It won’t spillover.

The United States’ openness to the global economy can be measured by the cross-border flows of goods and services (trade); of capital (foreign direct investment and other types of financial assets); and of people (immigration).[1] By some of the most central measures, depicted in the figures below, US disengagement from globalization has been significant, particularly in comparison to the general trend in and behavior of other large high-income democracies. Former President Donald J. Trump may have pursued that decoupling with his policies discouraging offshoring of US manufacturing and imposing tariffs on imports. But the trend of US deglobalization began with US administrations well before Trump took office in 2017.

The figures also illustrate that these successive US governments’ efforts to protect selected domestic workers by insulating them from the global economy have already failed—the US workforce is no better off, and in many ways worse off, than other advanced democracies, which increased their openness to the global economy at the same time: Labor force participation in general and for women in particular is lower; manufacturing jobs have declined as a share of employment at the same rate; and labor earnings as a share of GDP have followed the same path.

In his newly published article “” in Foreign Affairs, the bimonthly journal published by the Council on Foreign Relations, Adam S. Posen argues that making life better for American lower-income workers depends on the United States reopening to global economic cooperation and integration. The figures below showing signs of the deteriorating US role in the world economy were adapted from research for that article.