Strategic Narratives in Global Trade Politics: American Hegemony, Free Trade, and the Hidden Hand of the State
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The characterization of the United States as a liberal hegemon seeking to uphold free-market capitalism against the illiberal state capitalism of China and other emerging powers has become commonplace, along with the attendant notion that American economic openness has been exploited by the unfair trade practices of other states. Given their dominance in US political discourse and role in shaping contemporary policy—including fuelling Trump’s trade wars and aggressive unilateral trade actions against all of the United States’ major trading partners, his attacks on the World Trade Organization, and talk of a “new Cold War” between the United States and China—these claims merit far greater scrutiny. In this article, I challenge the stark dichotomy frequently drawn between American “free-market capitalism” and the “state capitalism” of its emerging challengers, arguing that this forms part of a strategic narrative deployed for political purposes, including legitimating the United States’ use of aggressive trade policy measures. An examination of the American hegemon’s actual trade and industrial policies complicates this characterization. Despite presenting itself as a promoter and defender of free trade, I show that the unifying logic of US trade policy has always been the promotion of American economic interests: the United States has engaged in considerable state intervention and trade protectionism, both to shield vulnerable industries and support others to achieve and maintain their global dominance.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".