Tariff nationalism as symptom: the libidinal economy of trade

Why does tariff nationalism keep intensifying even when its economic costs are plain, and why does the protectionist gesture seem to deliver a satisfaction out of all proportion to what it materially achieves? Accounts in international political economy explain the interests and ideas behind the return of protection, but they say less about its emotional and unconscious appeal – about why trade measures widely shown to be self-harming remain politically compelling. This article argues that the trade nationalism crystallised in the Trump administration’s 2025 measures is best understood not as a rejection of neoliberal globalization but as its symptom: a distorted expression of the very tensions that free-trade ideology long managed without resolving. Drawing on the emerging field of libidinal political economy and on Lacanian social theory, it develops three linked ideas – symptom, fetishistic disavowal, and enjoyment (jouissance) – to show how trade is not only calculated but desired and enjoyed. Free trade and protection appear, on this reading, as two ways of managing a single unresolved antagonism, with the Global South cast as the excluded ‘outside’ whose dispossession quietly underwrites the fantasy of restored national sovereignty. The article specifies what a libidinal political economy adds to the affective and discourse-theoretic turns already under way in critical trade scholarship, and asks what a less self-deceiving relation to trade’s constitutive antagonisms might look like.