The Great American Decoupling

Under Trump 2.0, the U.S. is decoupling from the world—and the world from it. Both are worse off for it.

The philosopher Hegel once described observing Napoleon riding out from the town of Jena after battling the Prussian army. On horseback, Napoleon, “this world-soul,” in Hegel’s words, was a “wonderful sensation to see.” The conquering French statesman seemed to embody history itself, an overwhelming force “concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse,” who, Hegel wrote, “reaches out over the world and masters it.”

When Trump strode out onto the stage in the Rose Garden—soon reportedly to be paved over, like in a Joni Mitchell song— to announce his “Liberation Day” tariffs on April 2nd, he, too, seemed to embody the zeitgeist of an age: resentful, nationalistic, ludicrous, willing to apply punitive measures against everything from penguin-inhabited islands to the world’s second-biggest economy. This was indeed a (perverse) “world-soul” appearing before a stunned global audience. Concentrated in a single point, the empirical person of Donald J. Trump wielded a terrifying, Napoleonic power, channeled through what may have been an LLM-generated, but at any rate deeply irrational, formula, aimed at taking a wrecking ball to the world economy.

For unlike the 2008 financial crisis, whose causes were structural, multifaceted, and complex, the April 2025 market meltdown can be traced to the misguided actions of a single individual—aided, of course, by a handful of advisers, like Peter Navarro. Remarkably, this present moment has its origin—to an unprecedented degree in the annals of modern finance—in a single person.

It might therefore seem easier to undo the damage. But even if Trump were to reverse the tariffs tomorrow, markets and nations have memories. The blow Trump has dealt to the global economy consists in the “extreme uncertainty that we're creating,” as economist Paul Krugman has described it. Even if stock markets do regain their losses, and volatility declines, Trump has shown his willingness to “go nuclear” on trade and the global economy. And so one might reasonably ask: What's to stop him from doing so again? While we may not get a full “Trumpcession”—though with news of a U.S.-China trade war ramping up, who can tell?—a certain amount of rot has surely been implanted in economic affairs.

Disengage and Decouple

More broadly, the Trump tariffs have only further accelerated what we might think of as the “Great American Decoupling,” which was under way even before his tariffs announcement: Trump’s apparent “pivot to Russia,” his view that the U.S. might not come to NATO members’ aid, and his earlier threats to annex Greenland, Canada, the Panama Canal, and the Gaza Strip, have all helped turn allies into skeptics, if not outright adversaries, and transformed a hegemon into something of a pariah.

Well before this current crisis—which is to say, in our time-warped, “flood the zone” reality, a mere few weeks ago—the New York Times reported on a “growing number of Europeans, Canadians and others who are forgoing American goods” to express their opposition to Trump’s foreign policy stance. Now, after the tariffs announcement, consumers in Denmark, to take just one example, are redoubling their boycott of American goods. European products are being labeled with star-shaped stickers in one major Copenhagen supermarket, which serves the dual function of helping consumers avoid American-made goods. There’s even a Danish-language Facebook group encouraging members to “boycott goods from the USA,” which currently has around 95,000 members.

Consumer boycotts are one striking example of how the world is decoupling from the U.S. economy. But there are other changes under way as well.

In Germany, conservative politicians have called for the country to bring a significant proportion of its gold reserves back from the U.S.—currently, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York holds German gold worth €113 billion, more than a third of the country’s reserve. A symbolic right-wing populist stunt, extending back to 2012 when a similar proposal was made, it’s nevertheless likely to be met with more support this time around. “The very idea that [the gold] might not be safe would have been considered ridiculous from 1945 ... until a couple of weeks ago,” POLITICO notes.

Meanwhile, in Norway, echoing wider European concerns about whether the US could “switch off Europe’s weapons,” some have worried that the U.S. might be able to disable the Norway’s fleet of more than fifty U.S.-made F-35 fighter jets; defense experts reassured Norwegian readers that the U.S. likely did not possess a “big red button” with which to paralyze the jets, but also noted that without full U.S. support, the planes would likely only be able to fly for a few months before being grounded, thanks to a near-total reliance on American-made spare parts and weapons systems. Even to ask these questions is suggestive of how far the fundamentals have changed since Trump’s January 20th inauguration.

Another sign of decoupling is the plummeting rate of arriving foreign visitors to the United States. “The number of foreigners passing through customs at the 10 busiest U.S. airports fell by over 20% year over year toward late March,” Axios reports. Several European countries have issued travel advisories. Multiple countries are warnings its transgender citizens to exercise caution when traveling to America. More anecdotally, looking around academia today, I’m hard pressed to find anyone seriously considering traveling to the U.S. for an academic conference as long as Trump remains in the White House: Many perceive that it’s simply not safe to do so.

As U.S. academics look for work elsewhere, including renowned scholars of fascism like Jason Stanley and Timothy Snyder, non-U.S. academics are increasingly shying away from the country as well, driven by a spate of troubling stories about border control, but also the Trump administration’s campaign against academic freedom aimed at quashing dissent—from ICE’s arrest of former Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil to Homeland Security agents’ arrest of Tufts doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk. American universities have long been the envy of the world, but the risks now seem needlessly large.

Naturally, tariffs have upended trading relationships as well. Only four days after the tariffs proclamation, British carmaker Jaguar Land Rover announced that it would no longer be exporting its cars across the Atlantic. China has said that it is limiting exports of four key rare-earth minerals, “squeezing supply to the West of minerals used to make weapons, electronics and a range of consumer goods.” And doubtless there are thousands of manufacturers around the world who are now reassessing their trade plans.

Trump’s big gamble is that these setbacks will be temporary as producers relocate manufacturing to the U.S. instead. But homeshoring takes time. It’s also unclear who would work in these (alleged) new manufacturing plants: U.S. unemployment currently sits at 4.2 percent, a relatively low level, so there isn’t a huge amount of available labor sitting around. And if investors feel that Trump’s America is a chaotic, unruly place to do business, where the basic ground rules can be overturned with a tweet, why would they invest their capital there rather than in, say, Europe or East Asia?

The Prodigal Land

Remarkably, America’s decoupling from the world isn’t the work of geopolitical adversaries hoping to knock the world’s policeman down a peg or two, or radicals looking to settle scores with U.S. imperialism. Instead, the country is being undermined by its very own political leadership. As Paul Krugman said recently of tariffs more specifically, “If you wanted to kill U.S. exceptionalism, this is kind of what you would do.”

It goes without saying that none of this is a good thing, neither for the world nor for the U.S. Despite its troubling foreign-policy record, with a lower-bound estimate of 3.6 million indirect deaths just from its post-9/11 wars, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project, the American economy is a powerhouse, its cultural products enjoyed by billions, and its universities admired by scholars and scientists around the globe.

If America is retreating into itself, and the world is pulling back from its exuberant irrationalities under Trump 2.0, that same world surely stands ready to accept it once again, albeit on much improved terms, under some more sensible leadership in the future. Perhaps some day in the not-too-distant future, the world will re-welcome an America that, like the prodigal son, was “dead and is alive again, and was lost and is found.”

The choice will largely lie with the American people themselves.