Donald Trump's announcement on Wednesday, April 2, of increased tariffs on imports to the US may be deemed brutal, irrational, or counterproductive. But, in the long term, this sharp tariff hike mainly suggests that the American president intends to bring globalization to an end.

With Trump's second presidential term in office, the US has turned its back on 80 years of trade liberalization, by once again imposing tariff barriers.

The 1930s Great Depression led to tougher protectionist measures being implemented on both sides of the Atlantic, worsening the depression to the point of weakening democracies. The victors of World War II decided to abandon this approach, instead striving to build vast multilateral agreements aimed at opening borders to trade. In this spirit, 1947 saw the signature of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the precursor to the World Trade Organization (WTO), which was established in 1995.

At the same time, the US forged very close trade ties with its Mexican and Canadian neighbors, creating a massive free trade zone with the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994, which became the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) in July 2020.

In just five years, from 1929 to 1933, the global trade war ended up reducing world trade to a third of its former level.

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