Opinion | Globalization Is Collapsing. Brace Yourselves. (Gift Article)

18 comments

1. “There is room to argue about how much Mr. Trump and other right-wing leaders oppose globalization in its entirety. After all, they certainly cooperate with one another,” the historian Tara Zahra writes in a guest essay for Times Opinion. “But it is undeniable that free trade and the free movement of people, two phenomena that made America rich and powerful, have come under intense and sustained political attack and that resentment about globalization has been a critical force in the rise of the global right. The echoes from the first third of the 20th century are loud and clear. So what can we learn about the current moment from the first collapse of globalization? Will it take a third world war to turn this ship around? Or are there other, less ominous possibilities?”

   Read the full essay [here, for free](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/05/opinion/globalization-collapse.html?unlocked_article_code=1.9U4.iE92.cl3meEY9itUk&smid=re-nytopinion), even without a Times subscription.

2. It was a managed exit under Biden, who wanted to decrease US reliance on external sources while improving US manufacturing.

   Trump is taking a flamethrower to the whole thing and is going to set the entire world back a decade, at least. We aren’t ready to decouple, and you can’t create entire logistic chains in six months. People are going to die from lack of basic food, medicine and support in consideable numbes even in relatively wealthy countries for the first time in generations.

3. I don’t think the US withdrawing from Globalization will kill globalization. Systems will just shift and keep functioning around the US. The tariffs will cause some manufacturing to shift back to the US, but then because of the tariffs people outside the US won’t want to buy them or won’t be able to afford to buy them. They’re approaching this like they have a solution, but there are only trade offs no solutions.

4. Globalisation started collapsing the day rich countries started using poor nations as manufacturing sweatshops and using sanctions as a tool to control them.

5. Globalization will collapse when all the good paying jobs are exported overseas and all that’s left for your population is to consume, aka the path Americans were set upon in 1975.

   First they came for manufacturing, and I did not speak out because I was a software engineer.

6. The world will be divided into spheres of influences, where some countries may overlap like the Philippines (US vs China) and the UK (US vs EU), and Ukraine (US vs Russia).

7. The problem with this narrative is that the people voting for the collapse of globalization are not the poor. For example: https://www.vox.com/politics/369797/trump-support-class-local-rich-arlie-hochschild

   It has much more to do with perceptions and with culture.

8. The international trade net is so interwoven that a collapse of globalism is de facto impossible, at least at this point in time. All that will come of it is rising prices and recession.

9. If China, Canada, Europe are any good, they put suitable retaliatory tariffs against the USA, while reducing trade barriers amongst themselves. That way globalisation continues, just outside the USA.

10. Us consumption was acting as something of a heat sink for global overproduction. Without the US, there are very few other places that have large millennial cohorts capable of soaking up exports, which will lead to protectionism as those goods try to find new homes.

11. This is trump’s way of forcing new deals that benefit America. Now my guess is that we’ll wind up negotiating the exact same deals we had last week but Trump will proclaim he got a better deal and he’s the world’s best negotiator.

12. The surprise isn’t that it’s ending, the surprise is the fact that the US put up so long with economic actors like the CCP, who is an unrepentant lying, scamming, and thieving actor with economic model of being a salty water bottle merchant supplying to those wanting to quench their thirst, or to other countries who have double or triple digit tariff rates on goods that the US was likely to export, while needing/wanting access to the US market, capital, tech, and defense commitments.

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14. Fantastic. I hope it dies and blows up faster. Globalization and global “free” trade is a lie. 

    If anything, I wish for higher tariffs and will throw a party for the death of globalization. 

    The experts who told us China would be “liberalized” by global “free” trade and that there would be no consequences to offshoring everything never admitted they were wrong. 

    Neoconservatives and neoliberals were wrong on trade. Paleoconservatives like Pat Buchanan were completely correct on trade. 

    Hamilton, Lincoln, McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt were fine with tariffs/protectionism because they realize that a nation isn’t just an economic zone. These past political figures are more trustworthy than the so called current experts who have continued to get everything wrong for decades.

15. The two biggest economies aren’t backing down. The writing is on the wall and we are headed for full blown war. The winner will create a new world order.

16. U.S. consumption cooled global overproduction.

17. globalization has been collapsing for years now, with Brexit, and the rise of nationalist leaders across the world. Mainly driven by immigration and the general infiltration of rivaling countries into Western institutions.

    we’re currently in the middle of de-globalization. The recent tarrifs didn’t start it

18. Globalization is not collapsing. Another narcissistic and insular piece by an increasingly out of touch American populace. The world will adapt and trade around America and these people will be staring at each other as the country faces a colective ego death from the narcissistic collapse of no longer being the global center of trade.

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