It was never alive to begin with, it was all a con. Some people fell for it, some people didn't. Either way, it was never not obvious that it was a lie. If what

It was never alive to begin with, it was all a con. Some people fell for it, some people didn't. Either way, it was never not obvious that it was a lie. If what you're signing are trade agreements, what you have is inherently not free trade, and there is no way to dance around that fact. There has never been a time when the US or any other major nation wanted free trade, and that includes China today (which similarly lies every time it says the words "free trade" and pretends to be in favor of it; trade with China is anything but free of heavy restrictions). All major economies want carefully restricted trade, controlled trade, and there are no exceptions. There will never be exceptions. If you hear the US say it wants free trade, understand that it's always a lie that you are hearing. The same with any nation that claims they want free trade (while negotiating trade restricting agreements). It is that simple. What is really being said is: we think we can get one up on you through a trade agreement that favors us more than it favors you, or at the very least we think we can craft the terms in such a way that we both gain something while some other external parties lose out (which is what eg NAFTA/USMCA accomplishes, external parties lose, the parties to the agreement gain by restricting trade in a manner favorable to the people inside the trade agreement). USMCA is an aggressive trade restriction agreement, not a free trade agreement (they like to throw around phrases like "free trade agreement" to continue the con). The purpose of allowing China into the WTO was for the big globalist corporations to go in and feast on what was believed to be an epic consumer & manufacturing opportunity, that was the sole purpose of it. And it's the sole reason Bill Clinton was tasked with making it happen by his moneyed masters, the people that de facto control him and everyone else like him in politics. It almost entirely blew up in their faces, rather hilariously. McDonald's? They don't even own their own restaurants in China today. Disney? It doesn't even own the majority of its own park in China today. The globalist parasites are getting what they deserve re China. It's one of the few times where I'll applaud China - they made something of their nation and have built up extraordinary household wealth - rather than allowing themselves to be forever fleeced by parasites and allowing the gains to all be expropriated back to some other shore. If China had allowed things to go any other way, the parasites would have abandoned China when convenient politically (eg today), and would have left China for dead economically, without a care in the world for the fleecing that went on or the wasteland left behind. Instead, China made itself self-sustainable by heavily restricting what the parasites could do, it kept plenty of the profits onshore and they used that capital to build up their nation.