Globalization

Globalization refers to the deepening integration of national economies, cultures, and political systems through trade, capital flows, migration, and communication technology, accelerating sharply after the Cold War’s end in 1991 removed the last major barrier to a single global market. Conservatives have divided sharply over globalization in a way few other topics produce: one conservative tradition, rooted in classical liberal economics, treats free trade and open markets as a straightforward extension of the free-market principles conservatives already hold, while a second, more recent national-conservative current argues that unmanaged globalization has hollowed out domestic manufacturing, weakened national sovereignty, and eroded the shared culture a nation needs to govern itself.

This split hardened into open political conflict during the 2016 American presidential election, when Donald Trump campaigned explicitly against trade agreements that mainstream Republican orthodoxy had supported since Ronald Reagan, and it remains the clearest fault line inside conservative politics in the United States, Britain, and much of Europe today.¹

Key Takeaways

• China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001 accelerated a manufacturing decline in the United States that economists later termed the “China shock,” displacing an estimated one to two million American manufacturing jobs between 1999 and 2011.²
• Free-market conservatives, following economists such as Milton Friedman, argue that trade barriers function as a tax on domestic consumers and that comparative advantage raises living standards even when it displaces specific industries.
• National conservatives argue that economic efficiency arguments ignore the strategic risk of depending on rival or potentially hostile nations, particularly China, for critical goods including pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, and rare earth minerals.
• The North American Free Trade Agreement, signed by the outgoing Bush administration in December 1992 and pushed through Congress and implemented under Bill Clinton in 1993, remains the most cited example in the American debate over globalization’s costs and benefits to domestic workers.
• Supply chain disruptions during the COVID-19 pandemic beginning in 2020 shifted a meaningful share of conservative opinion, including previously free-trade-oriented voices, toward supporting “reshoring” policy to reduce dependence on foreign manufacturing.

History And Context

The postwar liberal international order, built at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference and expanded through the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, progressively lowered tariff barriers among Western economies over four decades, a process American conservatives from Dwight Eisenhower through Ronald Reagan generally supported as both economically beneficial and strategically useful in binding allies together against Soviet influence. The pace accelerated dramatically after 1991, when the Soviet collapse removed the last major economic bloc outside the global trading system, and the World Trade Organization’s creation in 1995 established a rules-based framework that most of the world’s economies, including formerly communist states, joined in the following decade.

China’s WTO accession in December 2001 marked the decisive turn in the modern debate. Conservative and centrist policymakers in both American parties had argued that integrating China into global trade would gradually liberalize its political system alongside its economy, a bet that Chinese Communist Party consolidation of power under Xi Jinping after 2012 made increasingly difficult to sustain. Economists David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson documented in a series of influential studies beginning in 2013 that the resulting import surge produced concentrated, lasting damage to specific American manufacturing regions rather than the smoothly diffused adjustment that standard trade theory had predicted.³

The Conservative Position

The free-market conservative position, articulated most consistently by economists at the Cato Institute and in the Wall Street Journal editorial page tradition, holds that tariffs and trade restrictions raise prices for domestic consumers, invite retaliatory tariffs that harm export industries, and slow the productivity gains that come from specialization and competition. On this view, the manufacturing job losses associated with Chinese import competition are real but represent the same kind of painful, unevenly distributed adjustment that earlier waves of automation and trade produced, and the correct response is worker retraining and a stronger domestic safety net rather than reversing trade liberalization itself.

The national-conservative position, advanced by figures including Senator Marco Rubio and writers associated with the journal American Affairs, argues that this framework treats national economic strategy as a pure efficiency calculation and ignores questions of sovereignty and resilience that a nation-state cannot outsource to market outcomes. On this account, allowing a strategic rival to become the dominant manufacturer of pharmaceutical ingredients, semiconductors, and military-relevant materials creates vulnerabilities that no amount of aggregate GDP gain can offset, and industrial policy tools including tariffs, subsidies for domestic semiconductor production, and outright restrictions on certain categories of trade with China are justified as a matter of national security rather than economic efficiency.⁴ Tariffs imposed on Chinese goods beginning in 2018 and continued and expanded under both the Trump and Biden administrations reflect the growing dominance of this position within Republican policy, even as free-market conservative economists have continued to argue the tariffs raise costs for American manufacturers and consumers alike.

Differing Positions

Progressive critics of globalization share the national conservative’s skepticism of unmanaged trade but locate the harm differently, arguing that globalization’s costs have fallen disproportionately on organized labor because trade agreements have historically prioritized protections for capital, intellectual property, and investor rights over protections for workers and the environment. On this view, the solution is not economic nationalism but stronger international labor and environmental standards embedded in trade agreements themselves, alongside a more generous domestic safety net funded by taxing the substantial gains globalization has produced for capital owners and highly skilled workers. Progressive economists also dispute the national-conservative security framing, arguing that supply chain diversification across multiple trading partners, rather than reshoring production entirely to high-cost domestic locations, achieves comparable resilience at a fraction of the cost, and that framing trade primarily through great-power rivalry risks provoking exactly the kind of conflict with China that more measured diplomatic and economic engagement could avoid.

References

1. Robert Kuttner, Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism? (W.W. Norton, 2018), p. 211.
2. David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson, “The China Shock: Learning from Labor-Market Adjustment to Large Changes in Trade,” Annual Review of Economics, vol. 8 (2016), p. 205.
3. David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson, “The China Syndrome: Local Labor Market Effects of Import Competition in the United States,” American Economic Review, vol. 103, no. 6 (2013), p. 2121.
4. Oren Cass, The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America (Encounter Books, 2018), p. 88.