In a two-year window between 1994 and 1995, the United States, Canada, and Mexico created the North American Free Trade Agreement — the first comprehensive free-trade zone between a wealthy democracy and a developing country — and the World Trade Organization replaced the GATT, the postwar tariff pact that had no court and no enforcement. The WTO gave the global trading system a permanent legal framework, a binding dispute-resolution mechanism, and a path for China's eventual accession (2001), which brought a fifth of humanity inside the rules. The most globalized economy in human history was built in those two treaties. Manufacturing, finance, and supply chains rearranged themselves around the new rules within a decade, often spanning three continents to assemble a single product.
The 1990s trade order was extraordinarily successful by its own metrics: global trade tripled, hundreds of millions were lifted out of poverty (mostly in China and India), consumer prices in the rich world stabilized or fell. It was also politically explosive in ways its architects underestimated. NAFTA pulled mid-skill manufacturing jobs out of the American Midwest at a pace that local economies could not absorb, and China's accession contributed to the China Shock that economists David Autor and colleagues quantified — roughly two million American jobs lost — emptying small cities of work and meaning. That hollowing fed the deaths of despair (opioid overdoses, suicides, alcoholic liver disease) that Anne Case and Angus Deaton documented in the 2000s and 2010s. The political backlash — Ross Perot's 1992 warning of a 'giant sucking sound', the Seattle WTO protests of 1999, the rise of economic nationalism on both left (Sanders) and right (Trump), Brexit, the bipartisan American protectionist consensus that emerged after 2016 — was sustained, and is now the dominant political fact in much of the developed world. The open-trading order of the 1990s is being deliberately dismantled in real time: by Trump's tariffs, by the CHIPS Act and IRA's return to industrial policy, by Europe's trade defences against China, and by a WTO whose dispute court the United States has paralyzed by blocking judge appointments since 2019.
The de-globalization now visible in every supply-chain strategy meeting, every national-security memo, every CEO's strategic plan — 'friend-shoring', 'de-risking', reshoring — is the consequence of NAFTA-WTO globalism overshooting its political tolerance. Whether the post-2024 order produces a more managed, slower, regionalized trade system, or genuine fragmentation into hostile blocs, is the largest question in the global economy. The 1990s consensus is gone; what replaces it is being negotiated, mostly without negotiation, in tariffs and export controls — the very instruments the WTO was built to retire.