JAMES CARTER And JACOB CHOE: MAGA Isn’t De-Globalization. It’s The Only Globalization Strategy That Still Works

For years, critics have lazily described Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” agenda as de-globalization — a retreat from the world, a rejection of trade, an inward turn. That charge is not merely wrong. It is intellectually dishonest.

MAGA is not a de-globalization policy. It is the most realistic globalization strategy the United States has pursued in decades.

What Trump rejected was not global engagement, but a failed model of globalization that stripped America of leverage while empowering strategic competitors — most notably China — and left U.S. allies and partners unsure of who was actually setting the rules.

America First doesn’t mean America alone.

For 30 years, Washington sold globalization as inevitable, benign, and mutually beneficial. Open markets would lead to open societies. Supply chains would produce stability. Cheap goods would substitute for strategy. Instead, the United States deindustrialized, China weaponized trade, and critical supply chains — from semiconductors to rare earths to antimony and graphite — migrated offshore.

This was not globalization in the abstract. It was globalization without reciprocity, enforcement, or national purpose. America played by the rules. Others rewrote them.

Trump was the first major political figure willing to say out loud what was already obvious: globalization that weakens the United States is not global leadership — it is national negligence.

Under MAGA, globalization was not abandoned. It was reconditioned.

Tariffs were not ideological; they were leverage. Trade agreements were not scrapped; they were renegotiated. Alliances were not dissolved; they were forced to become reciprocal. This was not isolationism. It was power-aware globalization.

The premise was simple: if the United States provides access to its market, its technology, and its security umbrella, then it is entitled to fairness, resilience, and strategic return. That is not radical. It is how every serious country operates — especially China.