Recent trade battles with China, Mexico, Canada, and Europe have reduced trade flows. Now, with the outbreak of COVID-19 severely impacting international commerce, many argue that globalization will soon be dead. Globalization is not dying. Rather, it’s evolving, and existing trends are accelerating. American companies and workers would be wise to prepare for what’s ahead.

In the New York Times on Tuesday, May 5, Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) proposed abolishing the World Trade Organization. On the next day came a flood of fact corrections from trade experts exposing the senator’s idea as the spawn of fallacies. Then, on that Thursday, conceding only that the United States can’t “abolish” the WTO, Hawley submitted a joint resolution to Congress calling for a formal withdrawal.

Beijing no longer has many friends in Washington—for understandable reasons. The entire Chinese government mishandled various stages of the coronavirus outbreak, including hiding the extent of infection and transmissibility to humans, punishing doctors and citizen journalists who sought to report on the looming pandemic, and moving far too slowly on a travel ban from Wuhan, allowing the coronavirus to become a truly global crisis.

Many predicted that West Texas Intermediate crude oil could trade as low as $15 a barrel during the Saudi-Russia price war. Some even speculated it could hit $5 when figuring in the demand crater due to the global pandemic. No one predicted this. There simply isn’t a proper word to use here — unprecedented, catastrophic, unimaginable — none fit.

Protectionists have been emboldened by the Trump administration’s approach to trade policy, and some are now using COVID-19 as an argument to support their cause. In most cases, it’s not worth responding, but I don’t think of economics columnist Noah Smith as an economic nationalist, so if he is saying things along these lines, I feel like it merits a response. Here’s what he said in his recent column:

Some people talk about trade as though it were an end in itself. It’s not. Trade is a means to an end. We trade so that we can specialize. We specialize so that we can produce more. We produce more so that we can consume and save more. That is how we create wealth and raise living standards.

Videos of triumphant doctors in Wuhan removing their protective equipment flooding social media this week symbolized the end of the fight against COVID-19 in the city where the outbreak began. With travel restrictions set to lift April 8 in Wuhan and wider Hubei province, and domestically transmitted cases of the virus near zero, life for China’s 1.4 billion residents is getting back to a new normal.

It took COVID-19 several weeks to mass migrate from China to Europe, but the continent is now awash in the virus. The pandemic has fully arrived in Italy and Spain. Other nations await the disease, hoping to slow its spread. It will kill many Europeans. It also might kill the European Union, at least the idea of a European community in any meaningful sense.

President Trump’s intention to persuade China to play by long-established international trade rules is commendable. But focusing on the U.S. trade deficit with China, and imposing tariffs to eliminate it, has proven ineffective. Now, the coronavirus has given Trump an opportunity to shelve that failed strategy and immediately eliminate tariffs on Chinese imports. This shot in the arm will likely be reciprocated by China, stimulate our economies, and give Trump the opportunity to chart a better course. Let me explain.

After some fits and starts, Joe Biden has emerged from a crowded field as the front‐runner for the Democratic nomination. There’s still some politicking left to go, but let’s talk about what a Biden trade policy might look like if he is elected president. In this article, I’ll consider three things: (1) What Biden has said about trade during the Democratic primary campaign; (2) what the Obama administration did on trade when Biden was vice‐president; and (3) what issues Biden would face and what he might do as president (this section is very speculative!).