Donald Trump’s attempt to upturn the global free-trade system has disoriented his critics and supporters. The massive downturn in the stock market, which followed his imposition of tariffs on much of the world last month, shocked Republicans as well as many of Trump’s billionaire backers. Liberals have rallied behind free trade and globalization, which they now see as a bulwark against the MAGA right. Meanwhile, many of the criticisms that liberals have made of tariffs, trade, and the causes of China’s rise has been mired in misunderstandings of the history of global development. However, the Left has a deep tradition of criticizing free trade without embracing Trump-style hawkishness.

Jacobin spoke to the economist Ha-Joon Chang, who is the author of more than a dozen books on global development and industrial policy, about Trump’s ongoing trade war. For Chang, America’s relative decline is self-inflicted. While China and other formerly poor nations took lessons from the United States’ rise to become industrial powers themselves, the US has systematically undermined the sources of its own strength. It has done this by empowering a capitalist class that prefers outsourcing and offshoring to investing productively.