In this comprehensive piece about the future of globalization, geopolitical competition will be a deciding factor. Until recently, the United States imposed what the author calls a neoliberal template on global trade. Today, this template is challenged in several ways and may well come apart. There will be regional integrations and adjustments as a result. The last forty years have witnessed a third wave of globalization that can be termed "neoliberal globalization" (Palley 2018b). During that period there was continued increase in trade, but there was also a global reconfiguration of production that shifted manufacturing from developed "northern" economies to developing "southern" economies. As part of that reconfiguration, the United States also shifted to running enormous persistent trade deficits, giving rise to the problem of so-called global imbalances. Now there are indications that the era of neoliberal globalization might be drawing to a close, as evidenced by the trade war between the United States and China; by the Trump administration's actual and threatened imposition of tariffs on U.S. imports of European Union (EU) goods; and by repeated unilateral U.S. imposition of sanctions and fines on countries, which hit both individual countries and their trading partners. Those developments threaten to fracture globalization.
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