The failures of globalization are due to improper regulation. If tariffs can't fix it, what can?

In the current global economic system, the incentive to exploit cheap labor and lax environmental standards isn’t accidental — it’s structural. Wealthy U.S. and multinational corporations are under relentless pressure to minimize costs and maximize shareholder returns, and that has often translated into a relentless search for the lowest possible production expenses, regardless of human or environmental cost.

That search has led to predictable places: countries where wages are low, labor rights are weak or unenforced, and environmental rules are little more than decorative. These conditions aren’t just tolerated — they’re marketed. Emerging economies are told, explicitly or implicitly, that if they raise wages or strengthen protections, foreign investment will vanish to a more “business-friendly” location willing to look the other way. 

It’s a global race to the bottom, a contest that rewards nations for suppressing union activity, relaxing safety standards, and sacrificing whole landscapes to keep global supply chains humming.

Just look at how much the Chinese Communist Party has thrived under this system. By harnessing the power of cheap, exploited, and even forced labor, the CCP has leveraged China’s massive population in the high stakes game of globalization.

This system leaves ethical producers at a permanent disadvantage and concentrates wealth at the top. And as long as the incentive structure stays the same, no amount of moral pleading will undo the logic of the model. To change the outcomes, the incentives must change. One underused tool for doing so: tariffs — not as isolationist walls, but as price signals that make exploitation more expensive than fair production.

That is the great unspoken premise behind Trump’s second-term tariff blitz.

Back in April 2025, analysts treated Trump’s sweeping tariff package like a geopolitical heart attack. “Why Trump May Get Away With His Tariff Trauma,” Politico warned at the time, marveling at how few nations retaliated. Diplomats quietly admitted that coordinated global action was unlikely — not because they approved of the tariffs, but because no one trusted anyone else enough to mount a unified response. And in the absence of unity, each country calculated that keeping its head down might serve its own interests better than picking a public fight.

Even then, it was clear Trump was aiming at something bigger than a tactical trade skirmish. His advisers said he wanted a wholesale restructuring of the U.S. economy — a legacy project, something closer to a new industrial strategy than a tariff tantrum. Fox News framed it as leverage in a Trumpian negotiation cycle: tariff, pause, renegotiate. Trump himself told voters to expect “short-term discomfort.”

But, six months later, the dust is still rising rather than settling.

The initial panic in markets has stabilized, however. Inflation, which many economists predicted would spike, instead moved sideways: slightly higher for tariff-affected sectors, slightly lower elsewhere as supply chains rerouted faster than expected. The 90-day tariff pause Trump granted in summer turned into what critics call a “rolling pause” — renewed for compliant countries, quietly lifted for strategic ones, and tightened again on China, whose effective tariff rate now hovers well above 125%.

Manufacturing reshoring has been uneven but real. But as Trump’s critics have constantly pointed out, oftenly gleefully, reshoring American manufacturing concerns was always going to take time. 

The Commerce Department reports an uptick in capital expenditures in electronics, pharmaceuticals, and machine tooling — industries that had been bleeding overseas for decades. At the same time, consumer prices for certain imports rose, but not catastrophically. Big-box retailers adapted with blended sourcing strategies, moving orders to Mexico, Vietnam, and India. In other words: the world is adjusting, not collapsing.

What’s more surprising is the political shift. 

Labor leaders who spent years opposing Trump are now openly acknowledging that some form of protectionism is unavoidable. UAW president Shawn Fain — who once wore a “TRUMP IS A SCAB” shirt onstage at a political event — recently defended tariffs as “a tool in the toolbox” for bringing jobs home. Populist Democrats like Chris Deluzio and Jared Golden have warned their own party that reflexive free-trade dogma is intellectually bankrupt and politically suicidal. They’re not wrong.

For decades, trade orthodoxy insisted that free markets, open borders, and “global value chains” would raise all boats. Instead, the United States lost 90,000 factories, union membership collapsed from 20% to 9%, and whole regions of the country slid into economic and social decay. “Deaths of despair” didn’t come from nowhere. They came from shattered industrial towns, downwardly mobile communities, and a political class that told them globalization was good for them — even as every lived experience said otherwise.

Protectionism alone won’t reverse that. But pretending the old model can be revived is delusion.

A border-adjusted tariff system — as some conservatives now propose — would tax imports at a universal rate and credit exports at the same rate. In effect, it would reward domestic production and neutralize countries that suppress labor or environmental standards to gain a competitive edge. Couple that with targeted tax reforms and serious spending discipline, and you have the bones of a new economic order: one that prizes national resilience instead of disposable efficiency.

Even Trump’s fiercest critics admit that global trade cannot continue as it has. The era of neoliberalism exhausted itself. The supply chain shocks of the pandemic, the geopolitical weaponization of trade by China, and the weakness of the “just-in-time” model all shattered the illusion that the cheapest option is the best one.

Can tariffs save globalization? Not in the form we’ve known it. But they can force globalization to evolve into something healthier — something that doesn’t rely on exploited workers in one hemisphere to subsidize cheap goods in the other. Tariffs alone aren’t a solution. But they might be the price of finally confronting a problem we spent 30 years pretending didn’t exist.

If it works, President Donald Trump might deserve a victory lap.

(Contributing writer, Brooke Bell)