In the U.S., Russia, even China, in India, right-wing nationalist governments are in power. In other major powers like Germany, Brazil, and South Africa, politics is in a flux with center-left influences trying to tether governments to their liberal roots. But there is a movement globally to the far right of the political spectrum as the liberal-left power players employ lawful and extra-constitutional means to grab onto their tenuous hold on power. Europe is trying to be the Last Man for the liberal-left, the EU is the supranational organisation which Germany, France and Great Britain use as a common front to resist the surge of the continental far right just at the cusp of seizing power.
Francis Fukuyama in his 1992 book The End of History And The Last Man believed that the EU as model will spread the idea of liberal democracy as the final form of government for all nations, and that there is no alternative. Thirty-three years later this assertion appeared to hold true until a pro-Russian power elite led by Donald Trump came to office in Washington DC, in 2025 January, and in just three months by April the global economy has caught the jitters of an all-around tariff war, on foes and friends alike.
The military component of the globalisation wars began with the Russian swift incursion into, called a full scale invasion by most in the West, Ukraine’s Russian-speaking break-away republics in the east. This invasion took place on February 24, 2022. Joe Biden of the Democratic Party was president of the U.S., with firm support of the EU, Europe’s major powers and the Western military alliance, NATO, the response was robust and decisive. The U.S.-led West swiftly cut their supply and value chains within Russia itself as it forced its way across Ukrainian territories on land, air, and the Black Sea.
The gains made since the collapse of the Soviet Union from 1991 ending the Cold War, and the swift inroads of Western finance and businesses were suddenly being detached as one company after the other left Putin’s Russia. To date the Russia-Ukraine war has raged for about three years with a heavy toll on men and materiel on both sides, in 2022 alone Western firms like Mercedes Benz, Starbucks, Coca Cola, Levi’s, Apple, Heineken, Pepsi, Unilever, Dove, L’ Oreal cosmetics, Marks and Spencer, BurgerKing, Marriot and Accor Hotel Group have left or suspended operations in Russia; French carmaker Renault sold its 68 per cent stake in Russian automaker Avtovaz. Critical Russian gas pipelines to Germany transiting Ukraine and the Baltic Sea were sabotaged by yet to be identified actors placing underwater explosives.
Russian gas started flowing to China a bit earlier, before the Ukraine war began. A 3000km Power of Siberia pipeline resumed gas supplies to China in 2019. Before the end of that year more gas was expected to be routed from the underdeveloped Kovykta fields, and as the Ukraine war got underway near the fourth quarter of 2022, the Russians and Chinese inked an extension to an earlier gas supply deal to the tune of $37.5 billion worth. By this same period economic rumblings were being felt across Europe’s major economies: the British pound lost its value since 1985 levels against the U.S. dollar; a study found that 60 or more UK factories were at risk of shuttering due to high energy bills as Europe’s wider economy was said to face possible collapse in about three years from 2022.
India and China have cashed in on buying heavily discounted Russian crude and gas which have placed both countries on the path of being leading global economic powerhouses. By December 2022, JP Morgan strategist had predicted that deglobalisation will be a major trend for the year 2023. As 2023 wound down in December, The New York Times reported that Western companies that announced their withdrawal from Russia from the February 2022 beginning of the so-called Special military operation have lost a staggering $103 billion U.S.
In the same December Russian president Vladimir Putin at an investment forum in Moscow referred to the Western payment system SWIFT as discredited since payments between states are increasingly being done through national currencies such as the rouble, remhimbi, rand, and rupees. At the onset of the Russia-Ukraine hot war, Western states had imposed batches of sanctions targeting Russian banking, gold, oil and gas.
The sanctions as earlier noted undermined logistics nodes in Russia, including financial routes, therefore making it difficult or impossible to bring in components and other wares into the Russian economy. But the reverse was the case with China and India as logistics routes and payments channels were strengthened within formats as the BRICS group. The West at some point in the last quarter of 2022 introduced a price cap on the shipment of Russian crude which was further intended to undermine shipping, insurance and re-insurance companies of Russian crude above $60 per barrel.
President Trump was sworn in after a convincing electoral victory in November 2024 that saw him win both the popular votes and the electoral college votes which like the U.S. congress represents each state by delegates number proportioned to the U.S. congress as one entity. The critical area Trump won, and won all, were the so-called swing states, winning six states there cleared his constitutional hurdle to the White House.
Most of these swing states were in the areas of the U.S. at the receiving end of decades-long globalisation; usually called the Rust Belt, due to rusting and dilapidated infrastructure as American firms moved their operations to the coastal states on the West and East coasts, and also outside of the U.S. Trump’s win was historical and bruising, the campaigns in themselves between the Democrats and Republicans was like no other before: two assassination attempts on Trump and multiple criminal indictments stacked the odds against the Republican.
