Globalization has expanded dramatically over the past three decades, the importance of the state has declined dramatically, and multilateralism has gradually replaced unilateralism. Globalization is multilayered. On the one hand, multilateralism is realized in regional international organizations, with closer cooperation between countries within the European Union and ASEAN. On the other hand, economic integration beyond traditional regional organizations, such as the RCEP, has been described as creating a greater scope for economic mutual benefit.
Under the leadership of U.S. President Bill Clinton, China was finally admitted to the WTO in 2001, and globalization moved forward in a big way, with a magnetic attraction effect that led to an influx of companies and capital, and a gradual shift from socialism to state capitalism, as well as the country’s participation in world competition. However, the Chinese Communist Party did not open its market significantly as promised, and Western companies in some sectors could only set up factories if they had joint ventures with Chinese companies, in which the Chinese side coveted the relevant technology.
China’s entry into the world economy coincided with the boom in the Internet world, and in order to increase its competitiveness, China deliberately fostered monopolies in all major technology sectors, using the Chinese market to quickly raise up huge oligopolies such as Tencent, Huawei, and Alibaba to join the global competition and quickly gain an advantage, becoming almost too big to fail. The West, led by the United States, has tilted toward neoliberalism. In the U.S., the left-leaning Democratic Party has pushed hard for globalization and has led the West to accept China’s access to global markets. The European Union, for its part, has expanded after the collapse of the Soviet Union to include more of the former Eastern European countries, making the regional economies larger, and the British Labor Party and other left-wing European parties have moved from the left to the center.
Globalization is in a sense the expansion of capitalism. Under neoliberalism, Western multinational corporations have been growing through mergers and acquisitions under the rules of the free capitalist market. The state capitalism of the Chinese Communist Party has further flourished in recent years through the establishment of the Asian Investment Bank and the Belt and Road Initiative. This has led to the impoverishment of the middle class in advanced countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom, a steady decline in real purchasing power, and an increase in global inequality. Another factor contributing to the rise in global inequality is the expansion of financial capital and the resulting bursting of bubbles, with each bursting of a bubble quickly erasing the losses of the richest group and disproportionately affecting the middle class and below.
China’s entry into the WTO coincided with the collapse of the financial markets due to the bursting of the dot-com bubble, and perhaps this is what induced the world’s major trading houses to accept China’s accession, which was supposed to boost the world’s ailing economy. However, what everyone witnessed was a much larger financial tsunami brought on by the subprime mortgage meltdown. Such a bubble bursting cycle may seem irreversible, but in recent years Trump’s economic and trade policies since taking office have been seen as a reversal of globalization.
It is true that Trump is ostensibly opposed to globalization, and he remains skeptical and critical of international organizations and global agreements, criticizing the World Health Organization (WHO) for negligence and deciding to withdraw from them due to Wuhan, China’s pneumonia connection. He has also decided to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement, an anti-internationalization decision that stems from his desire not to see Americans continue to be the main culprits – for a long time the United States has been considered a major world power and has been financially more burdened than other countries, but has been at a disadvantage, benefiting so-called developing countries like China.
Trump is not opposed to all multilateralism, and he began renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with Canada and Mexico shortly after taking office because he wanted to change it to one that would benefit the United States. If multilateralism is limited to consolidating regional international organizations such as the EU and ASEAN, it will only lead to competition among regional organizations, which is not necessarily good for globalization.
If re-elected, Trump would not only broker one-on-one free trade agreements, but also develop international alliances based on democracies, as Secretary of State Pompeo recently said: “We have built real alliances – alliances that crush the Islamic State of Syria, alliances that counter the Chinese Communist Party, alliances that refuse to An alliance to appease Iran.” The Trump administration’s starting point for all of its policies is to preserve freedom and democratic universal values while no longer disadvantaging Americans or allowing authoritarian countries like China or Iran to profit from them, but this may not reverse the overall trend of capitalist globalization and the global inequality and periodic bursting of financial bubbles that it brings.
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