This chapter expands and extends the critique of conservative responses to globalization outlined in the last chapter. This chapter focuses specifically on the political economy of actually existing globalization. It does so in four sections. First, conservative (and other) arguments both supportive and critical of free trade are considered, through a detailed analysis of the case for comparative advantage and free trade. This opening section problematizes this case, but equally suggests that at least some of the conservative critiques of free trade, including those associated with the Trump administration, are unconvincing and likely to make matters worse. In keeping the focus on the US, the second section then considers the question of US decline and asks whether US (capitalist) hegemony in the international order has declined, or whether in fact it has globalized. The section suggests that it is more a case of the latter than former, and this informs the discussion in the third section. This examines the practice of the Trump administration and questions the viability of protectionism for securing the goal of “making America great again”. Equally, however, the section questions the extent to which the Trump administration is not so much isolationist or protectionist, as opposed to using the threat of tariffs to extract concessions from countries on a largely bilateral basis. The section concludes that there are both protectionist and bilateral tendencies in the administration, but neither of these are likely to secure the goal of increasing high-wage manufacturing jobs on a scale envisaged by Trump. The fourth section then returns to the case for free trade through consideration of the argument that Brexit will involve a return to a global Britain, based on spontaneous free trade with countries across the globe, and reinforced by cultural similarities between Anglosphere countries. Here the argument is made that both Trump and Brexit, in different but related ways, underestimate the reality of global value chains and intra-firm trade in the world economy and the ways in which regulation is central to the making of a global economy.

Conservative support for and challenges to free trade

At the heart of both paleoconservative and (possibly) Trumpian views on political economy is the view that globalization has led to US decline, and this is because countries have benefited unfairly at the expense of the US.