The 2024 presidential elections in America between Trump and Kamala Harris was nothing other than warlike, it was a campaign steeped on rolling back globalisation and the much vaunted ascendancy of liberalism as the end of history, the end of discussion. The parts of the U.S., the Midwest, made the final call on who would control the levers of power and the global economy; a trade war involving tariffs on foreign imported goods from anywhere in Europe or Asia was likely the sure path to an America First sloganeering.
On April 2, 2025 President Trump upped the ante by declaring a Liberation Day on which he declared blanket tariffs on America’s traditional friends and allies alike, tariffs ranged from 10 per cent to as much as 49 per cent were levied sequentially on the United Kingdom to Cambodia consecutively. Asian countries appeared the hardest hit as the top nine out of 60 countries were from the region with the highest percentages: Vietnam(46 per cent), China(34 per cent), Taiwan(32 per cent), India(26 per cent), South Korea(25 per cent), Japan(24 per cent), the EU(20 per cent), the UK(10 per cent). A further 25 per cent tariff was imposed on all automobiles coming into the U.S., apparently also targeting Asia or China which overtook Germany in 2022 as second largest exporter of cars, and in the first three months of 2023 replacing Japan as the global leader as the top car exporter.
Chinese car brands were able to achieve these due to increasing demand for electric vehicles and also increased demand from the Russian market. In Africa, specifically in Nigeria of which Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala is the director-general of the World Trade Organisation, Trump imposed a 14 per cent reciprocal tariff on Nigeria’s 27 per cent charges on U.S. goods. Nigerian exports to the U.S. had in five years grown from $5.8 billion in 2018 to $6.3 billion in 2023.
Trump’s ultimate aim is to bring back manufacturing back to the United States economy, he literally wants factories to move to the U.S., ushering a new Golden Era like never before. The hot war in Ukraine is still raging as some form of ceasefire is being brokered, and some form of quid pro quo minerals deal for the Zelenskyi Ukraine government to approve for the U.S. side. Trump had promised a quick end to the war before he assumed office as president, but that’s not what her EU allies and the Russians want.
Many Western businesses have left Russia with big losses in their balance sheets, especially American, European industries as stuttering under the weight of high energy costs to keep running. German carmakers who left the Russian market are now being hit below the belt with Trump’s new tariffs. The German-led EU has already described Trump’s move as a major blow to the world economy and promising some response.
The UK which does some 60 billion pounds worth of exports to the U.S. has expressed muted relief while expecting tens of thousands of jobs in the car manufacturing industry to be at risk . China, the world’s second largest economy has called it tariff blackmail, as its across straits foe, Taiwan, a U.S. ally, described it as unreasonable.
Globalisation wars as we can see is multi-phase involving tools of violent war to taxes on imported items at ports of entry of countries. The first phase started in early 2022 as Vladimir Putin’s Russia made a grab for Ukrainian territories and the Western response of biting sanctions and disconnection of supply chains in Russia, and the appropriation of billions of dollars to aid Ukraine military resistance. Russian defence expenditure swelled also at the same time as Asian appetite for cheap Russian gas spiked.
Chinese factories are now producing at near full capacity. However cumulative tariffs imposed by Trump presidency in 2025 means Beijing is to pay taxes at U.S. ports of a whopping 54 per cent, but the Eurozone countries of the EU are cranky and tired out from the Ukraine war, added to this saga; Europe is being harangued to pay 5 per cent of their GDP on NATO military acquisitions from a current 2.5 per cent most are struggling g to meet. Trump tariffs are on course to unravel the North Atlantic alliance and make NATO obsolete as he claimed in his first term. Trump’s tariff war phase may lead to other geopolitical hotspots like Taiwan, Phillippines, Pacific islands, and Iran erupting into new hot wars.
Trump like Putin is also testing, or probing, the extent of the North Atlantic alliance on which NATO rests, he is making aggressive moves into Danish-owned Greenland; Denmark is a member of Nato and the EU. Trump would rather Denmark sell Greenland without a fight. Less than 100 days into his second presidency Trump has upended many multilateral treaties and agreements with allies in the EU, further threatening a U.S. exit from Nato and the UN system all of which Liberal Europe and the EU had evolved around.
The last man may just be at the threshold of a world of protectionist trade tariffs which is a direct threat to its founding ideology, an ideology that may after all, not be the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution.
Ufondu is a political analyst. He can be reached via: [email protected] or +2348104082848.
