Trump’s Tariffs = Localist Liberation?

On so-called “Liberation Day,” the Trump administration announced its new wave of tariffs. The language was poignant. Liberation. It was a word meant to stir, to conjure up the dream of breaking free from foreign exploitation.

Dependence on global trade is indeed a trap. For decades, our deepening reliance on faraway markets and supply chains has left us unable to meet even our most basic needs – from food to jobs to medicine. We’ve become chronically dependent on the whims of global businesses, banks, and their distant, profit-hungry boards – institutions over which we have no control.

So there is a real need to move away from this dependence by diversifying our national economies. In fact, in an era of climate shocks and pandemics, it makes sense to decentralize the production of our basic needs as much as possible. And this would require the right to prioritize and protect our local, regional and national economies from global monopolies.

Oh protectionism, that old word. Thanks to Trump, it’s been taken down off the back shelf and dusted off for the first time in decades. Most mainstream commentators speak the word like vitriol, but common sense begs: what’s wrong with protecting your own economy?

The question is: protection from whom?

Trump believes the danger comes from other countries “ripping us off.” But that’s yesterday’s story. Today, multinational corporations hold more wealth and power than many nation-states – and they owe allegiance to no country. Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) clauses in trade treaties allow corporations to sue governments for trying to protect people or planet. From Thailand to Germany, governments have been sued for “lost profits” over everything from banning toxic mining to raising minimum wages. This paralyses national governments and makes a joke of democracy. It leaves no doubt about who calls the shots in the global economy.

Against this backdrop, tariffs offer no path to freedom. They are outdated, antagonistic gestures that pit countries against one another at a time when we should be uniting against our real common oppressor: corporate rule.

That said, it is possible that tariffs could help reduce the most absurd kinds of global trade. Take, for example, the fact that, every year since the covid pandemic, the US has imported about 1.5 million tons of beef – more than any other country. And guess what – it exported almost exactly the same amount. This trade-for-trade’s-sake squanders precious resources, drives up emissions, enforces toxic monocultural farming across vast areas, and contributes to the build-up of mountains of plastic. But emissions from global trade receive no mention in the COP climate negotiations.

So perhaps a silver lining might yet be eked out of the tariffs proposed. To make a real difference, however, they’d need to be part of a coordinated plan to rebuild healthy national, regional or local economies. And Trump’s tariffs are part of no such plan. In fact, quite to the contrary: the administration recently cut $1 billion in funding for two USDA programs designed to help local food purchasing – initiatives that were just getting on their feet, born as they were out of the supply-chain chaos of the COVID era. Meanwhile, Trump’s tax cuts continue to favor the global elites, and his plans to ramp up industrial extraction do not square with any attempt to protect and nurture local resources.

In exposing the limitations of tariffs, let’s not buy into the propaganda spouted by the mainstream corporate media, which continues with zealous assertions that global trade benefits us all. Even left-wing commentators have been largely unhelpful in exposing the truth about global trade: that it’s enriched global corporations at the expense of society; that it’s been an ecological disaster and an economic trap.

It’s also been an assault on people’s jobs and prosperity. In the Global South, millions of land-based people have been disenfranchised and uprooted to fuel sweatshop economies. In the North, workers have been laid off or demoted as jobs were shipped overseas. With the deregulation of trade and finance, the gap between rich and poor has widened to obscene proportions in almost every country, and even once-affluent middle-classes are plagued by economic instability and a cost-of-living crisis.

In this way, the economic tyranny of globalization is what made space for demagogues like Trump to come to power in the first place. The forces that elected him are largely borne of rising economic insecurity and discontent with the political process. And he is far from an isolated phenomenon. Confusion and fear, unaddressed by mainstream media and politics, has been capitalized on by the far-right worldwide.

So, yes, we need to condemn globalization loud and clear. And we need a cohesive strategy that moves us sensibly and sanely in the opposite direction.

The strategy would be two-fold:

1. Re-regulate multinational corporations. Rein in their impunity, revoke their special rights under trade law, and hold them accountable. This would be the first port of call for halting the corporate takeover of our democracies and protecting human rights and the environment.

2. Simultaneously rebuild resilient, regional economies. This means reinvesting in local infrastructure, supporting education and training for place-based employment, prioritizing research and development for smaller-scale production, clearing red tape for local businesses, and—most crucially—regenerating the real economy: soil, water, biodiversity, and the fabric of interdependent human communities.

In many areas of the world, from the USA to China, from India to Australia, people are already engaged in this work: they are forming local business alliances, starting local finance initiatives, exploring locally-based education and energy schemes, and, most centrally, building a genuinely regenerative local food movement. All of these efforts reweave the fabric of local interdependence and connection. And while they are already growing, policy change is really needed to help them multiply and flourish.

This two-pronged plan has a name: localization. And that would offer a real escape from the global trade trap – a scheme worthy of the word liberation.