"Globalisation is a force of nature, not a policy," said Tony Blair six years ago. "It is a fact."
Now, with Donald Trump's "Liberation Day" tariffs upending the near century-long process of integrating the global economy, the current prime minister has declared that era effectively over.
"First it was defence and national security. Now it is the global economy and trade," said Keir Starmer in The Telegraph. "Old assumptions can no longer be taken for granted. The world as we knew it has gone."
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Starmer's message was "received by some with bewilderment, treated as a knee-jerk reaction to Donald Trump abroad and Nigel Farage at home", said George Eaton in The New Statesman. But the "most striking thing – in a government not renowned for its consistency – was that we'd heard this before".
His chancellor, Rachel Reeves, declared on a visit to Washington almost two years ago that "globalisation, as we once knew it, is dead".
"It's a reminder that the death of globalisation (or at least a form of it) has been a process rather than an event," said Eaton.
The truth is that in his "assault on globalisation, Trump has been pushing on a door that was already ajar", said the Financial Times. The loss of jobs to less developed countries and the global financial crisis had "damaged public confidence in postwar economic orthodoxy" both in the US and in other Western nations.
With the rise of China, Trump has successfully "fused these resentments about trade with his own psychology. The globalisation era was defined by the idea of win-win – that both sides can benefit from compromise." For Trump, there can only be one winner.
"When regimes end, they end in phases," said Wolfgang Munchau on UnHerd. Communism collapsed over a decade, starting with the Solidarity strike at the Gdansk shipyard in 1980 and ending with the 1991 coup against Mikhail Gorbachev.
"Trump's first term was Gdansk, the canary in the coal mine." Last week's "Liberation Day" was "globalisation's Gorbachev moment".
What next?
The US-led post-war world order may be "finally starting to crumble", said Dr Amitav Acharya in The New York Times, but "chaos will not inevitably follow".
"That fear is partly based on two errors": that the period since the end of the Second World War has "not been as good for everyone on the planet" as it has been generally for citizens of the West, and that "the very precepts of order are not Western inventions".
And that is a "reason for optimism. To understand that the American order is not the only possible system – that, for many countries, it is not even a particularly good or fair one – is to allow oneself to hope that its end could augur a more inclusive world."
This in essence is what Starmer is aiming for as well. "The world has changed, globalisation is over and we are now in a new era", a Downing Street official told The Sunday Times. "We've got to demonstrate that our approach, a more active Labour government, a more reformist government, can provide the answers for people in every part of this country."
That might not mean "the end of globalisation entirely", but Starmer is hoping "a more balanced version can emerge", said Eaton.
