This isn't a surprise. Globalization allows surplus countries to gain competitiveness by forcing down wages and exporting the resulting domestic demand deficiencies, and the accompanying savings excesses, to countries with open capital markets (or also, in the case of... https://twitter.com/JChengWSJ/status/1262631824720834561

...Germany, to other EU countries that may not legally protect themselves from being forced to absorb German excesses), who end up running the corresponding deficits and paying the costs in the form of rising debt and higher, persistent unemployment.

Beggar-thy-neighbor...

...policies only work in a globalized world of free capital and trade flows, which is why countries like Germany want to maintain the existing system and countries like the US don't, even though most Germans are as badly affected by globalization as most Americans. This is the...

...main point of "Trade Wars are Class Wars": the American financial elite are no less in favor of globalization than their German counterparts, but German workers, producers, small businesses, and the middle class should be no more in favor than their American counterparts.