Trump, Mercantilism and the Return of the Zero-Sum World

The End of Abundance and the Rise of Zero-Sum Geopolitics: How the Ecological Crisis Is Rewriting the Rules of International Trade and Imperial Strategy

Despite his populist rhetoric and climate denialism, Donald Trump has brought back to centre stage an economic worldview that is surprisingly realistic: mercantilism. Among economists, it is common to label Trump’s policies as neo-mercantilist, a notion that refers to the economic thinking that characterised wealthy nations between 1600 and 1750. This label is quite logical, supported by his economic nationalism, trade wars, reshuffling of geopolitical alliances, and threats to seize foreign territories. However, it is also common to question the rationality behind these principles, portraying the U.S. president as a confused man without a coherent plan—something far more debatable. Indeed, the mercantilist worldview was in many respects more realistic than the liberal one, especially concerning the role of natural resources in economic development.

Trump is a reactionary, but he is not an idiot. The worldview behind his economic policies is more accurate than that of many other Western leaders, which makes him all the more dangerous. Ultimately, what U.S. policy reveals is that “Make America Great Again” means trampling over vast social sectors and entire countries, plundering nature for its benefit, and building a fortress nation unconcerned with what happens elsewhere on the planet. These elements, which are also part of any eco-fascist proposal, are often overlooked when critiques are confined to conventional terms (“he doesn’t understand economics,” “he’s crazy,” “he doesn’t know what he’s doing…”).

Despite its anti-environmental rhetoric and practice, the U.S. government is fully aware that the planet’s natural resources are scarce. It also knows that the American Way of Life cannot be extended to the entire global population, and barely even to U.S. society itself, since that level of consumption lies well beyond the Earth’s natural limits—both in terms of resource availability (sources) and environmental sinks (climate change). Consequently, their response to this diagnosis is appropriation and privatisation of as many resources as possible by the U.S., using whatever methods imaginable.

As in mercantilist times, such practices are often justified in terms of national security concerns. When the imperialist European nations waged wars to reclaim American colonies, they always argued it was for national protection: allowing another country to own colonies—especially those rich in resources or strategically located—was considered a threat. In the same vein, Trump claimed that annexing Greenland or regaining control of the Panama Canal was a matter of national security.

As mentioned, most economists agree that associating Trump with mercantilist policies is accurate, yet they also argue that such an approach is misguided. Mercantilism has long had a bad reputation among economists, ever since Adam Smith’s sharp critique of the school in the late 18th century. Today’s liberal economists generally see mercantilism as a failure to understand the actual workings of international trade—something supposedly clarified by David Ricardo’s more optimistic and peaceful view. For example, trade experts like Paul Krugman see U.S. policies as outdated and harmful—for both the U.S. and the world. However, these critics often overlook a crucial point: the foundational assumptions of the mercantilist worldview are more realistic in today’s context of ecological crisis.

THE HISTORIAL MOMENT OF MERCANTILISM

While researching my next book, La guerra por la energía (Península, January 2026) - yet available only in Spanish - I delved into the reasons why most economists from the 17th to 19th centuries openly justified colonialism and imperial wars. Economic historians describe these early economists as mercantilists, though they never really formed a coherent school of thought—they were more like advisors and consultants to various kingdoms. At that time, the boundary between power and wealth was, at best, blurred and, more often, nonexistent.

The mercantilist worldview was grounded in the belief that natural resources were limited, making the economy a zero-sum game: one nation’s gain was another’s loss. For example, when Spain and Portugal disputed the Moluccas in the 16th century, it was based on the idea that certain spices, such as nutmeg, could only be produced in those Indonesian islands. Whoever controlled production also controlled trade and its vast profits. A century later, the Dutch conquered the islands, competing fiercely with the British and employing extreme violence, forced labour, and slavery, which they hypocritically rejected in Europe. This was the norm in the mercantilist era, as the declining Spanish and Portuguese empires competed with the rising private companies of Britain, the Netherlands, France, and Denmark for global markets and trade routes.

Of course, the mercantilist worldview was not a proto-ecologism rooted in a scientific understanding of planetary limits. It was the result of a harsh lived experience. In those preindustrial societies, everything essential for life came from the land, which, by definition, was scarce. Food for people and animals, fibres for clothing, wool from livestock, wood for fuel and construction—all competed for land use. This is the core argument of economic historian Edward A. Wrigley, developed in his book The Path to Sustained Growth: England’s Transition from an Organic Economy to an Industrial Revolution. As a result, land set the limits to economic growth, and infinite growth was unthinkable.

Classical political economists like Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill theorised that economies would inevitably reach a “stationary state,” a point beyond which further growth was impossible. Even the optimistic Adam Smith acknowledged that natural resource scarcity imposed an insurmountable limit. That’s why early political economy became known as the “dismal science.”

This worldview led to numerous inter-imperial conflicts, which rulers viewed as necessary for national prosperity. If resources were scarce, the best way to expand one’s economy was to seize the resources of others. Territorial expansion provided European empires with fertile lands, new export markets, cheaper labour, new products, more precious metals, and other minerals. It made most of the world dependent on European needs. Industrial growth during the Industrial Revolution was only possible due to the continuous transfer of resources and energy from the periphery to the centre. The Great Divergence between the wealthiest regions of Europe and Asia, as described by Kenneth Pomeranz, emerged after 1800 due to the expanded access to resources by the core countries of an already global economy.

THE FREE TRADE ERA

Mercantilism fell out of favour in the 19th century, just as Britain industrialised using mercantilist practices and fossil fuels to power steam engines. With rival economies like India crushed, Britain became the world’s most competitive economy and began championing free trade. This transformation was justified by David Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage, still central to trade theory today.

