Neoliberal globalization is dead, long live neoliberalism. United States (US) Pres. Donald Trump offers not a deviation from the past but, perhaps, its logical next stage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The last half century of neoliberal globalization opened up economies and integrated them in the most profitable ways possible for capital and corporations. This was folded into a broader project of neoliberalism of supposedly free market capitalism with a minimalist state upholding individual liberties.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Opening up was successfully done by multilateral institutions since the 1980s and by free trade agreements (FTAs) from the 1990s onwards, reshaping economic policies around the world \u2013 especially, but not only, in the vast Global South. The world\u2019s labor and resources were organized into the most efficient profit-seeking and -making system in human history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Things were a little different with the broader project, which was never more than ideological cover for rapacious capital accumulation. Once monopoly capital emerged, markets could never be free and their trajectory is to be increasingly dominated and controlled \u2013 instead, the neoliberal era saw the unparalleled self-serving expansion of corporate power. The notion of a minimalist state was likewise an illusion, as if those benefiting from state control would ever seek to weaken it \u2013 instead, the neoliberal era saw governments systematically reengineered to serve private profits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Stripped of specious free market dogma and libertarian pretenses, neoliberalism<\/a> is ultimately about the state privileging capital, corporate profits and elite wealth over everything else including the people\u2019s well-being.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Which is also to say that neither governments nor corporations ever really had a principled commitment to neoliberal globalization. Unlike the true believers steeped in textbooks, theory and dogma, they embraced openness only when profitable \u2013 and readily turned to protectionism when it served their interests.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Neoliberal globalization stumbles<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Neoliberal globalization was immensely profitable for capital worldwide, but it also had unintended consequences for the world\u2019s sole superpower, the US \u2013 most notably the erosion of its hegemony in the face of a rising challenge from China, which now shapes so much of its imperial behavior.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Trump\u2019s \u201cLiberation Day\u201d hyper-tariffs<\/a> which suddenly raised US tariffs to their highest in a hundred years was a sensational moment signaling the US\u2019s break from free trade orthodoxy. More so because this occurred amid open US disdain for multilateralism which was the main vehicle for pushing open trade and investment around the world since the 1980s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But neoliberal globalization has already been unraveling for some time. The direction of economic policy moved in the other direction towards protectionism<\/a> after the 2008 global financial crisis. The countries with the most new protectionist measures were conspicuously the G7<\/a> (26,725 measures) and the BRICS<\/a> blocs (20,302) \u2013 with the most interventions by the US (10,975) followed by China (7,956).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Exaggerated \u201cfree market\u201d claims also didn\u2019t hold up in the real world. China\u2019s spectacular ascent used markets \u2013 but, critically, with strong and sustained state intervention, defying the textbook principles of neoliberal globalization. In contrast, the Global South, which was forced to liberalize the most, suffered deindustrialization and agricultural decline, weakened social services, and the chronic disempowerment of its poor majorities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Meanwhile, government spending soared \u2013 such as in the G7 economies \u2013 not to uplift the public, but to finance corporate welfare, military contracts, and regulatory structures that protect elite interests.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Trumpian offensive<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Yet while the Trump administration represents a rupture from neoliberal globalization, its protectionist stance reflects a deeper continuity. Trump is not repudiating neoliberalism but rather accelerating and concentrating it \u2013 where state power is not rolled back, but retooled to even more forcefully serve monopoly capital. It is an intensification of neoliberalism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The US massively raised tariffs to bully countries into further opening their markets to American goods and services. Power imbalance and one-sidedness have always been at the heart of neoliberal globalization \u2013 what once took trade negotiators years to secure in FTAs, the US now seeks to extract in a matter of weeks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As it is, the White House claims that \u201cmore than 75 countries<\/a>\u201d have reached out to discuss new trade deals. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was actually pretty transparent and said the tariffs gave Trump \u201cmaximum leverage<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Far from retreating from globalization, Trump is restructuring it through the lens of US hegemony \u2013 moving from multilateral liberalism to bilateral coercion. The US\u2019s undermining of the World Trade Organization (WTO), exiting United Nations (UN) bodies, disregarding FTAs and other disengagements from multilateralism are not anti-globalization, but efforts to unshackle American monopoly capital from constraints and to wield its dominance more unilaterally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The shift to \u201cAmerica First\u201d trade and investment policy is about leveraging US market, financial, and military supremacy to extract better terms for the US \u2013 especially against strategic rivals like China.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The US has also launched a massive deregulation plan, including issuing an executive order<\/a> against perceived \u201cregulatory onslaught\u201d to give corporate America\u2019s profit-making even wider latitude. Trump seeks to relax<\/a> federal government controls on telecommunications, transport, mining, energy, food and agriculture, health, labor benefits, the environment and many other sectors. Business groups like the US Chamber of Commerce, American Petroleum Institute (API) and National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) have already expressed support.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He put supposedly independent federal regulators<\/a> Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Federal Communications Commission (FCC) directly under his control. Trump is apparently also already maneuvering to have greater supervision even of the Federal Reserve<\/a>. These unshackle corporations from regulatory constraints on profit-making to protect the public. They also give the government even greater power to favor specific business allies, as well as over the financial system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Trump\u2019s economic program also includes classic neoliberal measures. On one hand, there are massive tax cuts for the rich and corporations by extending the first Trump administration\u2019s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which substantially lowered tax rates for corporations<\/a> (from 35% to 21%) and individuals<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On the other hand, to contain growing federal deficits, it threatens cuts<\/a> to public spending on social programs<\/a> \u2013 Medicaid, Medicare, SNAP food aid, veterans aid, federal grants for public schools, and possibly even Social Security \u2013 and on health<\/a>. Populist rhetoric aside, these will deepen inequality and worsen working-class precarity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n