Imperialism in a Full World: Neomercantilism and the Return of the Zero-Sum Game

Alberto Garzón Espinosa
 

"In September 2010, a Chinese fishing vessel was detained by the Japanese Coast Guard near the disputed Senkaku Islands. China’s unofficial response was to halt rare-earth exports to Japan—a country whose entire electronics industry depended on them. The dispute was brief: Japan released the captain, and China never formally acknowledged the embargo. But that episode became a geopolitical watershed, exposing the enormous dependence of the developed world on a single country’s monopoly over the minerals that are indispensable for the energy and digital transitions.

Interdependence, once praised as a virtue of globalisation, had become a weapon and a vulnerability. This incident was a symptom of a structural transformation that is remaking the world order: the return of zero-sum geopolitics in an era of planetary ecological crisis. The language of free trade, which for decades promised mutual prosperity, is being displaced by the language of national security, resource control, and economic warfare. Tariff wars, export bans on critical minerals, massive industrial subsidies—the Inflation Reduction Act, the European Green Deal Industrial Plan, and Made in China 2025—are the new normal of the world economy. They signal that the material foundations upon which the positive-sum imaginary of global neoliberal capitalism was built have been exhausted.

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