There was a time not so impossibly long ago when the global economy was unrecognizable. Mercantilism, a trade doctrine focused on the zero-sum accumulation of wealth, reigned in world affairs: nations established exclusive imperial spheres of influence with sky-high tariffs and minimized imports from all outsiders with the goal of total self-reliance. The natural outcome of this lack of economic interdependence was constant colonial conflict. The lesson? In a world before international institutions, without global free markets of comparative advantage, peace was simply less profitable than war. With the modern world volatile as ever, protectionism has become popular, particularly in the Trump administration. Even total autarchy seems to be alluring once more. But history, as always, is the lesson for why we shouldn’t be tempted.
The world order which slowly replaced mercantilism — now called “capitalism” — was much different. Built around the revolutionary Anglo-Dutch invention of the joint stock company, it incentivized predictable legal systems enshrining property rights to make international commerce worthwhile, giving rise to democracy, liberty and the rule of law. Capitalism ruled as the global status quo for over three centuries, inspiring liberal revolutions against the previous mercantile structures, like the Glorious Revolution in Britain and the American Revolution. Eventually it created the world of unprecedented economic interconnectedness we inhabit today.
On April 2, 2025, President Trump announced sweeping tariffs on over 180 countries, verifying the world’s worst fears that America had abandoned not just leadership in the Western alliance but its place in the liberal international order altogether. I am not the type to make broad, overly-certain predictions of the future — but if I am allowed one, I anticipate that “Liberation Day” will be celebrated in Moscow, Beijing and Tehran for many generations to come.
I will not reiterate the collapse of liberalism in trans-national order, nor ruminate on what precisely the Chinese Century will mean for us, as many others have already done. Instead I intend to consider more specifically what the administration intends this post-capitalist global future to look like. Unfortunately, it seems, Trump’s view of trade policy resembles the mercantilism of pre-democratic global orders almost to a tee. In his perception, trade is an inerrant dichotomy, so far from the truth of economics as understood that it shouldn’t be surprising nobody’s attempted it in over three hundred years: you’re either getting a “good deal”, or you’re being “ripped off”.
This may sound petulant and childish — it is. But it also stands in almost exact overlap with the classical mercantilist theory of trade: that a nation should produce everything it needs domestically or within its own imperial sphere of influence, exporting maximally and importing only the bare minimum. In much the same way, Trumpism insists that trade deficits are universally toxic. Entirely zero-sum, it essentially fails to acknowledge even the possibility that an economic exchange between state actors can benefit both parties. It has no regard for the role of economic interdependence in sustaining peace and democracy, nor even an awareness of the basic truth that no single country is fit to produce every necessary good more efficiently than all conceivable foreign competitors: it only takes into account the short-term bottom line. As in mercantilism, in Trumpism the chief recipient of revenue is the state and a select few cronyistic national companies (Tesla, anyone?) — not individual capitalist producers broadly. Likewise, we can consider how the mercantile view of economics led to colonial expansion to prevent importing natural resources by acquiring them for oneself: what else can one call the Trump administration’s obsession with annexing Greenland for its abundant rare earth metals and natural gas?
Trump’s America also has an imperial touch in foreign policy. It disregards all alliances, except those temporary ones which are purely transactional. It bullies Ukraine into forking over mineral resources, for instance, totally ignoring the need for a like-minded coalition of states against an adversary (because, of course, it sees dictatorships and democracies as equally adversarial on the same incidental basis). What we are witnessing is not the deranged kamikaze of America’s diplomatic and economic hegemony for isolationist clout, as many intelligent people have concluded for lack of a better answer. It is a deliberate attempt to reverse the global order to its pre-capitalist consensus of mercantile empire: to the days of might-makes-right.
Most by now see something deeply illiberal in Trumpism, and many have even made comparisons to fascism or other forms of autocracy from the past century. But Trumpism is no artifact of the twentieth century — it is of the seventeenth century, and this fact is essential. This doctrine is so draconian and antiquated that it has not been implemented at scale since before the American Revolution. And if it should ultimately triumph, no matter how many delays it might take, April 2nd’s game of global economics proves one thing: liberal capitalism is over. Mercantilism is back. The redcoats have returned.
