Donald Trump declares a trade war in stages. From the emotional and rhetorical offensive, to the collapse of global confidence and the stock market turmoil, the US president intends to reform global trade through bilateral negotiations in just 90 days, negotiating with 90 countries at once. In the Trumpian chaos method, system reform is approached from a place of uncertainty, but with exceptions, with the forced pause of a dark week confirming the instability with which the global order is being redrawn. Amid so much retreat and so much rhetorical contradiction, Trump has tested the limits of his invulnerability. The power of Trumpian unpredictability still has some red lines: the vertigo caused by the stock market crash and the threat of recession, and the realization of the costs that tariffs could inflict on those who brought him to power; hence the exemptions for technological products so as not to penalize the foreign production of American giants.
But, after Brexit (which, seen today, seems like a first paperback essay), we are witnessing another brutal decoupling underway, now between the United States and China. Washington and Beijing have moved from the game of mutual containment of recent years to a frontal challenge that calls into question the entire process of reglobalization. If the Biden administration, in the name of reindustrialization and national security, already maintained many Trump-era tariffs, especially in China, but also in the European Union, now the fractures in this hyperconnected world are accelerating.
In the port of Shanghai, hundreds of containers of goods that were due to leave for the United States have remained unloaded, while their owners look for alternative markets. The tariff war between Washington and Beijing not only breaks mutual dependencies but forces us to rethink the alliances that both had forged with the rest of the world in recent decades. That's why Xi Jinping is starting his own Asian tour to strengthen regional ties, while Brussels is negotiating with Washington from an awareness of vulnerability that dwarfs it, despite the fact that the EU is the main trading partner of both China and the United States, and that transatlantic relations constitute the largest trading bloc on the planet.
The European Union is the clearest example of how the Twenty-Seven are internally divided when it comes to making their risk reduction strategy more flexible (de-risking) regarding China, but also when it comes to trying to appease the Trump administration's retaliation, given that a good number of EU partners don't want to damage their relationship with Washington over security issues. The challenge for Brussels is how to adapt to the new scenario without getting caught in this structural rivalry.
Bertrand Badie, professor emeritus at Sciences Po in Paris, asserted in 2019 that "the second act of globalization had begun." After an initial act of "naive construction" post-Berlin Wall, which equated globalization with neoliberalism to build a world conceived as a market, marginalizing politics and sweeping away social protection, Badie pointed to an awareness of the impact that this reconnection of global dependency had entailed, but also a recognition of the political and social costs that this uneven growth had left on a significant portion of the population.
Now, however, Trump's now-famous Oval Office whiteboard, with its arbitrary distribution of countries and customs duties, acts as a comprehensive amendment to a system that was already discredited and in the midst of a rethink. It also affects the privileged position the United States has held in the global economy, with the dollar as the dominant reserve currency. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer forcefully asserted that Trump's so-called "liberation day" marks the end of an era. Globalization is giving way to geopolitical fragmentation and a brutal crisis of confidence in an imperfect, failing system.
