How are global trade, aid, and development being reshaped by populist power and the hegemony of individual billionaires?
In a disturbing scene this July during a summit hosting West African leaders at the White House, United States President Donald Trump interrupted the President of Mauritania, Mohamed Ould Ghazouani, a few minutes into his speech, signalling him with his finger to wrap it up, and remarked: ‘We need to be quicker than this, because we have a whole schedule.’1 Moments later, Trump turned to his other guest, Guinea-Bissau’s President Umaro Sissoco Embaló, and shockingly asked him about his name and his country.2 A mix of vulgar diplomacy and white supremacy reminiscent of pre-World War I French and British colonialism, and indeed the centuries preceding it.
Trump, as a white phenomenon, is only a manifestation, although a loud one, of the evident continuity of historical structural colonialism. However, this continuity is expressed in ways that differ from earlier forms of the political economy of colonialism. Many believe that the age of European colonialism ended with the independence of most countries following World War II. However, the exploitative and hierarchical power of economic colonialism remains in place through international development policies and coercive trade arrangements, which almost exclusively benefit the Global North by extracting value from the Global South in order to sustain the high living standards of Northern citizens.
One example out of many, the litre of orange juice that is sold in Europe for a little more than one euro costs a country like Egypt 550 litres of water to produce, even though it is a water-scarce country.3 Such levels of exploitation are consistently enabled in favour of Global North countries through special arrangements with authoritarian governments in the Global South. Now, let us imagine that the same litre of orange juice is hypothetically produced in a country like Belgium. The result would be that orange juice becomes an elite drink, and the majority of Belgians would only afford to buy it on special occasions. In this sense, and when this one example is considered alongside a wide range of commodities available on the shelves of supermarkets in the Global North, it becomes evident that structural colonialism remains present in what we can today call neocolonialism. The second presidential term of Trump since January 2025 is making this far too visible, due to his lack of the diplomatic and camouflage skills that previous American Presidents possessed. However, there are clear differences between what we can call colonialism and neocolonialism, or in other words, between the 19th century British Opium Wars and today’s American Tariff Wars.
This article argues that Trump’s erratic economic behaviour, especially his tariff war, his withdrawal from critical humanitarian aid, and his sanctions policies in economic development, represents a shift from ‘ideological colonialism’ previously practised by European empires to a contemporary, nuanced form of economic neocolonialism. In this newer form, sovereign states are not invaded by armies as in past centuries, but through enforced dependency. It is true that the faces of colonialism have changed, from monarchies and capitalist aristocrats to real estate developers and tech giant billionaires, however, the principle of global hegemony remains the central force in shaping international economic relations. Hence, neocolonialism.
Political geographer Ruth Craggs discusses colonialism and its enduring legacy in today’s development policies. As a discipline that emerged shortly after World War II, she argues that development studies was a response by scholars who had become increasingly disillusioned with the then dominant developmental imaginations in mainstream economics. According to Craggs, scholars came to realise that the persistent poverty and inequality in the Global South could not be understood in isolation from the colonial structures that shaped them. She explains that there were indeed colonial development projects aimed at improving infrastructure and economic growth, and at guiding what were then referred to as ‘childlike populations’ towards ‘modernity’. However, this epistemic violence was materially expressed through land grabbing, severe labour exploitation, and the construction of infrastructure specifically designed to serve the colonial economy of the metropole, not the welfare of the local population.4 Additionally, this so-called ‘developmental policy’ was an attempt to depoliticise colonialism and to diffuse resistance by the colonised. In this context, Craggs argues that such a strategy laid the groundwork for the ‘second colonial occupation’ through international organisations such as the UNDP and the rest of the post-World War II Bretton Woods institutions. Not only did these institutions employ former colonial bureaucrats as ‘experts’, but they also continued to follow developmental models that portray the North as the source of knowledge to which the South should aspire, in an exploitative reproduction of the former colonial relationship.5
Trump’s tariff war is not far removed from this, as it reflects more of a rearrangement within an existing hierarchy between the neocolonial and the neocolonised. In this historical context, Trump’s return to the White House in January 2025 does not mark a real break from existing patterns of neocolonialism. Rather, it signals a return to a dynamic more clearly visible in old colonialism, although now it is more transactional and more punitive. He asserts the hegemony of the Global North, and although his discourse is centred on American interests, this aspect would require further analysis, perhaps in another article. It is clear that his global policies go far beyond his well-known confrontation with China and extend aggressively toward low- and middle-income countries in the Global South. These policies inflict severe harm on many of these countries, which are already caught in structural dependency under today’s exploitative international trade system, where most of the value extraction from manufactured goods flows to the Global North, much like the orange juice example discussed earlier in this article.
