Exclusive Trump's tariff plan signals historic break from global trade: Yergin

Al Arabiya

02-04-2025

A new tariff regime set to be unveiled within hours by US President Donald Trump marks what may be the single most dramatic break from the global economic order since the end of World War II. According to renowned author and economic historian Daniel Yergin, we are witnessing a 'reversal of an eight or nine decade trend' away from free trade, ushering in a new era defined by tariff walls, trade nationalism, and protectionism.
Speaking to Al Arabiya News' Hadley Gamble on the eve of what is expected to be a major announcement from Trump detailing a sweeping new American tariff regime, Yergin warned that the assumptions underpinning decades of global economic integration were now being overturned.
'I've heard the Secretary of Commerce say what we want to do is build a tariff wall around the United States,' said Yergin. 'We're kind of going back to the years of William McKinley at the end of the 19th century, which was a very complicated time because you had a couple of major financial panics at the same time.'
Yergin, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and Vice Chairman of S&P Global, is one of the most influential voices in energy and geopolitics. His books, including The Prize, The Quest, and The New Map, are considered foundational texts for understanding global energy systems and their geopolitical implications.
'What we're seeing,' he added, 'is a reversal of an eight or nine-decade trend that began in 1934 under Franklin Roosevelt… to a view that the United States has been taken advantage [of], even though the United States has been doing better than any of the other industrial nations. And so we're at a great turn in history.'
This new period of economic nationalism, Yergin said, is deeply intertwined with the US-China rivalry. He noted that protectionist instincts were already present during the Biden administration but have become more pronounced under Trump.
'The Biden administration was also rather protectionist… famously, Joe Biden did not invite Tesla and Elon Musk to the electric vehicle summit at the White House in 2021, allegedly because it was not a union shop,' he said.
The tariffs are likely to reshape global supply chains and the future of advanced manufacturing. But Yergin cautioned that while announcements of new American factories abound, the jobs may not follow.
'The factories that will be built – this is an age of robotics. They're not going to be bringing jobs. This is not going to take us back to Detroit or Cleveland or Youngstown, Ohio. These are going to be different types of factories.'
Yergin described the unfolding trade war as part of a much broader 'great recalibration' – a moment in which countries are being forced to re-evaluate not only their trading relationships, but also their energy systems, economic structures, and geopolitical alignments.
On the energy front, Yergin delivered a sobering assessment. 'The energy transition is in need of a major rethink,' he told Gamble. 'A lot of the expectations, a lot of the planning, a lot of the spending was really crystallized during COVID, when demand was down and prices were down… And the consequence of that is that you had these straight lines, linear lines, that went to 2050 net zero, when almost half the world's emissions were not even covered by them.'
Far from displacing fossil fuels, he argued, the rise of renewables has come alongside a resurgence in oil and coal.
'2024 wind and solar were at the highest levels they ever were. 2024 oil and coal were at the highest levels they were ever. And natural gas would have been there, except for Russia's invasion of Ukraine,' he said.
Despite enormous political capital invested in green agendas, the numbers tell a different story: 'In the latest data we had – in 2022, 81 percent of the world's energy was hydrocarbons. In 2023 it was 80.5 percent. A one half of 1 percent change.'
That sluggish progress, Yergin explained, is not merely a failure of will, but a reflection of scale and feasibility.
'The numbers used for the Baku UN conference would say about 5 percent of world GDP over a number of years has to be spent [on the transition]. Now, developing countries don't have 5 percent of their GDP.'
Even developed nations are constrained.
'In Washington… there's this problem of this $36.5 trillion debt where the interest payments are greater than defense spending. So, you know, just the money's not there to do [it] on scale.'
Added to that, the growing electricity demands of artificial intelligence threaten to increase fossil fuel reliance.
'We saw this at the [CERAWeek] energy conference – electricity for AI. And in the United States, that means more natural gas going into it.'
Yergin warned that all these dynamics point to an energy future that is messy, uneven, and politically fraught.
'The notion that you're just going to draw a line and get to net zero by 2035 – that's why we say the energy transition is going to be multi-dimensional. It's going to unfold at different paces in different regions, with different mixes of technology and of critical importance, different priorities by different governments.'
Those different priorities are already leading to divergent strategies. In Europe, the rise of populism is fueling a backlash against regulatory excess and green targets.
'You're going to see it a lot in the battles over the budget, and you're also going to see it in the rise of the populist parties.'
Russia, according to Yergin, wasn't without its problems either. Sanctions had not stopped the war economy. It had, however, said Yergin, driven Moscow into the arms of Beijing.
'Russia's basically become an economic dependency of China,' he said.
Yergin concluded by reiterating his view, the world had entered an unpredictable new phase. The long-dominant assumptions about free trade, clean energy, and global integration are now under siege.
'It is recalibrating and reassessing and recognizing that those simple graphs that go to 2050 – [that] is not the way the world's going to go,' he stated.