Nuevas alineaciones globales en las guerras comerciales de EE. UU. y la globalización militar

By Dan Steinbock

Due to President Trump’s new round of international tariffs, the global economy is now in danger of being exposed. This is not just the result of people in global trade and investments, but the increase in US military spending.

President Trump’s new round of mutual and universal tariffs will increase trade tensions, lower investments, hit market prices, distort trade flows, disrupt supply chains, and undermine consumers, businesses, and investors. It will certainly penalize global economic prospects.

As fears of a recession and mass protests in the United States have begun, the loss of over 6 trillion dollars on Wall Street in just two days is just a prelude to what follows. Along with China, major trading economies in Europe, Japan, and South Korea, India and Brazil, and the rest of the world are poised to counter Trump’s tariffs.

A few days before Trump’s new tariffs, China said its trade minister had agreed with Japan and South Korea, Washington’s two treaties in Asia, for a common response to Trump’s actions. In Seoul and Tokyo, the statement was seen as overblown. However, following the impeachment of former President Yoon Suk Yeol, divided South Korea must face a trade war amid a constitutional crisis, while Japan’s Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba said: a «national crisis.» In South and Southeast Asia, Latin America, and sub-Saharan Africa, developing economies facing natural disasters and external destabilization efforts are also targeted by Trump’s tariffs.

As Washington uncouples old links between trade and defense policies, it has opened Pandora’s box for multidimensional alignments.

US Trade: Allies and Others

«National Security» as a Pretext for Global Fragmentation

Taken at face value, Trump’s mutual tariffs indicate that America’s greatest contemporary threats would be Saint Pierre and Miquelon, Lesotho, and Cambodia; that is, some small French islands near Canada and two poor, small countries in Africa and Southeast Asia.

Obviously, the new international tariffs are legitimized by «national security.» In practice, they favor new volatility and uncertainty.

In the past, US military allies have been trading partners and vice versa. Now military allies are trade opponents. In the past, disagreements have been resolved while rates were reduced; today the opposite applies.

The new protectionism is reminiscent of the Smoot-Hawley and reciprocal tariffs of the 1930s, which were accompanied by assertive nationalism, xenophobia, and massive military rearmament that paved the way for World War II, the Holocaust, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Therefore, it is strange that the military dimension has largely been ignored in recent surveys of globalization/deflobalization.

In 1945, the United States accounted for nearly half of the global economy. It was the world’s giant manufacturer and largest debtor. Cross-border transactions monopolized in US dollars. Today, the relative weight of the United States in the global economy has halved. It is the massive industrial borrower and the world’s largest debtor. And the global dominance of the US dollar in world transactions has likely halved as well.

However, military power is a completely different story. It is the muscle that the Biden administration has used covertly, and the Trump White House likes to handle itself. This brute military primacy is systematically exploited, as the White House seeks to bend the world to its image.

Military Globalization

Global economic integration is often measured by global trade and investments. Due to the mix of Trump administration’s mutual and universal tariffs, both were very difficult to dive into in 2017. Ironically, when the global economy was poised for a recovery, but due to the new protectionism, it has been lost, and has been lost since then.

Although ignored by standard indicators, military expenditures and exports have been in two phases since the end of the Cold War, which, like World War I, initially had to «end all wars.» After a brief hiatus in the 1990s, military spending rose in the 2000s, due to post-9/11 wars led by the US, which virtually doubled defense spending, costing the US over 8 trillion and nearly 1 million deaths in target countries. After the Obama era, another period of military expansion took place with Trump’s first administration («Trump 1.0»), rising dramatically in the Biden years.

In this process, global military expenditures increased to a total of $2.4 trillion in 2024. The 6.8% increase in 2023 was the steepest year-on-year growth since 2009. As a result, global spending is now at the highest level recorded by SIPRI, the leading research company in the field. The increase in global military spending can be mainly attributed to power struggles in Ukraine and Russia, both armed and funded by the United States, and growing geopolitical tensions in the Asia Pacific, following the US military pivot in the region a decade ago.

World Military Expenditures (in USD billion)

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