No one has been more consistent in denouncing globalists and globalism than Donald Trump. If “tariff” is the favorite word of his dictionary, “globalist” is his preferred term of abuse.
How ironic then, that Trump is turning himself, and the US administration, into an Uberglobalist, and one who is hurting the US more than other countries. The longer-term effects of his chaotic policy style—whose only charitable explanation is that it is shocking the world into a new paradigm—will be to make for more globalization. It might even lead to a better and more multilateral version of globalization.
Trump’s Tariffs
Trump is like the stereotypical headteacher in the old joke who always explains to pupils he will cane—in an effort to show his deep humanity—that “this will hurt me more than it will hurt you.” This dictum certainly applies to the new US trade regime. Yes, it will hurt the United States more than most countries affected by the supposedly “reciprocal” tariffs announced on so-called “Liberation Day,” April 2.
It used to seem that the tariff regime initiated by the first Trump administration, and lamentably continued under the Biden presidency, was shooting itself in the foot, in the sense that—as later academic studies showed—the tariffs did not generate new jobs (although the measures had a political effect in that they increased support for Republican candidates).
The new regime after April 2 is much more destructive. It increases costs for a large number of US businesses, including very important exporters. Steel and aluminum tariffs inevitably damage machine tools, engineering, aerospace, with the cost of imports (a direct burden on American producers) rising by some $100 billion. Automobile producers are hit by increased costs of parts that are shipped from Canada and Mexico and then turned into US cars that are then exported. The tariff regime is America shooting itself in the head.
In addition, the concept of Trump’s trade war fails to take into account the complexity of modern globalization, and in particular of very long and intricate supply chains that extend the old principle of specialization and comparative advantage. An iPhone is not made in one country: Some 43 countries are involved in some stage of the production process. Garments are spun and woven and dyed across frontiers. Pharmaceuticals often involve raw materials and active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) from China, then manufactured into generics in India. Putting in one set of tariffs simply leads to a tweaking of supply chains, with strategic relocations of production processes and ultimately more rather than less complexity in the geographic distribution of production. It is not just a matter of simply making more bits of the iPhone in India and less in China.
Some of the worst Trump tariff damage will be done to relatively poor countries, such as Lesotho, which had the distinction of topping the April 2 list with a 50 percent rates and sells a mixture of high value diamonds and cheap textiles. UNCTAD, the United Nations’s trade and development experts unit, explained how Madagascar with a 47 percent rate was being taxed for sales of goods that the US does not produce. The tariff regime is America shooting itself in the heart.
The Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement on the surface is about turning one’s back on the rest of the world, with echoes of the aviator Charles Lindbergh’s isolationist America First Committee of the 1930s. It demands turning back all the elements of the globalization that drove the world at the turn of the millennium. What it is in fact doing is attempting to create a heartless and headless world, driven solely by the great power fantasies of autocratic rulers.
Before MAGA, there was open trade and the accession of new countries, China and Russia, to the World Trade Organization (WTO), in an attempt to convince them of the benefits of an open and liberal world order. That is now replaced by a bewildering slew of high tariffs, mostly directed against traditional US friends and allies. In the previous era, large numbers of migrants, skilled and unskilled, crossed the frontier. Now they are being sent back, often brutally. And once there were open capital markets. Now President Trump’s advisers are thinking about extraordinary interventionist measures, such as pressure to convert short term treasury securities into very long-term bonds, a disruptive move that probably constitutes a default. All are forms of disruption, intended to remove a system that many Americans felt and feel has not worked for them.
But in fact, globalization is continuing, just in a different form. Former key Trump adviser Elon Musk has a vast international portfolio of business interests, notably in China. Trump himself has global real estate; his family is busy extending the company’s footprint. These interests play a key role in defining US policy. The only really powerful card the administration might play to bring Russian President Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table over an end to his war on Ukraine is the prospect of a large inflow of American investment in energy and minerals.
Security and the Middle East
A few months after Liberation Day, the intensification of the Israel-Hamas-Iran conflict gave another instance of the divided character of the Trumpian vision of international order. One of the main attractions of the MAGA vision for many Americans was the promise of global disengagement, condemnation of “forever wars,” and the claim that the first Trump administration was the first postwar presidency to avoid foreign military intervention.
In 2019, Trump characteristically proclaimed that “Going into the Middle East is the worst decision ever made.” But in 2025, going for a settlement by the master of “the Art of the Deal” (the title of his ghost-written book) required the same threat escalation as had been applied to trade policy, and the same risk that escalation might do deep damage, in this case even much more dangerous scenarios of unpredictable military engagement and even nuclear conflict. What happens if the bombing of three sites of the Iranian nuclear program is not enough to intimidate the leadership in Tehran? The use of a tactical nuclear weapon?
