Summarize
A decade after Brexit and Trump’s election, the global economy is more integrated than it was before the populist backlash began.
Shawn DonnanOctober 9, 2026 at 12:30 AM EDT
llustration: Iman Raad for Bloomberg
The populist revolution in the Anglo world is about to turn 10, as we near a decade since the US election of Donald Trump. And the world hasn’t been quite the same since.
The rise of the populists that started in June 2016, with the UK’s rebellion against its European Union-hugging elites and a vote for Brexit, was supposed to hasten the death of globalization. Its manifestations, including rising immigration and depleted factory jobs, were both a main target of the movement and identified as a cause of the economic disaffection fueling the revolt.
A decade on, there’s a paradox, though. This November, as Americans go to the polls for midterm elections in which Trump remains the leading character, they’ll do so in a global economy more integrated than it was in 2016. They’ll vote amid a Trump-endorsed artificial intelligence revolution that’s deeply reliant on globalization and in the shadow of bond markets responding to the mountain of debt left behind by a global pandemic. Despite all the trade barriers that have been erected, the safe economic wager increasingly looks like a world of enduring or even a deepening interdependence.
Yes, that conclusion seems at odds with the headlines. From US trade wars with Canada and China to the conflicts in Iran and Ukraine to the continuing strength of anti-immigration parties in Europe, the case for a fracturing global order remains strong. In many ways the rules-driven and technocrat-led global order targeted in 2016 looks fragile at best. But political fragmentation is different from what’s actually happened to the economy.
Trade On
Tune out the noise and take a long view of history, and the state of globalization — that force drawing people toward economic integration and the trading of ideas and goods, which has survived ups and downs for more than 2,000 years — actually looks remarkably healthy. Global trade has chugged along and, in absolute terms, even grown. More important, our increasingly digital and AI-powered lives promise only more global integration ahead.
Even measures of the “old economy” show that globalization has endured. Global trade in goods has remained remarkably resilient over the past 10 years. The strongest evidence comes from the Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis’ monthly World Trade Monitor, which for July, the latest month available, documented a volume of shipments around the world 25% higher than in November 2016. Over the past decade, the index has actually grown faster than in the one before.
To be fair, the trade in physical goods hasn’t expanded as fast as the overall global economy over the past decade, which means it isn’t the engine it once was. But neither has it collapsed. And the World Trade Organization this week said it actually expected that, at 3.9% this year, trade would again grow faster than global GDP.
In Asia, Europe and Latin America, the biggest economic story is that China is exporting far more than it was in 2016 and that what’s been called China Shock 2.0 has arrived. The country’s monthly exports in July were worth twice as muchas they were in November 2016. Like it or not, Chinese electric cars and e-bikes are on their way to a ubiquity at odds with any notion of deglobalization.
America, meanwhile, is also trading more than it used to. Despite Trump’s tariffs, in the first eight months of this year the US imported $500 billion more by value in inflation-adjusted real terms than it did in the comparable period in 2016. As a share of US gross domestic product, imports have barely shifted, at 11% to 12%.
The same story holds true for capital. Foreign holdings of US securities and American investment in overseas assets have both risen since 2016, in value and as a share of the economy. We’re more exposed to one another’s markets and speculation than we were a decade ago.
The value of imported components in manufactured goods around the world has also remained remarkably high. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, trade involving cross-border supply chains and thus imported parts or services was higher as a share of global GDP in 2024, the most recent year for which data is available, than it was in 2016. Trump’s latest tariffs have since come into effect, but companies so far have been more willing to swallow the cost of import taxes than to shift production. And the US is only one participant, of course.
Even the Trump administration is leaning on imported capital. Trump regularly boasts that foreign governments and both US and offshore private companies have committed more than $20 trillion in investment in the US during his second term; his own White House tracker puts the figure at $11.2 trillion. He’s even flirted withthe idea of Chinese carmakers building US factories, an embrace of globalization that would have seemed odd in 2016.
The Global Market for Attention
But that’s just the old-fashioned world. The real story is that our integration is increasingly digital.
Our attention span has been globalized, soon to be followed by our intelligence and memory. It’s not just that the phone in our hands remains a product of globalization. The vast data centers being built to keep up with AI’s appetite for computing capacity rely on chips and other parts from somewhere else, as well as a traffic of bits and bytes that flows across borders.
Since 2016 the number of people using the internet around the world has almost doubled, to more than 6 billion, according to the International Telecommunications Union. The ITU publishes broadband traffic going back only to 2019, but since then combined fixed and mobile broadband traffic has almost quadrupled. It stood at roughly 8,800 exabytes at the end of 2025.
The infrastructure for that digital trade is being distributed more widely. Data centers are the new ports, servers the new shipping containers and undersea cables the new silk roads.
