America, the Isolated

Tariffs are not policy. They are performance—symbols—flags planted in the wreckage of a global order Trump and his far-right allies are intentionally dismantling. Anyone still thinking this is about protecting American steelworkers or rebalancing trade with China hasn't been paying attention—or worse, is clinging to the fairy tale that this movement is tethered to any rational economic theory.

The truth is far more bleak. Trump's tariffs are just the on-ramp to something far more dangerous: the construction of an anti-global, anti-liberal, post-Enlightenment world system. The endgame isn't economic prosperity; it's ideological severance. Strategic decoupling from modernity itself.

We are witnessing the architecture of a new far-right post-globalism: fortress economics, ethno-nationalist trade blocs, and digital feudalism enforced by monopolistic tech and authoritarian statecraft. It isn't a glitch or a misguided jobs plan. It's the scaffolding of a counterrevolution against liberal democracy, built with tariffs, immigration bans, cultural revanchism, and epistemic collapse.

Trump imposed a staggering 104% levy on Chinese goods, prompting an 84% retaliation from Beijing. Days later, he announced an impulse driven 90-day pause on most tariffs—excluding China, where the rate has now been raised to 125%. Bond yields are still spiking, supply chains remain buckled, and trade partners from Europe to Southeast Asia are scrambling to firewall themselves. Don't let the bullish pundits fool you. There is no economic genius at work here.

These tariffs are not aimed at fairer trade. They are aimed at less trade. Less interdependence. Less cooperation. Less mobility. Less immigration. Less multilateralism. Less of the messy, pluralistic, borderless complexity that defined the post-WWII liberal order. In its place, Trumpism offers a purified national economy, mythic in its self-sufficiency and brutal in its social contract. Call it MAGAnomics. Call it Jokernomics. But understand: the product isn't prosperity. It's isolation.

The Enlightenment gave us certain principles: that markets function best when they are free, ideas should circulate without restriction, the dignity of individuals transcends national origin, and truth exists independent of power. Trump and his global imitators—Orban, Meloni, Bukele, Modi, and Milei—are deliberately rejecting all of this. They are not trying to reform the liberal order; they are trying to end it.

What replaces it? A medievalized global economy, where nations are castles, not nodes. Where access to trade is contingent on loyalty, not law. Where migration is criminalized, and foreignness is suspect. Where information is balkanized, loyalty is paramount, and the truth is whatever the strong say it is.

Think that's alarmist? Look at the machinery being constructed: tariffs weaponized to collapse alliances, ICE raids that defy court orders, Supreme Court justices entertaining the deportation of U.S. citizens, a return to gulag-style detention systems, the open flirtation with military tribunals and censorship. All of it signals one thing: a retreat from universality. From shared values. From Enlightenment liberalism.

This is post-globalism, not as an accident but as an ideology. And it's spreading. The EU is now retaliating. China is cutting off U.S. companies. Supply chains are fracturing by design. Tech platforms are becoming information states unto themselves, aligned less with countries than with regimes. The world is no longer flattening; it's fracturing. Into blocs, spheres, fiefdoms.

Underneath it all is a hunger for control. Tariffs are a tool of domination, not diplomacy. They serve no rational economic function in Trump's worldview because Trumpism itself is not rational. It's a worldview built on humiliation, dominance, and zero-sum conquest. If someone else is winning, America must be losing. So you blow it all up. Tear up the treaties. Raise the walls. Declare victory over the ashes.

This is how the far right has always governed and always will: not through complexity but siege, siege on truth, trust, trade, and every structure that binds us to each other in mutual obligation. Trump doesn't want a healthier world. He wants a smaller, meaner one. He wants every transaction, every border, and every byte of information to be a battleground.

Trump is no friend of labor. His tariffs won't bring factories back—they will drive up prices, provoke retaliation, and consolidate power in the executive. That's the point. Because, in the end, post-globalism isn't an economic model. It's a governance model. Rule by exception. Rule by spectacle. Rule by crisis, real or invented.

And so far, it's winning. Not because it works but because it offers something the neoliberal center has failed to produce: a narrative, a quest, a myth of national rebirth, a promise to the disaffected that the security blanket can be restored and complexity vanquished, that the world can be made simple again.

We are not arguing over policy. We are fighting over civilization.

Tariffs are the opening salvo.

This is America the isolated.

And isolation, in an interconnected age, isn't strength.