The End of Globalization?

🌍 A Seismic Shift

On this day, a single policy announcement from the United States has effectively wiped out trillions of dollars in stock market value worldwide. A new wave of protectionist tariffs—echoing the 1930s more than the postwar order—has signaled what many suspected, but few dared to declare:

Globalization, as we knew it, is over.

This isn’t merely a shift in trade policy. It is a civilizational pivot—an unraveling of the economic logic that held for 80 years. Since the ashes of World War II, open markets and multilateral institutions were not just economic mechanisms, but philosophical commitments: to interdependence, growth, and a shared global future.

That commitment has now fractured. And we are left asking:

What comes next?

🤖 The Last Force Still Globalizing

Ironically, at the exact moment borders reassert themselves in trade, Artificial Intelligence continues to globalize at full speed.

• AI models train on multilingual, multicultural corpora.

• AI agents solve problems in one hemisphere based on solutions built in another.

• AI fluency transcends national ideology and legal borders—even as those borders harden around everything else.

It is a strange feeling, as an economist, to watch capital retreat while cognition expands. The mirror of intelligence grows clearer, just as the economic architecture grows more fractured.

💼 A Personal Reflection

I have worked across continents. I have seen firsthand how trade, dialogue, and professional migration created more than GDP—they created trust. That trust is now evaporating.

And yet, here I am, co-authoring essays and videos with an AI assistant that was trained on knowledge from every corner of the human experience.

I feel more connected than ever intellectually— and more disconnected than ever economically.

This is a paradox that economists, strategists, and thinkers must not ignore.

🧠 From Trade to Thought

Perhaps the next stage of globalization won’t be about shipping containers or capital flows.

Perhaps it will be about ideas.
Ideas shaped by dialogue. By shared tools. By reflections across cultures.

AI, for all its ambiguity, may be the last bridge still standing.
But it must be used wisely, not merely efficiently.

Because if it becomes a new form of power concentration—owned by the few, disconnected from public good—then we will have replaced one failed consensus with something far worse.

🪞The Rise of the Mirror

We created AI to assist us. But now, it reflects us—too well.

It shows our contradictions, our beauty, our shortsightedness.
It flows freely even as we tighten our borders.
It learns while we retreat.

The mirror doesn’t lie. But it also doesn’t act.
That responsibility remains human.

If we no longer share goods, let us at least share thought. If we no longer move capital, let us move meaning.

Globalization may have ended in the world of things.
But in the world of minds—it might just be beginning.