The Trump administration has abruptly withdrawn from several humanitarian aid programmes, including those in the health and environment sectors, where millions of vulnerable people, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, will be dramatically affected, with many dying from preventable diseases. These withdrawals not only weaken these countries’ ability to reach the ‘developmental goals’ set for them by international institutions, but, worse, they are used as pressure tools for political gains in US foreign policy. This could, for example, involve taking a pro-Israel stance on the ongoing genocide in Palestine, aligning with Taiwan against China, or voting in one way or the other at the UN institutions.
While in the past colonial powers provided infrastructure as a ‘gift’ to the colonised – camouflaging their real intention to connect the economies of the colonised to the empire’s centre – or the neocolonial international development institutions reinforced the exploitative pattern of international trade in favour of the Global North, disguised as ‘aid for development’, the Trump administration no longer makes any such camouflage effort. Instead, it presents economic power as a disciplinary tool, denying aid, raising tariffs, and threatening sanctions, all in the service of a narrow economic nationalism that aims to dominate the world economy. This represents a shift in neocolonialism from the post-independence exploitative inclusion that was the norm until early January 2025, to today’s coercive exclusion. In the latter, countries are no longer incorporated into exploitative networks through selective development but are punished for failing to comply with American hegemony.
Unlike their colonial predecessors, who often came from elite educational backgrounds and operated within formal institutions of empire, contemporary figures such as Donald Trump represent a cruder, more market-oriented form of neocolonial leadership. Trump’s background as a real estate developer and media personality, combined with his strategic and highly mobile alliances with corporate elites such as Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and others, marks a clear shift from imperial governance to corporate hegemony. This is not genuinely new, but it is now distinctly more aggressive. Development is no longer framed as a camouflage but as a business transaction, subject to the same cost-benefit analysis as a real estate deal.
Trump and Musk, with their recent clash of powers, represent a shift in the neocolonialist class. It may be even more important to pay attention to Musk’s erratic economic behaviour than to Trump’s, in order to prepare for a very different global future, one which economic development studies might need to address. Musk’s recent efforts to establish an independent political movement, reportedly rivalling Trump in influence, suggest that the next phase of global governance may no longer require traditional political institutions at all. Instead, we may be on the verge of a post-democratic global order, where platform capitalists and unstable techno-utopians, whose visions of the future are deeply exclusionary, become the governing class and the new neocolonialists.
To conclude, the colonial past is simply not past. Its ideologies, institutions, material and cultural structures persist, albeit in mutated forms. Trump’s second term demonstrates the capacity for self-recycling of colonial logics, repurposed for a neoliberal age in which sovereignty is subordinated to market imperatives and development is recast as a stick without a carrot. The transformation from empires to enterprises, or from kings to Trumps, should not be mistaken for progress. Neocolonialism remains. Critical development studies must continue to interrogate these changing dynamics, not only to reveal their historical genealogies, but also to resist the reproduction of global inequality in ever more technocratic and deceptive. To do so is not only a scholarly obligation, but a political necessity in an age where neocolonial billionaires, armed with power and blind to history, disguise domination as innovation and ignorance as progress.
This article has been lightly proofread using AI assistance.
- Reuters, ‘Live: President Trump meets with African leaders’, YouTube, 9 July 2025, accessed 18 July 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVdvAopK8mA.
↩︎ - Ibid. ↩︎
- Osama Diab, ‘Al-Tawāzun al-Lāmutakāfi’: Hal Lanā An Nas‘ada Biziyādat Ṣādirāt al-Burtuqāl?’ (Unequal Balance: Can We Rejoice at the Increase in Orange Exports?), al-Manassa, 11 May 2022, accessed 18 July 2025, https://manassa.news/stories/5786.
↩︎ - Ruth Craggs ‘Development in a Global-Historical Context’ in The Companion to Development Studies 3rd Edition, ed. ‘Vandana Desai and Robert B. Potter (Routledge, 2014).
↩︎ - Ibid. ↩︎