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.
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.
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 – especially, but not only, in the vast Global South. The world’s labor and resources were organized into the most efficient profit-seeking and -making system in human history.
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 – 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 – instead, the neoliberal era saw governments systematically reengineered to serve private profits.
Stripped of specious free market dogma and libertarian pretenses, neoliberalism is ultimately about the state privileging capital, corporate profits and elite wealth over everything else including the people’s well-being.
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 – and readily turned to protectionism when it served their interests.
Neoliberal globalization stumbles
Neoliberal globalization was immensely profitable for capital worldwide, but it also had unintended consequences for the world’s sole superpower, the US – 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.
Trump’s “Liberation Day” hyper-tariffs which suddenly raised US tariffs to their highest in a hundred years was a sensational moment signaling the US’s 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.
But neoliberal globalization has already been unraveling for some time. The direction of economic policy moved in the other direction towards protectionism after the 2008 global financial crisis. The countries with the most new protectionist measures were conspicuously the G7 (26,725 measures) and the BRICS blocs (20,302) – with the most interventions by the US (10,975) followed by China (7,956).
Exaggerated “free market” claims also didn’t hold up in the real world. China’s spectacular ascent used markets – 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.
Meanwhile, government spending soared – such as in the G7 economies – not to uplift the public, but to finance corporate welfare, military contracts, and regulatory structures that protect elite interests.
The Trumpian offensive
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 – where state power is not rolled back, but retooled to even more forcefully serve monopoly capital. It is an intensification of neoliberalism.
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 – what once took trade negotiators years to secure in FTAs, the US now seeks to extract in a matter of weeks.
As it is, the White House claims that “more than 75 countries” have reached out to discuss new trade deals. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was actually pretty transparent and said the tariffs gave Trump “maximum leverage.”
Far from retreating from globalization, Trump is restructuring it through the lens of US hegemony – moving from multilateral liberalism to bilateral coercion. The US’s 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.
The shift to “America First” trade and investment policy is about leveraging US market, financial, and military supremacy to extract better terms for the US – especially against strategic rivals like China.
The US has also launched a massive deregulation plan, including issuing an executive order against perceived “regulatory onslaught” to give corporate America’s profit-making even wider latitude. Trump seeks to relax 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.
He put supposedly independent federal regulators 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. 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.
Trump’s 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’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which substantially lowered tax rates for corporations (from 35% to 21%) and individuals.
On the other hand, to contain growing federal deficits, it threatens cuts to public spending on social programs – Medicaid, Medicare, SNAP food aid, veterans aid, federal grants for public schools, and possibly even Social Security – and on health. Populist rhetoric aside, these will deepen inequality and worsen working-class precarity.
Neoliberalism on overdrive
At one level, these are all part of a calculated strategy to reindustrialize the US, secure high-tech supremacy, and reassert imperialist dominance in an economically bipolar world. Trump’s policies seek to rebuild domestic manufacturing not for public welfare, but to ground American financial and technological elites in more secure profit ecosystems.
At another level, they are about significantly expanding the state’s role as enabler of capital accumulation and elite wealth. It is not a minimalist state retreating from economic life, but one being reengineered to serve elite interests at the people’s expense. Trump’s policies are poised to benefit large capital in sectors aligned with the US agenda: manufacturing and technology, military industries, fossil fuel energy, construction and infrastructure, and finance and private equity.
American billionaires like Donald Trump and Elon Musk taking high government office also starkly illustrate neoliberalism’s core dynamic: capital wielding state power. The super-rich no longer just influence policy from the shadows – they now brazenly take positions in government, laying bare neoliberalism.
Trump’s hyper-neoliberalism is jarring because it strips off the polite liberal multilateralist veneer and doubles down on its core logic. The illusion of a break masks its mutation into a more authoritarian, militarized, and chauvinist form. It is without apologies: raw, weaponized, and more dangerous than ever.
