you'll see on this map are the Netherlands and Hong Kong represented as enormous economic powerhouses. They aren't actually producing anything. They are simply transit points. Goods are shipped there, then they are immediately shipped out again. This distorts their trade statistics in a way that could look misleading, even if it isn't technically.

What bothers me even more is the idea that national governments are suddenly placing safety ahead of saving a quick buck, maybe they are, or maybe they're just reacting to the last global supply chain crisis and will quickly forget about it the moment their cost of doing business comes back up again. Because we've been through this cycle before. We panic, we rebuild, then when the accountants get hold of us we quietly move back when our costs of production are suddenly 30% higher.

Therw was an article that I read which said that 2023 was a record year for global trade and yet for 2026 we're suddenly talking about deglobalization, reshoring and nearshoring. So which one is it, is the world trading more or less? Are we trading more, even as we tell ourselves we're trading less? The confusion is real.

I don't know if this map represents the end of an age or just a minor glitch on the radar. We already know that things change. China's near monopoly on the global battery and solar panel trade could evaporate if someone else manages to figure out how to extract lithium more cheaply. Or perhaps it may stay like this to the end of time. I can sum all that to one word, unpredictability of life.