Competition tends to make everyone better. And no company or country can maintain an edge indefinitely. Free trade and open competition help poorer countries focus on things they can do well and raise their living standards. And that’s exactly what’s been happening, under American leadership, for several decades. In his book The World America Made, Robert Kagan writes that in the 1950s, there were about 1 billion rich people and 5 billion poor. “By the beginning of the twenty-first century, four billion of those poor have begun climbing out of poverty,” he writes. “This period of global prosperity has benefited an enormous number of the world’s poor and produced rising economic powers like China, Brazil, Turkey, India, and South Africa in parts of the world that had once known mostly poverty.” In other words, the rest of the world is catching up to us economically, and that’s improving lives of billions of people.