The false promise of friendshoring

Each year the 193 member states of the United Nations General Assembly vote on dozens of resolutions, earnestly setting the world to rights. Last month, for example, they voted in favour of reducing space threats, eradicating rural poverty and combating dust storms, among other things. The votes count for little. The assembly’s resolutions are not legally binding. Its budgetary powers are small. And it has as many military divisions as the pope.

But for scholars of international relations, these votes have long provided a handy, quantitative measure of the geopolitical alignments between countries. More recently, economists have also turned to them. Owing to the trade war between America and China, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the conflict in Gaza and recent blockades in the Red Sea, geopolitics has become impossible for dismal scientists to ignore. Although their models of trade and investment typically give pride of place to the economic size of countries and the geographic distance between them, they are now considering “geopolitical distance” as well.