Mixing international trade with geopolitical rivalries is going to be the new norm. This is a regrettable development, even more so because most Asian economies – and particularly the success stories of China, South Korea and Japan – were able to grow thanks to access to global markets and expanding trade.

The Chinese economic miracle would have been impossible without these opportunities. Had the West not built the post-World War II structure of international trade and finance, China could have never emerged from the poverty it suffered after the death of former Chinese leader Mao Zedong. In a sense, one might think that China should today be paying back this debt, taking on responsibility for supporting a functioning world economy. Instead, trade in Asia is regressing. (This is not to overlook the role of American policy, during both the Trump and Biden administrations, in politicizing trade in Asia.)

The major uncertainty lies in the Global South. While not as prominent as the Non-Aligned Movement of the Cold War, the Global South is now one of the major geopolitical challenges facing the West, particularly on issues around trade.

Three rival structures

The Far East today lacks a comprehensive security architecture. There are bilateral treaties like those between the U.S. and Japan and the U.S. and South Korea. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) serves as an established multilateral organization, providing a framework along the lines of other continental bodies such as Mercosur, the South American trade bloc.

In economic and trade issues, there are three organizations – Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) and the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) – which must be seen as geopolitical rivals.

All three organizations have made lofty declarations in favor of economic cooperation, trade and development. Their true intentions are revealed in their membership. APEC is the most established of the three and the most diverse, counting rivals like the U.S., China and Russia. Notably, for the forthcoming annual meeting, set to be held in the U.S., Washington has banned Hong Kong Chief Executive John Lee but confirmed that there is no bar on Russia’s participation.

The RCEP is a Chinese initiative, and its membership suggests that Beijing aims to create a following of economically relevant states to support its own international trade agenda. India and the U.S. are outside of the group. Instead, it includes countries that are strongly dependent on China and whose regimes are on the outs with Washington, such as Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia.

The IPEF is the most recently launched forum, aimed at furthering American geopolitical interests in the Indo-Pacific region. This is evident in its composition, which includes Australia, Japan and India – countries playing a key role in the U.S. strategy to contain a rising China.

Australia, despite some trade disputes with China, belongs to all three organizations. Similarly, Japan – which long kept a low profile in multilateral initiatives beyond its security treaty with the U.S. and its presence in the G7 – is also a member of each grouping.

Threat to free trade

Trade issues have always been part of politics, and organizations like the World Trade Organization and the European Union were designed in part to tear down restrictions on free trade. But the present times are especially fraught with risks around trade. During the Cold War, the West had to deal with powerful military threats posed by the Soviet Union and its allies. However, the USSR was of little relevance to the world economy. The West could establish a world economic order that was largely built on a market economy and free trade values. Even beyond the Western alliance, like members of the “nonaligned” countries, there was no other option but to deal with the West on its own terms.

This fundamentally changed with China’s emergence as one of the world’s largest economies. The roots of this new challenge lie in the historic reforms launched by former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping. Pragmatically, China maintained its one-party system while at the same time opening up major elements of its economy – if not to a full-fledged market economy, then one that allowed Western investors, technology and businesses to enter.

Beijing opened the economy to its own version of private enterprise, meaning that non-state actors were allowed to operate wherever they did not infringe on the general, party-dominated economic framework. With the Western world keen on economic interaction, China sought to make its economy more competitive in world markets.

In the global economic picture that has developed over the past three decades, China competes in Western markets through existing frameworks – for example, in capital markets and by acquiring Western companies to gain access to technology and intellectual property – while maintaining its own unique economic model. Despite talk of free markets, the Chinese economy remains one fully controlled by the Party.

For some time, the West overlooked the challenge presented by this dynamic, presuming that it could deal with China like an ordinary market economy. Now that Western governments have woken up – particularly the U.S., with Europe following haphazardly – they face another challenge. Washington has decided that this is the moment to address the risks posed by Beijing, with politicians from both sides of the aisle declaring China as the country’s main adversary. Besides the highly dangerous possibility of an open war, there are rising prospects of long-term economic conflict.

The historic rivalry between the U.S. and China is, for now, being fought on economic terrain. Washington has moved from the so-called “pivot to Asia” under the Obama administration to a policy of containing China’s rise. The main goals are the reindustrialization of America and preventing advanced technologies from reaching Chinese companies, particularly in the field of information technology.

This is unfortunate for countries (such as Switzerland) that depend on open markets and on trade policies based on economic, rather than geopolitical, criteria. There is considerable collateral damage when ostensibly free-market nations like the U.S. turn to economic populism, alongside more mercantilist states like China and India.

Urs Schöttli is an independent advisor on Asian Affairs.

