At the beginning of this month, Donald Trump’s “liberation day” tariffs sent markets into a tailspin. The Nobel Prize-winning American economist Paul Krugman let out a despairing howl: “America created the modern world trading system,” he said, later adding that “Donald Trump burned it all down”. Meanwhile, as the US president and his coterie of advisers took a sledgehammer to global economic shibboleths, I wondered, “how to make this about me?”
On the evening of liberation day, I stood in a garden with some friends. Among them was an arch-conservative. He defended the tariffs and made the case for economic protectionism. Days later, I read a Telegraph columnist express sceptical admiration for Trump’s politicking, or for not merely “caretaking history” but “attempting to change it”. As far as I understood it, arch-conservatives and Telegraph columnists were once the great champions of globalisation and free trade. The same caste of people who advocated for Brexit on the grounds that it would establish – in that now rather noxious term – “Global Britain” are now retreating from the idea entirely. Trade deals with the whole world was the dream in 2016; oh, we didn’t really mean it, is the sense in 2025.
Far from me to condemn anyone or any group for changing their mind. It is a virtue, in any case, to malleably adapt to the shifting climates (cultural, political, economic). And of course, conservatives and Telegraph writers are not an ideological homogenous blob, nor should they be. But it is unmooring, nonetheless, to witness an inversion of the basic political expectations that have guided my adolescence and 20s. It is hard to measure the weight of events as they are happening around you. But I talk to my friends in their late 20s and early 30s now, and no one can shake the idea that the principles that organised our youth have vanished.
Of course, Trump’s protectionist instincts are not new. In his first term he took aim, in particular, at Chinese imports – measures continued and accelerated by Joe Biden in 2024. But in his speech in the Rose Garden of the White House on April 2nd, it seems there was one thing everyone could agree on: it was different this time. And when – in the words of the Guardian diplomatic editor – the man elected to lead the country that invented globalisation “places the rejection of globalism at his ideological core, even if it means alienating the US’s closest allies, a fundamental reordering is under way”.
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And don’t just take it from me, or him. Even the Labour government in Britain is briefing the death of the old way of things. “The world as we know it has gone,” prime minister Keir Starmer wrote. “Globalisation as we’ve known it for the last couple of decades has come to an end,” a Treasury minister added later the same day. This is not to be taken as Labour’s happy embrace of the new reality established by Trump, but as solemn acceptance of some rather worrying facts.
Growing up as a teenager in the late 2000s and early 2010s in Dublin, my peers and I were perhaps among the great beneficiaries of a world (or at least, a Europe) founded on principles of free trade and open economies. To borrow a cliche (and one that will make me sound impossibly bourgeois): we were eating oranges from Spain and probably wearing fast fashion problematically produced in the developing world; texting each other on rudimentary smartphones made with materials from China using early internet slang most likely imported from American television. For the generation slightly below mine this was turbocharged, with their news imported from foreign apps such as TikTok and their clothes from fast-fashion behemoths such as Shein.
More than any of that, and sorry to state the obvious, Ireland itself was one of the great winners of globalisation as the European Union dragged the weary economy on to the leader board of the wealthiest in the world. We don’t need to remind anyone about how foreign direct investment completely changed national fortunes.
[ Irish young people worried Brexit will limit their opportunitiesOpens in new window ]
There are two other big events I was old enough to understand as both totemic and material turning points (the financial crash of 2008 was too confusing for a 12-year-old to parse, I suspect). The first was Brexit – an early and obvious reckoning with free movement of people, a theme that would come to define the ensuing decade. And, more happily, the marriage equality referendum of 2015 and abortion referendum of 2018 offered an assured sense that Ireland’s rapid and vertiginous liberalisation was real and popular, and that the oppressive Catholic social conservatism that was long out the door had finally and fully departed. It didn’t seem wrong at the time to feel this was a world changed (changed utterly, and all that). And that is all the more justified in hindsight.
Plenty of commentators have wondered whether liberation day will be remembered as one of these epochal moments, or whether it may be consigned to history as a macroeconomic blip as Trump course-corrects. But one thing I have learned this month: assuming that the world we understand is the world that will endure is naive indeed.
