Author Archives: Eamonn Fingleton

Protectionism Is (Almost) Mainstream

Lighthizer, Robert. No Trade Is Free: Changing Course, Taking on China, and Helping America’s Workers: New York: Broadside Books, 2023. ==== “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” Often attributed to John Maynard Keynes, … Continue reading

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The Myth of Post-industrialism

By Eamonn Fingleton America’s shuttered factories and the false hope of post-industrialism. (This article first appeared in the November-December 2022 issue of The American Conservative.) In the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the American nation … Continue reading

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America’s Shuttered Factories and the False Hope of Post-Industrialism

Harvard sociologist Daniel Bell convinced America that manufacturing didn’t matter. He was wrong. By Eamonn Fingleton In the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the U.S. Navy doubled its fleet within a year and quadrupled it before … Continue reading

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The rise of East Asia and an epochal threat to American freedoms

By Eamonn Fingleton (This article appears in the January-February 2022 issue of The American Conservative. To read it in pdf form,  please click here.) In April 1998 Sony Corporation chairman Norio Ohga made world headlines with this comment: “The Japanese economy … Continue reading

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The long arm of Japanese industrial policy: Northern Ireland’s experience

In Dublin, Ireland, where I have lived in recent years, many observers view East Asian economics as a remote issue of little interest in Western Europe. As I discovered the other day, it is an attitude shared even by some … Continue reading

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On VJ Day, a hard look at an atom bomb apologist

By Eamonn Fingleton If you Google “Laurens van der Post” and “Hiroshima”, you’ll turn up hundreds of thousands of results. This confirms something that some observers have known for years: that though the South African-born author Laurens van der Post … Continue reading

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Was the Hiroshima bomb justified?

By Eamonn Fingleton It is a question that comes up every year: was the atomic bombing of Hiroshima justified? This year — the 75th anniversary of the attack — the question seems more pertinent than ever. The bombing, which took … Continue reading

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Some of my Forbes commentaries

  If you click through on the headings below, you can get to the articles concerned. Most of them focus on international trade or American decline or both. For my first item, however, I chose something different — partly because it … Continue reading

Posted in American decline, China, Global economy, History, Japan, Manufacturing, Press, Service economy, Sino-Japanese relations, Trade | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Now Blogging at Forbes

I am now blogging at Forbes – you can find my most recent articles here. The RSS Feed for my Forbes blog is here.

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Boeing Goes To Pieces

This article was first published in the January-February 2014 issue of The American Conservative. At a welcoming banquet in Japan in the 1980s, Ford Motor chairman Philip Caldwell received a memorably double-edged compliment. “There is no secret about how we … Continue reading

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