May 21, 2026 | The National Interest
After Globalization: The Case for a ‘Near-Global Economy’
The United States needs to pursue economic integration with countries that meet its free-market and geopolitical standards.
May 21, 2026 | The National Interest
After Globalization: The Case for a ‘Near-Global Economy’
The United States needs to pursue economic integration with countries that meet its free-market and geopolitical standards.
Excerpt
Last week’s US-China summit in Beijing led to “fantastic trade deals,” according to President Donald Trump. At the same time, President Xi Jinping spoke of the summit’s contribution to “constructive strategic stability,” but both comments are increasingly out of step with reality. The Beijing talks were not the start of a new, stable trading relationship but another step in the managed decline of the old one. The unrestricted globalism that fed China’s economic rise is dying, strangled by Beijing’s own coercive and non-market economics. Rather than focusing on Boeing, beef, and beans, America needs to start building what comes next.
Over the last two and a half decades, China has weaponized the global economy—evading sanctions and export controls, sustaining money laundering, promoting opaque sovereign debt, and engaging in state-sanctioned IP theft and global surveillance. Chinese overproduction and critical mineral monopolies are damaging economies around the world and undermining US national security. Now, as companies seek to diversify away from China, Beijing has issued new regulations that deny exit visas to employees and penalize companies suspected of moving their supply chains out of the country.
The era of globalization has produced both substantial benefits and considerable risks. Economic threat actors are now regularly leveraging global trade and finance pathways to undermine US and allied security. Globalized shadow banking networks and international dark fleets sustain Iran’s terror proxies and its drone factories. Mexican drug cartels and Chinese gangs use the global financial system—often through US banks—to launder cash and buy anti-aircraft weapons.
America has the economic power to fight back, but it cannot do it with the same playbook. And it should not do it alone.
Elaine Dezenski is senior director and head of the Center on Economic and Financial Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where Josh Birenbaum is the deputy director.