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Before continuing, it is important to define some terms. Globalization occurs when societies around the world begin to interact and integrate economically and politically. The intercontinental trade experienced during the Age of Sail and via the Silk Road are early examples of globalization. Globalization really took off after World War II and received a recent boost with the widespread adoption of the internet. Importantly, globalization in common discourse includes both the voluntary economic activities between peoples of different nations and the involuntary geopolitical activities of governments.

In contrast, Ian Bremmer defines globalism as an ideology that calls for top-down trade liberalization and global integration backed by a unipolar power. Statists believe that market exchange between people is literally impossible without government; only when a group claims a legal monopoly on violence and then builds infrastructure, provides security, documents property titles, and serves as the final arbiter of disputes can a market come into existence. Globalism is the application of this perspective to international trade. Globalists believe that top-down global governance enforced and secured by a unipolar superpower enables globalization.

But, like statists on a more local scale, the globalist view is logically and historically flawed. Global trade was well underway before the first major attempt at global governance, the League of Nations, in 1919. The league’s stated aim was to ensure peace and justice for all nations of the world through collective security. Falling apart at the outset of World War II, it failed miserably. But globalism as an ideology found its footing after the war. Europe was devastated. This left the US and the USSR as the only two countries with the ability to exert power globally.

So began the fastest era of globalization in history. Trade exploded as people moved on from the war. The globalist project also got off the ground with the founding of the United Nations and the World Bank. Globalism was limited only by the ideological differences between the two superpowers. The USSR wanted to support revolutions while the US aimed for top-down trade liberalization—which drove the recent allies apart and plunged the world into the Cold War.

In the United States, the neoliberals and neoconservatives dominated the political mainstream through their shared mission to bring markets and democracy to the world at gunpoint and financed by US taxpayers. Fortunately for them, the rate at which their interventions at home and abroad were wrecking US society was slower than that of the Soviets. The abolition of prices and private property eventually led to the collapse of the USSR in the early 1990s. With its main adversary defeated, the United States had achieved one of the central tenets of globalism, unipolarity.

From the outset, the US establishment gorged itself on its new globe-spanning influence. Through new international organizations like the World Trade Organization, “free trade” agreements were introduced. Some ran for hundreds of pages, yet all free trade really requires is an absence of policy. The United States sailed its navy around the world’s oceans promising to secure shipping lanes like a global highway patrolman. Through the promise of US military security and the bankrolling of international governance organizations, US taxpayers were forced to subsidize global trade.

As Murray Rothbard highlights in Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, there is no such thing as international trade in a truly free market. Nations would still exist, but they would be pockets of culture instead of economic units. Any state restrictions on trade between people based on location are a violation of their liberty and a cost to society. Most free-market economists understand this and advocate against state restrictions accordingly. But subsidies to international trade are also antithetical to the free market. The proper free-market position is the complete absence of policy on both sides. No restrictions and no subsidies. Let people freely choose who they do business with. There should be no hand on either end of the scale.

Economic integration was far from the only focus of the US regime during its unipolar moment. Too many people had gained wealth, power, and status during the Cold War as part of the US war-making class. Despite the USSR’s total collapse, the last thing the United States wanted to do was declare victory and give up its privileged position. Instead, the United States scrambled to find a new enemy to justify the continuation of those privileges. Their eyes settled on the Middle East where they would, in time, launch eight unessential wars that killed any notion of a “rules-based international order.” US unipolarity proved Albert Jay Nock correct; governments are only as peaceful as they are weak.

This institutional desire for war would sow the seeds of destruction for the United States’ unipolar moment. As the United States eviscerated any notion that it stood for a rules-based order through its adventurism in the Middle East, tension was brewing in Eastern Europe and East Asia. To the doubtless joy of weapons companies and foreign policy elites, the Russian and Chinese governments were transformed back into the United States’ enemies.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February was a huge win for the US war machine, but it also represented an enormous step backward for globalism. The Russians seceded from the global order the United States had led for three decades. The West’s reaction, grounded in strict sanctions and forced economic divestment, deepened the rift in the global system.

What the future holds is anyone’s guess, but the globalist dream of a singular system of global governance is surely wrecked for the near future as the Russo-Chinese bloc breaks away. There will be pain because so many connections between nations are controlled by governments; however, a significant degree of globalization is still valued by the world’s consumers. The data contradicts any idea that globalization is reversing. It is only slowing as governments attempt to drag consumers along on their quest to divest from the other side.

Despite the claims that globalization is dead, international trade is alive and well. But the drive toward an interconnected world is slowing down as the ideology of globalism experiences its biggest setback in decades. The statist conflation of unipolar global governance and international trade explains where these claims are coming from and why they are flawed.

Connor O’Keeffe is a writer and video producer at the Mises Institute. He has a masters in economics and a bachelors in geology.

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