Today in Global Small Business: $4 Almond Butter In the U.S. Matters

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What's affecting me, my clients, my colleagues and other global small business owners:

• How Aldi is taking on U.S. supermarkets with its $4 almond butter (requires subscription).
• Foreign policy hawk South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, dies at 71.
• Trump's verbal flubs are piling up.
• Quote of the week:  “Almond butter is an affordable and easy nutritional powerhouse,” explains Lee Cotton, R.D., author of A Nourishing Perspective.
• Driving global growth through the power of small business.
• AI presents a major opportunity for small businesses but support is needed.

Note:  The Global Small Business Blog has been in operation since 2004 and is ranked number one in the world for entrepreneurs and small businesses interested in going global.  As of May, 2026, we average between 700,000-900,000 readers a month.  Thank you for your engagement! 

Happy, Sad or Worried About the New BRIC Bloc?

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Depending on where you stand, you might celebrate a more powerful BRICS bloc or worry about it—but neither reaction is warranted. An expanded BRICS will not turn the world upside down by having more clout from the South, nor does it herald the rise of a post-Western global order. 

Equally outlandish is the claim that BRICS expansion marks a major victory for China, Russia, and their attempts to build an anti-Western bloc among the countries of the global south—or that BRICS is the core of a new Non-Aligned Movement.

Expanding the list of members does not turn BRICS into a potent bloc. If anything, the expansion only undermines what little cohesion the group had before the expansion.

Read the entire article by C. Raja Mohan, a columnist at Foreign Policy, a senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute, and a former member of India’s National Security Advisory Board. Twitter: @MohanCRaja.

Never, Ever Retreat From Globalization

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Eswar Prasad, a professor of trade policy at Cornell University’s Dyson School and the author of, most recently, The Future of Money, pens an essay for Foreign Policy on how the world will regret its retreat from globalization.

As countries retreat from globalization and begin to look increasingly inward, there could be wide-ranging implications for both economic and geopolitical stability. Just as with the surge in globalization, however, the consequences of this pullback are proving to be unevenly distributed, with low- and middle-income countries bearing the brunt. 

Catch Prasad's essay here.

Rethinking Export Controls in a New Era

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"Export controls can be a formidable tool to protect technological advantage and to deter illiberal and dangerous use of technologies," says Martijn Rasser.  Used properly for their intended purpose—to affect the military potential of a foreign country, to advance major foreign policy objectives, or to fulfill international obligations—export controls can bolster U.S. national security.(1)

(1.) U.S. House of Representatives, Export Control Reform Act of 2018, H.R. 5040, 115th Congress, https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/5040/text. 

Rasser says to revamp export controls for this new era—a global strategic competition with technology at its core—U.S. policymakers should focus on three tenets for implementation.

1. Work with allies.
2. Raise the threshold.
3. Reframe the goal.

Read the entire (and very thorough) commentary:  Rethinking Export Controls:  Unintended Consequences and the New Technological Landscape.

Today in Global Small Business: The State of the World According to Bill Clinton

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What's affecting me, my clients, my colleagues and other global small business owners:

• Is Alibaba's stock (NYSE:BABA) a long-term buy?
• Why entrepreneurs worldwide have reasons to be optimistic.
• What is Alibaba?
• Why folks in Utah are interested in increasing exports.
• Are Americans incoherent on foreign policy?
• The state of the world according to Bill Clinton. 

More on "It's the economy stupid! ..."

Doha: Dead or Alive?

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The Doha round has stalled for what seems like forever.  At this point, do you think it's dead or alive?

Read:

If Doha goes down, what goes with it?
by David Bosco for Foreign Policy

And let us know what you think.  We welcome hearing from you.

Posted by:  The Global Small Business Blog

Cross-Cultural Learning: Being Able to Shut Up and Listen

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Side benefits of learning both a foreign language and a foreign culture.

Snippet:

How to learn about culture and language. When you live in a foreign culture, you learn how to learn. You learn what vocabulary is important, what language learning techniques work, how to make relationships, what skills are important, what details to pay attention to. These skills will carry over to other languages and other cultures in the future.

Read the entire piece here:  The Best Defense (be sure to read the wild comments)

Posted by:  The Global Small Business Blog

More Globalization

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I am not sure why the authors titled the feature in this fashion other than for purposes of provocativeness.  Globalization never went away.

The Return of Globalization
by Gary Hufbauer and Kati Suominen || Foreign Policy

Read it here.

A Sense of Globalization Is Very Important

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Foreign Policy Contributing Editor Christina Larson talks with Google Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt about what makes a city smart, how not to lose $1 trillion -- and the one place he's never been. Very interesting read.

Excerpt:

How is information technology changing the world?

When I was growing up, an elite controlled the media. And the majority of the world was very, very poor, both in a resource sense and an information sense. Since then, a set of things have occurred: the digital revolution, the mobile revolution, and so forth -- of which I am enormously proud because they are roughly the equivalent of lifting people from abject poverty and ignorance to a reasonable ability to communicate and participate in the conversation.

Information empowers individuals. And it has a huge and overwhelmingly positive impact on society. Think of someone who can now get information about finance or technology, or they're in school and they can't afford textbooks but access information online. Or imagine medicine -- I mean there's just issue after issue.

Globalization has clearly been responsible for lifting at least 2 billion people from abject poverty to extremely low levels of middle class. As a result, they have greater access to education and opportunity; they are much less likely to attack you, and they're busy trying to fulfill their low-cost version of the American Dream. They're trying to buy a car.

Read the entire interview: "Googlopolis"

Posted by: The Global Small Business Blog

The Age of Global Urban Expansion

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China and India rising.

Half of Asia will become urbanized, and nearly a billion people will shift from countryside to cityscape. Trillions of dollars will need to be spent on roads, trains, power plants, water systems, and social services. And it's going to happen in less than half the time that it took the West. China and India will account for two-fifths of the world's urban growth, but they are pursuing wildly different strategies for managing this shift.

Read more about this here.

How are you positioning your business to catch a portion of the opportunities mentioned in this powerful feature?

Posted by: The Global Small Business Blog

China: What Wall?

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Interesting post by Elison Elliott for the Foreign Policy "Global Markets" Blog Network (launched February, 2009):

Don't Bet Against China

It's running in line with our predictions No. 4 and 5 here. Elison and I have been in touch via email. I hope to interview him soon on this topic at The Global Small Business Blog.

Also make note of prediction No. 4 in our report talking about China "borrowing our ideas ..." Looks like Google has a short fuse on this. Read more here.

Fascinating. Another interesting piece here.

Goodbye Kitty?

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In a bid to raise its international profile, Tokyo has appointed three young women as cultural envoys because they represent Japan's long-running craze for all things cute.

Does that mean Hello Kitty (pictured above) is history? Let's hope not.

Read more here.

Global Internet Fire Walls

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As reported in Foreign Policy, "The List: Look Who's Censoring the Internet Now."

China and Iran have always had strict built-in fire walls for their Internet. But now, the following countries have also made the list:

• France
• India
• Argentina
• South Korea

Find out why here.

Globalization Is Here To Stay

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Globalization is much, much more than international trade and investment. It's about connectedness and global activities.

Quick quote:

Still, the current wave of globalization has many unprecedented characteristics. As Internet access penetrates the most remote corners of the globe, it is transforming the lives of more people, in more places, more cheaply than ever before—and the pace of change is accelerating faster than we can hope to chronicle it.

Read the interesting essay (that includes the above quote) about this notion in Foreign Policy, "Think Again: Globalization."