Le Courrier des Stratèges

14 April 2025

Calling Trump a globalist will be seen as highly provocative by all those who, for at least the last ten years, particularly under the influence of propagandists like Steve Bannon and General Flynn, have been convinced that Donald Trump is an enemy of globalism and a supporter of sovereignty. They promised us that Trump would never wage war and that he would wave a magic wand and bring peace to the world. The reality is a little different, and we set out to decode it step by step. First episode: what “discreet” vision of world order guides Trump's policy?

Of course there is the ideological battle over the question of protectionism, which is unfolding chaotically and being resolved on the trading floors. On the one hand, there are the supporters of tariffs, who see these compulsory levies as an instrument of sovereignty and re-industrialisation. On the other, the enemies of tariffs are keeping score, watching stock market indices plummet, along with growth forecasts, as Trump erects more and more tariff barriers.

I have said enough times before that, whatever the ultimate benefits of tariffs, they will provoke an immediate, predictable and well-documented mess (which we've been predicting for a long time in our columns). Trump and his entourage can be criticised for never having warned the Americans of this minor ‘turbulence’. On the contrary, on 20 January, the new President proclaimed that America's ‘golden age’ was beginning that day. Subsequent events show how he lied by omission. The golden age may come (although I doubt it very much), but it will definitely be preceded by difficult times that were not predicted.

But the purpose of this article is not to take a position on the merits of protectionism. I leave it to everyone to make up their own minds on the issue. What I am interested in is sifting through another lie that is widespread in European sovereigntist circles: that Trump has broken with globalism and is a defender of the sovereignty of nations.

These facile slogans, spread across Europe, including France, by the Bannon and Flynn networks (it would be interesting to know the sources of income of certain influential figures in France who are obsessed with promoting Trumpian policies, in defiance of the most obvious evidence), are fuelling great hopes in our country among the masses of people who have been downgraded or made precarious by globalisation. After decades of being crushed by a globalist doxa, there is a huge appetite for revenge and a blossoming of anxieties about the future which drives people to support the first huckster who comes along promising improvements.

Against this backdrop, soup merchants have invented Trump as the white knight of the downtrodden and the disenfranchised. This white knight is supposedly there to restore peace in the world, to reduce American domination and to make possible fraternity between all the sovereignists of the world, unjustly trampled underfoot by a small group of globalists. It is this mythology that I would like to dismantle today.

The question of reindustrialisation

The belief that Trump is a hero of sovereignty is based on a foundation of truth, unfortunately mixed with confusion and multiple ambiguities that muddy the waters.

First point: Trump is an advocate of the ‘reindustrialisation’ of the United States and the rebalancing of American trade. These two issues are as central in France (unlike many of its European neighbours who are still industrialised and net exporters of manufactured goods, such as Germany and, to a lesser extent, Italy) as they are in the USA. This similarity no doubt explains the sympathy that Trump can inspire in many working-class French people.

Incidentally, Trump works the same mythology as many French people on these issues. Because, when it comes to reindustrialisation, there is a long way to go: while everyone can agree on the formal principle of developing industrial employment, there are very few advocates of this principle who want to see a factory set up at the end of their garden, and even fewer who dream of working in that factory. As for the simple reasoning of calling on immigration to fill these new industrial jobs, it arouses hysterical anger among a large number of sovereignists, lulled by the (fabricated) idea that the little people are an aggregate of wonderful, hard-working, coherent people who will spontaneously cooperate in the success of the government's project, without needing an outside workforce to succeed.

Five years have gone by since COVID, and we at Le Courrier des Stratèges are well placed to know that there is often an inverse relationship between dithyrambic sovereignist declarations and the ability of those who spread them in every discussion to act on them. Unfortunately, many sovereigntists tend to compensate for their existential sluggishness by making vehement declarations, without actually doing anything, about their commitment to France's recovery.

If his policy were to work, Trump would undoubtedly come up against the same difficulty: how many of his WASP voters, who are so virulent against Latin American immigration, will be prepared to work in the factories he wants to reopen?

In the meantime, the declaration of intent feeds the sympathy of people angry at globalism and the feeling of belonging to the sovereignist international.

Bilateralism versus multilateralism

Another confusion is leading many sovereigntists in Europe to see Trump as a hero in the fight against globalism. This confusion stems from the fight against multilateralism.

In the minds of many sovereigntists, this ‘system’ of international relations known as multilateralism appears to be the very quintessence of globalism. In particular, it encompasses ‘regional’ mechanisms such as the European Union, where diplomacy is no longer conducted between states in exclusive relations, but through bureaucracies and special treaties, as is the case in Brussels through the European Commission and the European Council, immersed in its goldfish bowl of committees - ‘COREPERs’ and various groups and agencies.

