The power to become habituated to his surroundings is a marked characteristic of mankind. Very few of us realize with conviction the intensely unusual, unstable, complicated, unreliable, temporary nature of the economic organization by which Western Europe has lived for the last half century. We assume some of the most peculiar and temporary of our late advantages as natural, permanent, and to be depended on, and we lay our plans accordingly. On this sandy and false foundation we scheme for social improvement and dress our political platforms, pursue our animosities and particular ambitions, and feel ourselves with enough margin in hand to foster, not assuage, civil conflict in the European family.
This is how Maynard Keynes' The Economic Consequences of Peace (1919) starts. After more than a 100 years this seems a good place to start in our own analysis of our current complacency about the inevitablity, reliability and security of global supply chains that structure our trade, economic, political and social environment today.