For decades, the United States sold globalisation as an economic religion. Free trade was presented as inevitable. Supply chains were optimised across continents. Manufacturing migrated toward lower-cost jurisdictions. Wall Street celebrated efficiency, while Washington explained that global integration would ultimately enrich everyone. The world was invited to believe that comparative advantage had replaced geopolitical rivalry. Now the same country is preparing tariffs of at least 10% on imports from most major trading partners, while invoking concerns about forced labour as justification. The irony is almost elegant. The proposed measures would affect not only China but also allies and strategic partners, including the European Union, the United Kingdom, Canada, Mexico, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, India, and Switzerland. Some countries would face tariffs of 12.5% as Washington attempts to reinstate trade barriers previously invalidated by the US Supreme Court.

Officially, the argument concerns labour standards and unfair competition. Unofficially, this is something far more profound: the admission that the United States no longer believes the current version of globalisation works in its favour. And that changes everything. The American economy is now confronting the consequences of a model it helped create. Industrial dependence on Asia, fragile supply chains, strategic vulnerabilities, rising political populism, and widening fiscal deficits have progressively transformed free trade from an ideological certainty into a national security issue. The language of economics is slowly being replaced by the language of power. The problem for Washington is that rebuilding industrial capacity after decades of offshoring is not simply a matter of imposing tariffs. Entire ecosystems were transferred abroad: manufacturing networks, logistics infrastructure, skilled labour, industrial clusters and technological integration. Those systems cannot be recreated overnight through political slogans or emergency duties. Especially not in an inflationary environment already destabilised by the Iran war and energy disruptions.

This is where the situation becomes dangerous. The United States is simultaneously attempting to: contain inflation, finance enormous fiscal deficits, preserve dollar dominance, protect domestic industry, and maintain global economic leadership. Historically, those objectives are often contradictory. Tariffs may temporarily support certain domestic industries, but they also increase import costs, fragment supply chains, and reinforce inflationary pressures. In practice, consumers eventually absorb part of the cost through higher prices, while companies face more expensive inputs and weaker efficiency.

The timing is particularly problematic. The global economy is already under stress from energy shocks linked to the Middle East conflict. Shipping costs are rising. Supply chains are lengthening again. Bond markets are increasingly nervous. Long-duration sovereign debt is becoming structurally unstable in several developed economies. Under normal conditions, protectionism already creates inflationary friction. Combined with war-driven energy inflation, it becomes considerably more destabilising. Financial markets understand this perfectly well. This is why bond markets have become far more nervous than equity markets. Investors increasingly realise that inflation may not return rapidly to central bank targets. Structural fragmentation, deglobalisation and geopolitical rivalry are slowly replacing the disinflationary world that dominated the previous twenty years. The result is a world where: capital becomes more selective, financing costs remain structurally higher, supply chains become less efficient, and economic blocs progressively harden.

And perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this transformation is that the United States itself is now accelerating the fragmentation it once spent decades promoting. The rhetoric remains moral. The mechanics are increasingly geopolitical. Meanwhile, countries targeted by these measures are unlikely to remain passive indefinitely. China is already reinforcing alternative trade corridors and deepening ties with Russia, the Gulf, and parts of the emerging world. Europe remains trapped between strategic dependence on the United States and economic dependence on global trade. Emerging markets are beginning to adapt to a world in which access to dollars, supply chains, and external financing may no longer be politically neutral. Globalisation is not disappearing. It is simply becoming political again. And once trade becomes political, economics rarely remain stable for very long.