For years, critics have lazily described Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” agenda as de-globalization — a retreat from the world, a rejection of trade, an inward turn. That charge is not merely wrong. It is intellectually dishonest.

MAGA is not a de-globalization policy. It is the most realistic globalization strategy the United States has pursued in decades.

What Trump rejected was not global engagement, but a failed model of globalization that stripped America of leverage while empowering strategic competitors — most notably China — and left U.S. allies and partners unsure of who was actually setting the rules.

America First doesn’t mean America alone.

For 30 years, Washington sold globalization as inevitable, benign, and mutually beneficial. Open markets would lead to open societies. Supply chains would produce stability. Cheap goods would substitute for strategy. Instead, the United States deindustrialized, China weaponized trade, and critical supply chains — from semiconductors to rare earths to antimony and graphite — migrated offshore.

This was not globalization in the abstract. It was globalization without reciprocity, enforcement, or national purpose. America played by the rules. Others rewrote them.

Trump was the first major........

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