One of the bodies where this multilateralism has been deployed over the last few decades is the World Trade Organisation. It has conducted numerous rounds of negotiations, dominated by the United States, gradually to reduce tariffs across the board. As soon as he came to power, Donald Trump decided to crush this legacy and reintroduce protectionism, calling on each of the world's almost 200 states to negotiate a more appropriate tariff individually.

It is easy to understand the logic behind Trumpism. In the old system, the United States remained dominant, but its power was counterbalanced by the collegiality of nations. In the one-on-one confrontation, America is stronger and can exert direct pressure.

Paradoxically, many sovereigntists, who denounce the weight of NATO in post-Soviet wars, applaud this return to bilateralism, which nonetheless enshrines American hegemony more than ever. But this paradox can be explained by a misunderstanding, or even a misinterpretation. Many sovereigntists confuse globalism with multilateralism, and believe that the battle to be waged should be against multilateral institutions rather than against America's global hegemony. It is because of this confusion that the same sovereigntists denounce multilateralism while calling for it to be strengthened within BRICS.

In reality, the real subject of globalism is none other than the American desire to transform the planet into a global market in which US companies will be dominant. But the cognitive infiltration carried out by Bannon, Flynn and a few others has succeeded in making people mistake a regionalisation technique (multilateralism) for globalism itself. And confused minds are convinced that the fight against multilateralism is a fight against globalism.

Why Trump is an out-and-out globalist

Here we come to the heart of the Trumpist ‘misunderstanding’. In reality, although Trumpism is hostile to multilateralism, it is nonetheless a form of globalism, i.e. a doctrine that considers that the United States should perpetuate its global domination and fully assume it. Quite simply, in Trump's mind, American hegemony in multilateralism is economically costly and must be corrected by a forced reorganisation of trade relations between countries.

To understand this, we need to reread the speeches made by Stephen Miran, an economist appointed by Trump to chair the Committee of Economic Advisers. A graduate in economics from Harvard University in 2010, Miran has theorised about protectionism, with arguments whose lack of precision takes your breath away. If you have any doubts about Trump, you may find it useful to read the Wall Street Journal's portrait of Miran in January 2025.

Miran gave a speech at the Hudson Institute ***

Today I’d like to discuss the United States’ provision of what economists call “global public goods,” for the entire world. First, the United States provides a security umbrella which has created the greatest era of peace mankind has ever known. Second, the U.S. provides the dollar and Treasury securities, reserve assets which make possible the global trading and financial system which has supported the greatest era of prosperity mankind has ever known.

Both of these are costly to us to provide.

This is the change in the United States' globalist vision. Until now, America has taken the view that it naturally played the role of world policeman, and that one of the natural attributes of this role is to provide the world with a reserve currency. Army and currency: these were the two mainstays of American domination.

I'll come back to the contradictions inherent in this belief in a later paper.

In the meantime, Trump's protectionist entourage leaves no doubt as to his desire to change things: the fact that the dollar is a global reserve currency is very costly for America, because it leads to an rise in the value of the currency and therefore to higher export prices for American products. For the team in power in Washington, this is the main cause of the country's de-industrialisation, and its increasing dependence on China.

To remedy this, the Trump team intends to reconcile the preservation of the dollar as an international reserve currency (to ensure American domination) with a negotiated depreciation of the currency, through an agreement similar to the one negotiated by Reagan in 1985. At the same time, Trump intends to make those who profit from a strong dollar and thus from the loss of competitiveness of American industry pay by imposing tariffs.

Here again, Miran's reasoning is perplexing: this economist knows that retaliatory tariffs are more harmful than beneficial to the US economy. He believes that America should use its political clout to prevent its trading partners from retaliating against US tariffs!

This is the hallmark of true Trumpist globalism: it consists in unilaterally imposing on other countries a world order in which America can protect its economy but its partners cannot.

Trumpism: exacerbated American economic domination

Those who saw Trump as a vigilante capable of imposing other rules of the game on the global balance of power have therefore misunderstood his intention.

Admittedly, Trump does not share the multilateral vision of the globalists. But neither does he intend to renounce the prerogatives of the United States. His intention is to strengthen them by demanding legal privileges for his country, and a kind of tax on the reserve role that the dollar plays today.

Given the negative externalities that the status of reserve currency produces, Trump intends to make the rest of the world pay to reimburse him for the alleged prejudices he is suffering.

In this sense, Trump appears to be the bearer of a new form of globalism. In his mind, American domination should be exercised directly over the rest of the planet, through a system of bilateral relations which will be just as powerful as the current multilateralism. Trump's pressure on Greenland is a case in point.

In short, Trump is proposing a different kind of globalism, one in which American domination can go as far as sanctioning European companies for pursuing internal policies which run counter to the ideological orientations of the American President, as we saw in the case of the letter sent by the US embassy to French candidates for American public contracts.

Eric Verhaeghe

Articles by Eric Verhaeghe

Trump is a Globalist