Once upon a time, the story was that 70% of the global internet flowed through northern Virginia. Nowadays the more accurate figure is around 20%. That’s still a lot. But if you’re in London, Sydney or Kuala Lumpur, chances are your online queries are staying closer to home. Read one way, that’s a story of fragmentation and the US losing control over valuable choke points. Yet it also points to the widening backbone of our digital integration.
Some of this is sinister, of course. The dark web — that dystopian crypto-fueled marketplace for everything from stolen passwords to opioids — has only grown in the past decade. So have the scam farms of Southeast Asia. Crime is an even more globalized industrial enterprise.
There are more benign examples, though. A decade ago the idea of a Chinese-owned social media platform such as TikTok shaping American culture was a daunting national threat. But it has stuck around despite Congress’ attempt at a ban and is now a crucial piece of the creator economy with its own middle class. “Chinamaxxing” is a thing. A rural Irish boy starting a cottage business selling eggs from a roadside box and postingabout it online inspires real visitors from another land.
Not long after football club Arsenal won the Premier League earlier this year, I sat in a Washington dinner and listened to a speaker hail a resurgent American nationalism and lambast a sclerotic Britain. All I could think of as he spoke was the sea of social media posts I’d watched that week of fellow Arsenal fans dancing in the streets in places like Kenya. Soft power is sometimes overrated, and that goes double for the influence of sports. But who wouldn’t want the global brand power of an Arsenal, or any other British club?
The Premier League is now even more dependent on foreign owners and capital and squads filled with imported talent than it was when Britons voted for Brexit. In fact its big problem, outside of financial rules violations à la Manchester City, is that it’s become so globally beloved that English fans fear getting crowded out.
Importing AI
There’s no sector in which Trump’s accommodation of globalization is more evident than AI.
The massive investment boom underway, which economists have calculated stands to be bigger than the US’s 19th century railway build-out, relies on imported parts, starting with the high-value chips and servers on which data centers run. And even as Trump has hiked duties elsewhere, he’s excluded those chips and servers from his tariffs.
The physical boom is only the start of the AI story. In June researchers at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution reported that only half of the academics whose work contributed to the foundational papers behind China’s DeepSeek models had been exclusively affiliated with Chinese institutions. Of the 356 authors they identified, 80 had spent time at US universities, including 13 who’d recorded a combined 119 years there.Donald Trump speaks with tech executives about artificial intelligence at the White House in Washington on Sept. 29, 2026.Photographer: Tierney L. Cross/The Washington Post/Bloomberg
But it goes beyond research. Chinese universities are now the leading producers of top AI researchers, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace reported last month. Yet the US remains a major draw for that talent when it enters the workforce. The reality is that US AI companies depend heavily on imported engineers. Immigrants also make up almost two-thirds of the founders of the country’s leading AI startups.
National borders are also more porous than policymakers would like when data is involved. During Joe Biden’s administration, the US placed strict export controls on advanced AI chips in an effort to keep Chinese companies from using them to develop models. And yet Chinese firms have allegedly circumvented the curbs by leasing access to chips in countries such as Malaysia.
The same pattern extends beyond AI. We’re trading more ideas too. The number of academic papers with co-authors at institutions in different countries has grown rather than shrunk over the past decade, according to OECD data.
Even our faith is increasingly global, or rather, its institutions are increasingly dependent on global flocks and talent. One afternoon in the summer of 2024, I sat down with a Catholic bishop in the Pittsburgh exurbs as he described his efforts to resettle not just Ukrainian refugees but also the priests imported from Nigeria and the Philippines who tended to his rural parishes. His diocese was in Trump country. Yet it relied on immigrant priests.
The first time I confronted the idea of the death of globalization was in 2013, soon after I’d moved from an editing job to writing about what was then the sleepy topic of global trade. At that time the case for its demise lay in the aftermath of the global financial crisis and a slowdown in the breakneck growth in trade that preceded 2008. But from the ashes of that crisis, new types of connections were arising. Declaring the death of globalization then risked missing the shape that it was taking.
There’s an enduring power to economic forces, and there are limits to policymakers’ ability to shape something as amorphous as the global economy. From profit-driven companies to unruly consumers, there are too many players to control.
The world has changed in the past decade, and there’s more change to come. A pandemic altered economic calculations. Powers are rising and falling. A daunting era of technological disruption has begun. Demographics are twisting the shapes of our economies. Climate change is exacting a toll and creating new risks. Wars weigh on not only those caught up in the fighting but also the world’s access to resources.
But a decade after the populists rose to power by asserting national interests over all else, we’re more connected than ever. Globalization is not merely alive. It remains on the march, whether we like it or not.
