As former MI6 officer and British diplomat Alastair Crooke reported last week, Russia and China are apparently organizing other nations to reject British Free Trade, the liberalism of Adam Smith and Globalism, in favor of the German Friedrich List's 19th century idea of economic and national sovereignty. List said:

"My destiny having afterwards again conducted me to the United States, I left behind all my books; they would but lead me astray there. The best book on Political Economy in that new country is the volume of life. There we see solitudes rapidly converted into rich and powerful States. There only have I obtained a clear idea of the gradual development of the economy of a people. A progress, which in Europe required the lapse of centuries, is accomplished there under the eyes of a single observer; there, society is seen passing from the savage state to pastoral life; from this condition to agriculture; and from agriculture to manufactures and commerce. There, one may easily observe how the rent of land rises gradually from nothing to its highest range. There, the plainest farmer knows better than the most sagacious of the learned men of the Old World the means of making agriculture prosperous, and augmenting rents; he endeavors to attract manufactures to his neighborhood.

"Nowhere are modes of communication for trade and travel, and their influence on the moral and material life of the people, better appreciated. That book I have read earnestly and assiduously, and lessons drawn from it I have tried to compare and arrange with the results of my previous studies, experience, and reflections." National System of Political Economy