*Originally published in 2025 and preserved as part of our archive project.Get E-International Relations delivered to your inbox, free of charge. As you sign up, consider becoming a paid subscriber to support our work.

Over the last twenty years or so, using a wide range of empirical data and drawing from the works of Andre Gunder Frank, Peter Gowan and world system theorists, we have produced a trilogy whose key tenet is that the American system of global imperial governance established in the 1940s has, since the end of the 1960s, entered a period of protracted, yet sustained, decline (Fouskas & Gokay, 2005; Fouskas and Gokay, 2012; Fouskas & Gokay 2019). The global financial crisis of 2007-08, along with the Eurozone crisis and the health emergency of the Covid-19 pandemic, further transformed the Euro-Atlantic area into a hotbed of perpetual crisis. The United States’ proxy war with Russia over Ukraine, which provisionally united Euro-Atlanticism behind the façade of an antiquated Cold War policy of NATO expansion, did little to reverse the economic decline of the USA. On the contrary, it increased the United States’ deficits (domestic and international), devastated the European, especially German, industry, and widened the fissures within NATO. To put it bluntly, the factors that pulled the United States and the Western world as a whole out of the stagflation of the 1970s, chiefly under the aegis of the American-led policy of neo-liberal globalisation, have lost their propulsive force. This approach no longer works, especially for Europe and the United States.

Despite all this evidence pointing to a structural-historical decline of the Euro-Atlantic area as a whole, Editorials and prominent economists, such as Paul Krugman, castigate Trump as an “unstable individual” that knows nothing about politics and economics. President Trump’s tariff offensive was called by The Economist as “ruination day”. The sweeping tariffs imposed on the entire world, both allies and adversaries, have been regarded as economic madness. These tariffs on all imported goods represent the most significant surge in over 130 years, pushing the effective average tariff rate above 25%.  The intention was to reduce or eradicate the U.S. trade deficit and compel foreign manufacturers to invest in and sell directly in the U.S. It also aims to enable domestic manufacturers to replace foreign-made goods with U.S. products — thus adhering to the mantra of “Make America Great Again” (MAGA). Many mainstream economists and commentators described this as “wildly destructive stupidity,” “astonishing self-harm, " a lack of “any grown-ups in Trump’s economic team, " or being “divorced from the reality of trade”.

However, trying to understand tariffs based only on their immediate economic outcomes is misguided.  Even though Trump explained the logic of the tariffs as an attempt to correct the trade imbalance between the US and the rest of the world, White House officials outlined the expected goals behind the tariffs in more detail. They described these goals as concentrating economic forces nationally to “push for structural changes to the global economy to rectify challenges that are difficult to overcome, including high tariffs globally, currency and tax policies, intellectual property theft, and even health and labour standards”. Ultimately, Trump aims to reshape the global economic order by prioritising America’s national interest through this wide range of tariffs. It is also worth noting that when President Richard Nixon severed the dollar’s link with gold in 1971, he did so to eliminate the obstacles to the free flow of capital between countries, positioning the dollar at the centre of the global economic system, where its financial fluctuations would ultimately reach the United States through the T-Bills system and the offshore operations of Wall Street. This marked the beginning of the era of neo-liberal globalisation and financialisation. Team Trump Two (TTT) having correctly diagnosed the crisis of neoliberal globalisation, aims to reverse it by putting America’s national interest first.

The USA began to experience a trade deficit with other countries in the 1980s as American manufacturing shifted its operations to the Global South and Canada to capitalise on cheap labour and advanced technology. A significant portion of the goods exported to the USA originates from American companies operating in Mexico, Canada, and China, among other countries. Vietnam exports millions of shoes to the United States, produced in 59 USA-owned Nike factories there. Tesla manufactures the majority of its electric cars in China. Manufacturing costs in the........

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