No American did more to lay the groundwork for 21st century globalization than Bill Clinton. As the 42nd president of the United States – the leader of the world’s largest economy and sole superpower – he shepherded a historic North American trade deal through Congress and celebrated China’s entry into the World Trade Organization. Clinton embraced globalization, championed it, and sought to shape it as a force for good.
When he left the White House in 2001, Clinton’s public approval rating was a remarkable 66 percent. The U.S. economy had boomed on his watch; almost 23 million more Americans were working at the end of Clinton’s presidency than at the beginning. Abroad, he had presided over an era of U.S. supremacy. Former adversaries in Moscow and Beijing cooperated with Washington, hoping to imbibe the secrets of American prosperity.
On the left, the Democratic Party’s progressive wing disdains his market-oriented economics. The most recent Democrat to occupy the White House, Joe Biden, scorned Clinton-style trade deals, choosing instead to promote domestic manufacturing. It was an article of faith in the Biden White House that voters injured by foreign competition helped deliver the presidency to Donald Trump.
Conservatives, meanwhile, assail Clinton’s handling of China. He was naive, they say, to believe that Chinese Communists would ever surrender their monopoly on power, even if in western eyes full economic liberalization required political reform. Like many others, Clinton wrongly expected technology to erode Chinese authoritarianism.
On a mid-winter day in early 2024, Clinton was ready to talk about globalization – the greatest engine of prosperity the world has ever seen – and how it went off track. Thinner than in his White House years, thanks to the vegan diet he had adopted after a brush with heart disease, he still had a thick head of hair. His eyes were clear. On his wrist, he wore an Apple Watch with a band of safety-vest orange.
“It’s gotten to be that there’s not a lot of clear thinking about the upsides of globalization,” he said at the start of a 75-minute interview in his midtown Manhattan office.
Leaning back in his chair, with his legs stretched out before him, Clinton acknowledged that events have not turned out as he had expected. He agreed that U.S. leaders failed to provide the help they had promised for those Americans left behind in a globalized world and had underestimated the resentments percolating among the working class.
Part of the problem, he said, was that the private sector had outfoxed the public sector. As capital grew more mobile, governments struggled to raise enough money by taxing corporations and the wealthy to pay for the social programs that would have softened the blow for workers.
“Look, I was amazed that we held off as long as we did in this kind of nationalist reaction, because you could see all over America and all over the world that the thing that was killing globalization was that the policies had to be ratified by nations. But their ability to nationalize the benefits was limited, either by their tax base or their wealth or their understanding or whatever – it was just limited,” he said. “So there was going to be a reaction sooner or later.”
“I carried that area,” Clinton said, referring to his election triumphs in 1992 and 1996. But by 2020, Democratic backing there had withered. In rural Jim Wells County, just west of Corpus Christi, where Clinton had beaten George H. W. Bush by a margin of better than two-to-one, Trump romped.
A few months shy of his 78th birthday, Clinton was by turns formidable and nostalgic. His comments were punctuated by a nagging cough, but his political memory was undimmed: He accurately quoted the vote shares that Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale received in their 1984 showdown and retold with relish detailed stories of his career in Arkansas. Reminded at one point of election night in Little Rock in November 1992, he said with a wistful smile, “That was a good night.”
His Clinton Foundation office was not particularly imposing. A pair of photos hung on the wall behind his desk. One showed his wife Hillary, the former secretary of state, standing with her hands clasped in front of her, head thrown back in laughter. On the opposite wall was a black-and-white image of the Oval Office: Clinton and George W. Bush in conversation, with Barack Obama looking on.
Clinton boasted of completing nearly 300 trade deals during his eight years in Washington. Today, neither political party shows any interest in matching that record. In a bitter twist, aggrieved Rust Belt voters, feeling themselves victims of Clinton’s trade policies, wrecked his wife’s 2016 presidential bid.
Long before Trump came on the scene, public discontent was evident, Clinton said. Relentless automation and a rising tide of Chinese imports destroyed five million manufacturing jobs while the response to the 2008 financial crisis compounded the pain. Each aspect of globalization – trade, finance, technology, ideas and people – raised difficult questions that Washington struggled to answer. Sometimes, it barely seemed to try.
Those who failed to flourish in what Clinton once called “the new economy” turned against the conventional wisdom on trade, immigration and change itself. “You could just see it. They were just…seething,” he said.
The old politician understood the anger among those who were ill-equipped for this new, borderless world. He just thought his wife could outrun it. “We didn’t appreciate how much built-up frustration there was,” he said.
The irony in Hillary Clinton’s 2016 defeat lay in her husband’s earlier clairvoyance. As president, Clinton had warned that support for trade deals would evaporate if the government did not help those who lacked the skills or education to capitalize on the globalized economy. Yet Washington failed to act. In his first years in the White House, Clinton prioritized deficit reduction. Then, Democrats lost control of Congress, making new social spending politically impossible.
Clinton had an ambitious safety-net agenda of health care reform, universal training and place-based investments, according to Gene Sperling, who directed Clinton’s National Economic Council. But the Republicans who controlled Congress for six of his eight years in office, neutered it. “Looking back, he feels we should have insisted that the major domestic investments and protections happen before or at least at the same time as any market opening. And it clearly pains him that it didn’t,” Sperling said.
From his first days as a politician in the mid-1970s, Clinton drew support from rural voters and blue-collar whites. His political base overlapped with Trump’s.
Both men understood the importance of the working-class vote, but their political strategies could not have been more dissimilar. Barnstorming for his wife in 2016, Clinton approached blue-collar audiences the way he had addressed his neighbors back in Arkansas. He took their concerns seriously and sought to win them over by connecting arcane policy choices to their lives.
