US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent stood before the Economic Club of New York last Tuesday evening to deliver what amounted to an obituary for the term 'globalisation' — the concept that dominated the past three decades with its promise that cheaper goods and deeper integration would make the world wealthier and safer. Bessent said that promise had not held, and that policymakers had wrongly assumed that lower prices could compensate for the loss of productive capacity.

He then uttered the sentence that distils the philosophy of the new era: 'A nation that depends on its adversaries for critical inputs is not truly sovereign, and a nation that reduces its economy to consumption is not truly prosperous.'

Globalisation has not died, as some imagine — it has merely changed hands. It has passed out of the grasp of corporations and markets and into the corridors of security agencies and the back rooms of politics.

Globalisation is no longer an economic project driven by production costs. It has become a security architecture driven by anxieties over China, wars, pandemics, straits, and supply chain disruptions. This shift is not the product of a passing 'Trumpian' mood; it is the fruit of an accumulation of shocks that have redefined the trade-off between efficiency and security.

The depth of this transformation is demonstrated by the fact that the two parties that have alternated in leading the United States for decades share the same view of globalisation. The anxiety expressed by Bessent, Treasury Secretary in a Republican administration, is almost a carbon copy of concerns previously articulated by Democrats. In 2023, Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser in the Biden administration, criticised the decades-old assumption that 'markets always allocate capital efficiently and effectively' and that supply chains would hold in every crisis. When Bessent echoes the same sentiment today, it becomes clear that the issue has moved beyond the persons of Trump or Biden to a deep American consensus that 'unconditional economic openness has become a security risk.'

To understand how the economy is being retamed, it is necessary to break down the new vocabulary driving the scene — in the language of reality rather than that of think tanks. The most prominent terms are:

  • Reshoring: factories returning home even at higher cost. The most prominent example is the CHIPS Act, which allocated tens of billions of dollars to entice the semiconductor industry back to American soil; companies have committed to more than 540 billion dollars in domestic investment in that sector alone.
  • Friend-shoring: trading with those you trust politically rather than those who offer the lowest price. Mexico, India, and Vietnam are gradually replacing China. This shift reached its symbolic peak in 2023, when Mexico overtook China to become the largest exporter of goods to the United States — a signal of a major shift in the geography of trade.
  • Near-shoring: bringing supply chains closer to your markets and spheres of influence, rather than leaving them suspended at the far ends of the earth.
  • The end of the 'cheap goods' illusion: the conclusion that unites all of the above. Western governments are now willing to accept producing goods at higher manufacturing costs in exchange for guaranteeing their supply will not be interrupted during crises. Economists estimate that fully reshoring critical industries could add between 1 and 3 percentage points to consumer prices in the affected sectors.

Amid all this talk of states, corridors, and factories, one figure is largely absent: the ordinary consumer. It is the consumer who will ultimately pay the bill for tamed globalisation. The secure good is necessarily more expensive than the cheap one; when a state chooses a nearby, trusted manufacturer over a distant, low-cost one, the difference shows up in the prices of cars, phones, medicines, food, and energy. In short: the old globalisation promised the consumer a lower price — the new globalisation demands that the consumer pay a security premium.

The old globalisation assumed the sea was always open, that ships passed unimpeded, and that straits were neutral. But the Strait of Hormuz, Bab al-Mandab, the Suez Canal, the Taiwan Strait, and the Black Sea have all demonstrated that geography has a say that economics must hear. Globalisation discovered that a ship does not sail across the maps of trade but across a reality more like a minefield, where any one mine can detonate at any moment and disrupt supply chains.

The obsession with 'dangerous concentrations' and 'foreign chokepoints' was plainly visible in Bessent's own remarks, when he called for diversification so that America would no longer be 'at the mercy of a foreign chokepoint.' The aim is to build shorter, more secure regional supply networks that reduce dependence on sea lanes that have become open arenas for conflict. The stakes of this gamble become clear when we consider that economists estimate a Chinese blockade of Taiwan alone could cost the global economy roughly 2.7 trillion dollars in losses in its first year alone — given that Taiwan manufactures the vast majority of the world's advanced chips.

In the old globalisation, partnership with America was a flexible alliance; today it has become a protocol conditioned on explicit trade concessions. Bessent encapsulated this when he said that economic partnership with the United States 'now carries obligations and requirements,' adding in a tone not devoid of threat: 'The United States has many tools to address practices that distort trade and undermine reciprocity, and we will always seek to use them wisely, but we will never hesitate to use them firmly.'

A live example of this reciprocal logic is an agreement signed in early 2026 between Washington and Taiwan, under which Taiwanese technology companies committed to channelling large investments into the United States in exchange for reductions in tariffs on their exports.

The essence of the scene — and its deepest paradox — lies in culture. A state can impose tariffs on chips, cars, and steel, but it is powerless to impose a tariff on algorithms, or to stop a video at the border, or to prevent an artificial intelligence model from reshaping language, taste, and consciousness.

Consider the contrast: a shipping container collides with customs checkpoints and political borders, waiting for inspection, clearance, and duties; while a line of artificial intelligence code or a video clip crosses continents in a fraction of a second.

Yet the picture is not absolute. States, even if they cannot seal off digital culture entirely, are attempting to redirect it through app bans, data laws, 'digital sovereignty' frameworks, and the localisation of data centres within their borders. Digital culture is not entirely free, but it is far more resistant to taming than physical goods. And so the layers of the new world arrange themselves: the economy tamed by tariffs, customs, and factories; technology partially tamed by data, servers, and legislation; while consciousness remains the most rebellious element of all — the hardest to restrict or tame.

What we are witnessing now is a waypoint in a long trajectory whose links accumulated over three decades. Between 1990 and 2008, optimistic globalisation reigned: free trade seemed an unstoppable destiny, and China became the unrivalled workshop of the world. Then the 2008 financial crisis shook confidence in the market's infallibility and its ability to self-correct. By 2016, Trump's rise to the White House and the Brexit vote signalled the return of economic nationalism to the fore. By 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic had exposed the fragility of supply chains — the mere closure of Chinese factories was enough to paralyse the entire world. In 2022, the war in Ukraine returned energy and food to the heart of national security calculations. And from 2023 to the present, artificial intelligence and chips have transformed technology into an arena of open sovereign contest, completing the portrait of a world consumed by the pursuit of security.

Our region stands at the heart of this equation, and faces two choices: to treat it as a threat or as an opportunity. The threat is that its exports of oil, chemicals, and fertilisers are classified as 'dangerous concentrations,' compelling the West to diversify its sources away from the region, leaving its countries caught in a harsh choice between Chinese investment and Western security partnerships.

The opportunity, however, is deeper and more far-reaching. Tamed globalisation poses the region — and particularly the Gulf states, which have demonstrated their capacity to adopt forward-looking visions — with existential questions whose answers are determined by an understanding of what tamed globalisation actually needs: by its very nature, it requires trustworthy, stable regions with strong infrastructure and an intermediary geographic position. These are specifications that several Gulf states have successfully achieved.

And so the new world takes shape as Trump envisions it: semi-closed political and economic fortresses, yet still compelled to communicate through technological and cultural windows they lack the power to shut — a far cry from the promise of the 1990s of one open global village.