Tim Geithner can't seem to catch a break. Our Treasury secretary was at Beijing University last week to assure the Chinese that their dollar investments were safe. The audience broke into laughter.

The Chinese should be wary of such hubris. While America's public finances are troubling, to say the least, Beijing and the rest of the world should examine the future for economies, including China's, that have become overwhelmingly dependent on exports. Their future looks as problematic as the future of the debt-ridden United States.

As ugly as the credit markets have been, trade has been worse. Since World War II, global trade has grown twice as fast as gross domestic product. But things have shifted with the downturn. For starters, the exports of the world's three biggest exporters — Germany, Japan and China — are 33 percent lower than they were a year ago. With American imports down by roughly the same amount, two-way trade has contracted by $1.5 trillion. There are real questions as to whether this development is more than a temporary pullback and will evolve into a quiet shift toward a new era of deglobalization.

Those in that snickering Chinese audience should consider that, on paper, the United States looks relatively immune to this trade collapse. American exports are 11 percent of GDP, according to the World Bank. Compare this to the exports-to-GDP ratios, for example, of China (42 percent), South Korea (46 percent), Germany (47 percent) and Thailand (73 percent).

What happens if the U.S. consumer pulls back permanently, as seems distinctly possible?

Beijing boasts of its big stimulus package. Yet the government's efforts to stimulate domestic consumption appear to be not much more than a large subsidized lending operation, a stimulus that is unlikely to be sustainable. Transforming China into a consumer economy to compensate for lost exports will take years. Beijing, too, secretly hopes the U.S. consumer will quickly come to the rescue.

The world may be waiting longer than it expects. The United States may be undergoing an economic shift.

At the Group of 20 summit in London, Obama said that the United States cannot be the world's consumer. On the surface, this sounds like a statement about the temporary condition of the business cycle.

Actually, Obama was talking about something far more significant — not outright Smoot-Hawley-style protectionism but a coming policy of small tax, spending and regulatory changes that will encourage this quiet trend toward deglobalization. Like it or not, this shift reflects a growing Washington mind-set that globalization has gone too far. Witness the Buy American provisions on Capitol Hill. Obama is playing not only to his union supporters but also to a segment of the U.S. corporate community whose enthusiasm for the global supply chain and "just-in-time" inventory management is waning.

And the coming rise in shipping costs has the potential to turbocharge this deglobalization process. The U.N. agreement last October on sulfur-burning levels for ships (not to mention California's own restrictions on ship emissions) are expected to send shipping costs skyrocketing.

Analyst Philip Verleger argues that the net result could well be that a lot of low-wage jobs that moved to China, India and other emerging markets will move back to the West.

But here's the punch line: A capital-dependent America can't decouple from the world, or we will face the danger of our own hubris.

America needs the world's capital as much as the world needs American consumers — an economic situation tantamount to a policy of mutually assured destruction.

True, the global system needs rebalancing. But until that happens, all parties need to think seriously about how to achieve a permanent worldwide recovery despite serious headwinds.

David M. Smick is a global financial strategist. He wrote this commentary for The Washington Post.