Either likely outcome, escalation to full out conflict or de-escalation as America steps down, will reduce the credibility and hence the power of the United States. That logic was already abundantly clear in the tariff case. The yo-yo of tariff announcements, with a pullback after business protests about the extent of the damage, created a new narrative: Trump had been forced to step down by the sharp Chinese response. The Geneva-based economist Richard Baldwin concluded in a social media post in May that the Trump method should be called “The Art of the Reel.” Hit hard. Get hit back. Go home. Declare huge triumph.” Reformulated by Robert Armstrong of the Financial Times as TACO (“Trump Always Chickens Out”), the analysis drove Trump into an incandescent rage, and made the likelihood of dangerous and damaging escalation in both trade and Middle Eastern politics more rather than less likely.
The Return of Globalism
This new proclivity for high tariffs and deal-making, however, is globalism under another name. In fact, this is actually exactly what the man who first applied the label in the discussion of US international relations analyzed. The term “globalist” originated with an émigré German scholar at Columbia University named Ernst Jäckh, who used the word in a 1943 book titled The War for Man’s Soul to describe what he also called “Hitlerism.” The German leader, he wrote, “has embarked on a ‘holy war’ as the God-sent leader of a ‘chosen people’ bred not for imperialism but for globalism—his world without end.” Hitler and Stalin were globalists in the sense that they had an ideology that they wanted to project across the whole world. Both leaders indeed kept globes on their desk—an interior design choice memorably satirized in Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator.
Very soon, the label was used in the intense debate about America’s place in making a new world order. Critics of an overextended American role in the world deployed the term of abuse, sometimes appropriately, as a criticism of US engagement in the United Nations system, or interventions in Korea and Vietnam, and then in the Middle East. The label had some power because it was specifically designed to describe a grab for world power without an undergirding ethical principle. Hitler and Stalin were clearly unprincipled, even demonic, globalists.
Trump’s attack on globalists was fundamentally directed at an out-of-touch, amoral, international elite dedicated to wokeism. He is attempting to replace them with an alternative, amoral group formed around anti-wokeism.
Some MAGA advocates have tried to argue that there is indeed a profound ethical principle underpinning their movement’s attempt to reinvent not only America but the world. It is a principle of sovereignism, that every country—and especially big and powerful countries—have a primary, even exclusive, duty to their own inhabitants. America First.
In a now celebrated interview with Fox News, US Vice President JD Vance explained that, “You love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country. And then after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.” Defending this, the vice president, a recent convert to Catholicism, then added on Elon Musk’s X platform: “Just google ‘ordo amoris.’” It is doubtful than many of his audience understood the reference, but it triggered an intellectual storm, and in the end a condemnation from the lips of the dying Pope Francis.
Ordo amoris refers to St. Augustine’s presentation of the consequences of divine love, and the problem of a duty to love all humans when it is clear that that love often involves choices or what modern political scientists would term tradeoffs. We ought to be most conscious of an obligation of charity to those who are closest to us. But there is nowhere in St. Augustine or in the Christian tradition the implication that this means that the family is the first priority, and neighbors in a strictly geographic sense the next, and so on. On the contrary, caritas is about the application of a principle of divine love to strangers, when and if we interact with them. And globalization means that this interaction can be across long distances. Vance wanted to end the ordo with the American frontier. The backlash against American disorder will create a discussion about a genuine ordo.
The Chances for Multilateralism, and for Europe
Globalism, or the ethically and morally unanchored pursuit of advantage and interest on a global scale, is at the core of MAGA. The vision and the approach produce, as the language of Augustine suggests, disorder rather than order. Jäckh was right about a battle for the world’s soul. It may now be time to Make America Ethical Again, but that will only occur when the world becomes more ethical and more genuinely multilateral.
Europe has a powerful role to play here. Its political and economic elite is now speaking with new confidence. It is possible it may also act with more confidence. One of the great flaws of the early 1990s was the failure to develop European security and military cooperation. In the same days in November 1991 that the Soviet Union was dismembered in the meetings of Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarus leaders in Belovezh, Western European political leaders were preparing monetary union at Maastricht. It may ironically be good that a big cumbersome European military bureaucracy, one that would have perpetuated the mindset of the late 20th century, was not installed.
Today in the aftermath of Russia’s attack on Ukraine, and especially after the dramatic demonstration effect of Ukraine’s Operation Spider's Web in June 2025, the emphasis is on cheaply produced drones, the use of artificial intelligence (AI), but also of volunteer social networks that assemble and disseminate military information (and guide drones): a real civil militia fighting a new kind of war.
