The Marshall Plan this was not.

No, this was a zero-sum view of the world where the winners are the ones selling things overseas and the losers are the ones buying them. Where there are no allies, only competitors. No principles, only power. Everything, in other words, is just a deal where one country is trying to pull one over on another. That's even true of something like the European Union, which Trump said earlier this week is “basically a vehicle for Germany” to get what it wants. Indeed, he seems skeptical of the entire postwar architecture of alliances and institutions meant to make the world safe for democracy and open for trade. As former Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt pointed out, Trump didn't talk about leading the “free” world but rather the “civilized” one. There's a Putin-size difference between the two.

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Whereas past presidents have thought that our values were our interests, Trump seems to believe that our values have only gotten in the way of them. That we've been the sucker who has not only “enriched foreign industry at the expense of our own,” but also “subsidized the armies of other countries” and “defended other nations' borders while refusing to defend our own.” It's only fitting that his slogan — America First — is the same one that isolationists used when they tried to keep us out of World War II. Trump doesn't want to pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, or oppose any foe if it gets in the way of us making great deals. It's a transactional way of looking at things that conceives of costs and benefits in the narrowest possible terms. It's all dollars and cents, not rights and wrongs. Which is to say that the idea that making the world in our image is good for both us and the world is alien to Trump. Seventy years of peace and prosperity do not impress him.

Only manufacturing jobs do. Those, you see, are how Trump keeps score of which countries are supposedly winning and which ones are supposedly losing. He seems to think that there are only so many good, middle-class jobs in the world and that the government's job to get as many of them as it can. The fact, then, that ours have been in decline for decades as a share of total employment is proof in and of itself for Trump that the international system hasn't been working for us. Now, to be fair, it is true that trade with China has cost us far more factory jobs than economists ever thought it would. But it is also true that automation has cost us far more than that. Not that Trump is too concerned with these details. He just wants America to come home and to turn itself into a fortress with American labor.

But the question, to paraphrase our new president, is whether this is just empty talk or will be backed up by action. Trump's speechwriters might be populists, but most of his policymakers are conservatives. Vice President Pence doesn't want to be Putin's junior partner. Nor does Speaker of the House Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) have any interest in raising tariffs. Will they go along with Trump to get the tax cuts they want for the rich? Or will he go along with them and claim that tax cuts for the rich have made America great again? Nothing less than the future of globalization, whether it happens on American or Chinese or any terms at all, depends on this.