Donald Trump's victory in the 2024 election – and his threat to impose tariffs on all imports to the United States – highlights an important problem for the global economy.

The US is a technological powerhouse, spending more than any other country on research and development and winning more Nobel prizes in the last five years than every other country combined. Its inventions and economic successes are the envy of the globe. But the rest of the world needs to do everything in its power to avoid being too dependent on it.

And this situation would not have been much different had Harris won.

The "America first" approach of Donald Trump has actually been a bipartisan policy. At least since previous president Barack Obama's policy of energy independence, the US has been on a mostly inward-looking quest of maintaining technological supremacy while ending the offshoring of industrial jobs.

One of the major choices Trump made in his first term was to accept higher prices for US consumers in order to protect national producers by slapping high tariffs on almost every trading partner.

For instance, Trump's 2018 tariffs on washing machines from all over the world mean US consumers have been paying 12% more for these products.

President Joe Biden – in certainly a more polite way – then increased some of the Trump tariffs: up to 100% on electric vehicles, 50% on solar cells and 25% on batteries from China. At a time of climate emergency, this was a clear choice to slow down the energy transition in order to protect US manufacturing.

While Biden signed a truce with Europe on tariffs, it started a perhaps even more damaging battle by launching a subsidy race.

The US Inflation Reduction Act for instance contains US$369 billion of subsidies in areas such as electric vehicles or renewable energy. And the Chips Act committed $52 billion to subsidize the production of semiconductors and computer chips.