“You can’t tell people they’re stupid, and you’ve got to give them a chance to like you. So you have to show you like them. And then you don’t really change their mind. They change their mind based on what their lived experience is,” Clinton said. A few minutes later, he added: “You can’t go around and deny that nobody ever lost a job because of these trade deals or you can’t go around and claim that there was never any currency manipulation or any other changes that broke the rules.”
Trump, to put it mildly, took a different approach. The brighter future he peddled was a retreat to an imagined past. He did not explain the intricacies of automation, rising productivity and global interdependence. Instead, he railed about “American carnage,” economic “rape” and treasonous elites, including Clinton’s wife.
If Clinton was disappointed in the way events had unfolded at home, the outcome abroad was little better. He had been confident in the 1990s that the Internet would undermine dictators’ ability to control their people and to keep democracy at bay. But the strongmen had proven more resilient than expected. China’s “Great Firewall” shielded most Chinese citizens from western ideas while steering them instead to government-approved information. Meanwhile, in the United States, popular social media sites were replete with racism, slander and nonsense.
Just that morning, Clinton said, he had read a Pew Research Center study of attitudes toward social media. Out of 19 countries surveyed, the most negative views of sites like X and Facebook were found in the United States. Sixty-four percent of Americans – including Clinton – believed such products were bad for democracy. They contaminated “the information ecosystem,” he said, fueling popular frustration with government.
Leaders of the Denver Summit of the Eight, including Clinton, gather in the Denver Public Library in 1997. (Bob Pearson/AFP/Getty Images)
Clinton understood the backlash to globalization as a blend of economic, cultural and emotional influences. He noted that most of those arrested during the January 6, 2021 insurrection were not hurting financially. Many were college educated, small business owners or farmers.
“I think that it was a revolt of the stymied, of the people who felt stuck, not necessarily poor. You can go to New York here and walk into all kinds of neighborhoods where people’s incomes are below the average, but they seem lively and everything, because everybody’s got a job and people believe they can make tomorrow better. What kills people is when they look in the mirror every morning [and] they think every tomorrow is going to be just like yesterday,” he said.
Voters also did not approach trade policy like participants in a Washington think tank debate. Many Americans felt doubly battered by what they saw as cultural insults layered atop economic losses.
“The reaction against globalization was amplified by the very rapid social changes that were going on in America and other places where urban areas saw the rising acceptance of gay rights and gay marriage and all kinds of other things. And then the transgender issue came up and all that. So on social media, the people who were against all this [globalization] said, ‘oh here’s a way we can maybe get a hold of this and marry people who are against the social change to people who are feeling left out of the economic change,’” Clinton said.
Globalization’s defenders were part of the problem. Purists, chiefly on the coasts, dismissed any dissent, any defense of factory labor, any small-town attachment to community as ignorant protectionism. Treating the livelihoods of individuals and communities as just another variable in an equation might be the right way to run a regression, but it was the wrong way to win and hold political power.
To prove the point, Clinton recalled an episode from 1998 when he was trying to pass legislation to discourage youth smoking. Visiting tobacco farmers in North Carolina who saw the initiative as an existential threat to their way of life, he offered them government aid to switch crops, absolved them of responsibility for what was, after all, a societal challenge and promised to help. He did not tell them to pack their bags and move, economists’ standard advice for factory workers on the losing end of globalization.
“One of the problems we have is when people who have experience of all this talk about it, they have to be damn careful not to sound like they’re know-it-alls or arrogant or clueless,” he said.
A hint of defensiveness crept into the former president’s tone only once, when he was asked about his expectations for China in the late 1990s, as it prepared to join the global trading system. “I thought what I said. I thought they would gradually become more open and more inclusive…And I thought they would eventually replace us as the biggest economy in the world. And my goal was to make sure that when that happens, it wouldn’t be bad for us or dangerous for them,” he said. “I was much more hopeful.”
Clinton speaks during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 2024. (Joe Lamberti/For The Washington Post)
By now, the mid-winter sunshine streaming in the windows had warmed the room and the former president was late for his next appointment. Before leaving, he pulled from a shelf “The Social Conquest of Earth,” a book by the biologist Edward O. Wilson. Leaning closer, Clinton said that Wilson had found that the most successful species since the last mass extinction were ants, spiders, termites and humans – creatures that found ways to work together on common challenges.
“My globalization position is just that I think that our capacity to solve every problem we face, including climate change, is dramatically amplified by cooperation. I think the cultural and other identity issues are basically challenges to our ability to sit here and [do] what we’re doing like this,” he said. “But they just have to be met with and dealt with.”
It was time, Clinton said, to make “a new pitch for globalization,” one that could overcome a rising tide of nationalism. “You got two choices. You can pretend there’s going to be no change. If you do, we’ll lose more jobs than we gain. Or you can make change your friend,” he said. “But if you want to have a free enterprise system, there’s going to be some losers when investment patterns change. The obligation of the government is to minimize loss and find people something else to do so we can keep growing.”
That’s sensible enough, as far as it goes. But that “new pitch” is precisely the argument that Clinton made, and other politicians echoed, 30 years ago. And it didn’t work. Globalization made the United States as a whole wealthier. But the “obligation” to ensure that globalization’s gains were widely shared was only identified, never fulfilled. The people Clinton had worried would be left behind were, in fact, left behind and the political consequences — for his legacy, his wife’s ambitions, and the country’s future — were precisely what he had foretold.
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