Shifting the Debate from Trade to Financial Flows
Economic weapons can also be a tool for Europe to assemble the basis for a new, better, and more universal multilateralism. Trade and exchange rate policy in past eras of globalization were characteristically handled by different agencies, commerce departments, and finance ministries; their interaction has always been contentious. In the 1930s, the world lurched into division and conflict because trade negotiators argued that they could not produce a settlement before the exchange rate was fixed, and monetary officials agreed that some exchange rate settlement was desirable but could not happen before a general trade opening. Hence there was a stalemate, and protectionism escalated.
A further mechanism has now come to the fore. This can best be understood through reflection on the balance of payments. A country with a large trade deficit, like the US, still needs to be in balance, or fund the deficit; and it gets there because foreigners buy US securities or invest in America. The inflow of foreign funds to finance corporate investment, but also government deficits, now running at very high levels—over 7 percent in 2024 and estimated at a similar level in 2025—is so crucial because Americans do not save very much. Thus, the country imports savings from the rest of the world, and they pay for the trade deficit.
This is where Trump tariff proposals complicate matters. The US wants foreign investment as a key to future American growth. Biden needed this for the big infrastructure investments under the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act; and Trump needs this even more for reshaping the country—making his “golden age”—through AI. The character of the deal was at the fore during the inauguration. One of the first guests in the White House under the new administration was SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, there with the CEOs of Oracle and OpenAI. A new venture, Stargate, initially in Texas, is supposed to steer the AI revolution.
There may be an irony in the way a project of reclaiming sovereignty to launch what Trump calls “a thrilling new era of national success” depends on technical change paid through global funding. It was after all the combination of technology and globalized finance that made American workers and the America middle classes vulnerable. Job losses and insecurity turned them into Trump voters.
The dependence is not just rich in irony. It makes for a fundamental vulnerability. The success calculation depends on foreign money, but if that dries up, the promise of a miracle also fades. And it is possible to think of different ways that abundant funding—which had been the key to the era of globalization—might end.
First, the funding might end if globalized bond markets worry about the capacity of the US to repay the large debt built up. Since 2022, and the experiment of the Liz Truss government in the UK, which wanted to make a similar gamble on growth, the British bond market has been cited as a warning to Americans. The privilege of having a reserve currency does not mean that you can do absolutely anything. At some point, and usually very dramatically, as in 1931 or in 1971, the sentiment shifts. Revulsion and incredulity replace credibility. The use of the US dollar as a foreign policy instrument in a divided world makes that outcome even likelier.
Second, the funding would stop if the promise of the future suddenly appears oversold, or if the technology disappoints. Many investors worry that the soaring stock prices for tech stocks indicate a bubble on the point of bursting. A gamble on growth will require vast investments, but if the bubble bursts they may be unfinished, orphaned, and wasted.
Third, the funding would end if major providers of capital intervened to stop their citizens and their corporations investing in the US. Such an action could well be a response to the problems created across the world by some combination of American tariff policy or a strong dollar regime. If the producers of French wines, German automobiles, or Chinese aircraft and solar panels cannot sell their products in the US, their governments might contemplate limiting investments in the United States. Figures like Masayoshi Son who bring investment and jobs would face more and more constraints.
The flow of funds across frontiers has been most readily influenced by governments by changing the tax treatment of foreign investments. One of the drivers of the new Trump initiatives is pressure from the tech giants to change unfavorable tax treatment, notably in Europe. The global corporate minimum tax, negotiated by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), is under threat. An escalation of the tax conflict would mean Europeans taxing not only foreign corporations in Europe, but their own corporations and citizens investing in the US. Such a step would make the balancing of US payments harder, but might also divert European funds back into Europe. It may be one of the quick paths to decline that Trumpian shock tactics have opened up. It should be presented as a way of increasing European competitiveness.
Economic fashions are contagious. It is only a matter of time before the logic of the tariff imbroglio becomes apparent, and somebody makes “Make Europe Great Again” the central slogan of European politics. But the real debates will be about the management and control of investment and financial flows, and not about trade. As the new discussion unfolds, it will be the perverse and unintended result of the globalist US campaign against globalism. Alternatives to globalism will actually prove to be just as global as the world order their followers wanted to, and tried to, replace. Globalization will be back, in a reinvigorated and multilateral form.
Harold James is the Claude and Lore Kelly Professor in European Studies at Princeton University, Professor of History and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School, and an associate at the Bendheim Center for Finance. His The War of Words: A Glossary of Globalization appeared in 2021.
