Slobodian Analyzes Global Trade Future in NYRB Symposium
Professor Quinn Slobodian, Professor of International History at the Pardee School of Global Studies, has contributed to The New York Review of Books’ ongoing symposium analyzing the implications of the 2024 election. His piece examines the potential reshaping of global trade policy following Trump’s return to office.
Slobodian analyzes how the first Trump administration’s approach to trade policy became partially integrated into subsequent economic thinking. “The first time Trump was elected, there were dire prophecies about how his policies would affect global trade,” he writes, noting that even critics of globalization warned that “his tariffs would destroy the world economy.”
Looking at current developments, Slobodian examines Trump’s campaign promise of thousand-percent tariffs on Chinese products, suggesting these might be “negotiation tactics of a madman rather than concrete policy proposals.” He predicts several specific policy shifts, including a move away from green capitalism toward “carbon- and extraction-driven development” and a return to “the high times of asset price inflation and share buybacks.”
The analysis outlines several concrete predictions for international economic institutions: “The World Trade Organization, born in 1995 and useful only insofar as it delivered on American goals, will continue its senescence and likely early interment before it reaches middle age. Badly needed debt relief for the global south will lose any chance of US support.”
Slobodian concludes by addressing claims that these policies might benefit working-class Americans, writing that while “National Conservatism’s claim that the GOP is the new party of the working class has been realized at the ballot box,” there’s “no sign that it will flatten the country’s ever-steeper hierarchies of wealth.”
The piece appears alongside contributions from five other scholars and analysts examining various aspects of the election’s implications, as part of The New York Review of Books’ continuing coverage of political developments.
Quinn Slobodian is Professor of International History at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. He is also a contributing writer to the New Statesman, co-editor of Contemporary European History, and co-director of the History and Political Economy Project. Learn more about Quinn Slobodian at his faculty profile.