Comparative advantage isn’t easy to grasp, but its core claim is that trade benefits all participants, regardless of their economic development. International trade was no longer viewed as a zero-sum game, but rather as a positive-sum game, where everyone could benefit. What’s intuitively true for knowledge exchange—where one’s learning doesn’t require another’s forgetting—was now applied to global commerce.

The political implications were clear: war was no longer needed to access goods and markets, since trade was the perfect substitute. If you want nutmeg, buy it. This logic underpinned the spread of free trade in the late 19th century, although Britain often imposed it through violence, a phenomenon John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson referred to as “free trade imperialism.”

The idea that trade substitutes for war is the backbone of contemporary liberalism, which extols the virtues of free trade and builds economic policy around it. Poor? Free trade. Rich? Free trade. Want to industrialise? Free trade. Need resources? Free trade. This faith still rests on Ricardo’s 200-year-old theory.

But how could 19th- and 20th-century economists ignore the ultimate scarcity of natural resources? In truth, they didn’t entirely—they just focused on relative scarcity. A country lacking specific resources could trade with another that had them—the solution: free trade to reallocate scarcity. Lionel Robbins' definition of economics describes it as the science of allocating scarce resources. What they neglected was the idea of absolute scarcity.

To be sure, this made sense for decades. Resources seemed so abundant that few worried about absolute limits. As Joan Martínez Alier noted in his excellent Ecology and Economics, exceptions existed—like chemist Rudolf Clausius and economist Stanley Jevons, who warned that coal would eventually run out. Jevons even advised Britain to use it quickly to gain an advantage. In recent times, the concept of peak oil and other peaks has been studied by Charles S. A. Hall and his colleagues.

The problem is that this relative abundance was always temporary. Industrial society could only sustain itself through ever-increasing use of fossil fuels. But geological time is not human time, so even rapid consumption couldn’t deplete resources within a few generations. The result: human societies normalised abundance, ignoring planetary limits.

That explains why, when The Limits to Growth was published fifty years ago, warning of resource depletion and unsustainable growth, conventional economists had no real response. The best ideas from figures like Robert Solow or Joseph Stiglitz were to assume that any resource shortage could be offset by substitutes or capital—a biophysical absurdity dubbed “weak sustainability.” As Joan Martínez Alier and Jordi Roca have said, for these neoclassical economists «the depletion of natural capital poses no problem for the possibility of sustainable consumption, or even for the exponential growth of consumption (which is equated with greater utility or well-being), as long as we assume a sufficiently high degree of substitutability between natural capital and manufactured capital, and as long as we trust that technical progress will continue».

Most mainstream economists still can’t integrate the hard fact of resource scarcity into their models and worldviews. That’s why critiques of Trump’s neo-mercantilism are misdirected. They assume free trade is still the answer to development and diplomacy. But that world is disappearing. Kenneth Reinert, for instance, criticises neo-mercantilists in The Lure of Economic Nationalism for not understanding the mutual benefits of trade, yet never mentions that Earth’s resources are finite.

Even among heterodox economists, especially post-Keynesians, some acknowledge diminishing returns in agriculture and resource extraction, but counterbalance this with the growing returns of industry and services. This view echoes mercantilist emphasis on industry but ignores resource limits. You can find this argument in the works of Nicholas Kaldor, Anthony Thirlwall, and even Latin American dependency theorists, tracing back to mercantilist Antonio Serra and further developed by Erik Reinert in How Rich Countries Got Rich… and Why Poor Countries Stay Poor. Today’s progressive industrialisation proposals often stem from this tradition.

The problem is that this view treats industry as if it were detached from nature—an impossible idea. At the same time, as Alf Hornborg has pointed out, we could add that industrialisation, understood as the mechanisation of the production process, always implied a greater use of machines, which meant a higher transfer of flow resources from peripheral countries. This is the main reason because the unequal exchange, long discussed in the Marxist tradition, is also an ecological one.

THE RETURN OF THE ZERO-SUM GAME

The so-called energy transition is the process of replacing fossil fuels with renewable sources—the only way to mitigate global warming. However, the devices that harness solar and wind energy require vast amounts of minerals—electric vehicles demand even more.

As Daniel Carralero, Marta Victoria, and Cristóbal Gallego explain in their excellent book Un lugar al que llegar, by 2040, we’ll need 42 times more lithium, 21 times more cobalt, 41 times more nickel, 25 times more graphite, and 28 times more copper. Rare earth metals are also expected to experience significant demand increases. The future will be filled not just with solar panels, wind turbines, and electric batteries, but with mines.

As with fossil fuels and precious metals, these critical materials are unevenly distributed. Governments are aware of this and are preparing for resource scarcity. The EU has passed a Critical Raw Materials Regulation acknowledging “a high risk of supply disruption due to source concentration and lack of substitutes.”

When Trump’s administration abandoned free-market solutions and embraced a return to mercantilist practices—potentially with all the nationalism and violence of that era—it correctly identified the central problem of our time: today’s model is unsustainable, and growth for some can only come at others’ expense. His proposal, however, is incompatible with Enlightenment values and any reasonable notion of modern democracy. As I said, his fortress model requires not just militarised trade but the appropriation and privatisation of natural resources for the benefit of a reduced “demos” (white Americans).

In short, the ecological crisis compels us to consider the limits, particularly those imposed by nature. 21st-century political economy can no longer rest on the classical liberal assumption of infinite abundance. What’s at stake isn’t just wealth distribution, but access to the very foundations of life itself. Against a reactionary neo-mercantilism proposing global ecological apartheid, we urgently need an alternative combining democracy, global justice, and biophysical limits: a commons-based ecosocialism, replacing war with cooperation and appropriation with care. In such a world, resources are not commodities or loot, but a shared responsibility.