The first seven months of his presidency having been dominated by domestic issues, President Barack Obama has yet to enunciate his worldwide economic vision. But various smoke signals issued by Obama's economic team, coupled with the worldwide financial slowdown, indicate a possible retraction from the "economic liberalism" of the 1990s and early 2000s.

In other words, the election of a man who is said to have ushered in America's post-racial era may also portend America's era of post-globalization.

What exactly does that mean, especially if we continue to buy DVD players from Japan, shoes from Taiwan and drywall from China? Must post-globalization, if that's indeed where we are as an economy, connote a new regulatory paradigm; a crackdown, say, on Swiss bank accounts; tariffs on Chinese tires; a knee-jerk shift toward protectionism? Or is it more atmospherics -- an angry public mood; a heightened awareness of the damage that can be wrought with too many high-risk derivative swaps?

Or is it all just semantics -- less that globalization's day in the sun is over, and more that we've simply arrived at our first debt crisis of the global age?

Here's a vote for semantics:

"We've never had a more global economy than we do today," said David Hale, a global economist and founder of Chicago-based Hale Advisors. And he thinks the economy will become increasingly global, as foreign operators continue to buy up U.S. debt, and non-western economies in China and India continue to grow.

But to other analysts, post-globalization is more than just an empty turn of phrase. Global Trade Alert, a team of trade analysts, released a report this month saying the Chinese-American tariff skirmish "is just the tip of a coming protectionist iceberg," according to the Wall Street Journal. A report from the World Trade Organization, also released this month, "found slippage in promises to abstain from protectionism," the newspaper said.

"There will be, in some countries, a reflexive action to try to protect employment," said Alberta Sbragia, director of the European Studies Center at the University of Pittsburgh.

Economies obviously won't cease to be interconnected. But there has a been a growing criticism of globalization in general and the so-called Washington Consensus in particular, a name given to a slate of policy prescriptions meant to promote global trade as a means of improving the economies of developing countries.

The Washington Consensus puts forth that "increased levels of economic activity at the global level were good, that these interaction led to higher standard of living, greater wealth, higher gross national product," Dr. Sbragia said.

"I think that's been called into question by the severity of this downturn."

John Gray, a British political philosopher and former professor at the London School of Economics, has argued that the era of globalization, which essentially began with the Industrial Revolution, ended on Sept. 11, 2001 -- it just took us a while to realize it.

For decades, there was a relative equilibrium in the portability of production, capital and manpower.

Now, in a post-9/11 world, that's not the case.

"While trade and capital move freely across the globe, the movement of labor is strictly limited -- a very different state of affairs from the late 19th century, a period of comparable globalization in which barriers to immigration hardly existed," he wrote.

If the globalization era began in a sense with the immigrants who moved across oceans to work in mills and factories, the era reached its pinnacle after the Berlin Wall fell, coaxing developed nations into a false sense of security that the ragged, undeveloped powers would be lifted by the rising tide of global capitalism.

Instead, what Sept. 11 showed were the limitations of global capitalism, Mr. Gray wrote:

"In the past, it was taken for granted that the world will always be a dangerous place. Investors knew that war and revolution could wipe out their profits at any time. [But] over the past decade, under the influence of ludicrous theories about new paradigms and the end of history, they came to believe that the worldwide advance of commercial liberalism was irresistible."

The World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks would "shatter the markets' own faith in globalization."

Yet it would take more than a terrorist attack to waylay a global mind set. It would take a total implosion of financial markets worldwide -- something Canadian professor Eric Helleiner predicted a decade ago, in an essay contained in a book called "States Against Markets: The Limits of Globalization."

He argued while current "political dynamics suggest that financial liberalism cannot in fact be easily reversed, there is one event which can alter such dynamics considerably: a major international financial crisis.

"Such a crisis may [lead] governments to ignore the opposition of domestic actors and reimpose capital controls," he wrote. The European currency crisis of 1992, for example, brought about a fresh spate of financial controls, and new suspicion (and awareness) of the shadowy, complex international markets.

Have we arrived at such a point?

David Axelrod, senior advisor to the president, told the Washington Post's David Ignatius earlier this year (prior to the London G-20 summit) that, "The president's main focus is developing an economy that is not rooted in the bubble and bust, not rooted in an overheated housing market or maxed-out credit cards."

Translation, via Mr. Ignatius' keyboard: "What Axelrod described represents a different economic approach from Obama's recent predecessors. And it should reassure a world that is worried about American leadership. This White House is speaking an economic language that Europe and Asia understand -- more regulation, more government intervention, a more generous safety net -- without abandoning America's commitment to free markets."

But Rhian Chilcott, head of the Washington, D.C., office of the Confederation of British Industry, says the conventional story line is a misleading one.

"Sometimes we get trapped in a rather sterile debate about Anglo-Saxon vs. European models," and with it, an implication that U.S.-U.K. interests want a more "global" economy, and Old Europe wants more regulation, she said.

In reality, all countries occupy spots on a sliding scale of regulation -- there is no all or nothing, no global vs. post-globalization framework.

"Post-globalization is a meaningless, ridiculous phrase. We are in a global world. The events of the last 18 months have shown both the vulnerability that this creates [even as the] emergency measures that were coordinated showed that we are in a global world in terms of solutions."

People who criticize the global economy don't realize that the same interconnection among national banks and financial leaders helped to avert a far worse economic collapse, Ms. Chilcott said.

Any discussion of "post-globalization" worth its salt must include a dash of peak oil and hyper-complexity talk. James Kunstler, author of "The Long Emergency" and "The Geography of Nowhere," envisions a not-too-distant future when natural resources are scarce and transporting cheap goods over long distances will become impractical, if not impossible.

Under such a scenario, "post-globalization" doesn't represent some esoteric changes in banking regulations; it's a real change in the way we live, eat, and consume energy.

"The world has allowed itself to be bamboozled by putative economic gurus such as Tom Friedman," Mr. Kunstler told the Post-Gazette, "whose very conspicuous pronouncements in The New York Times and in his various books the past decade misled the public into thinking that transient international trade relations were a permanent feature of the human condition.

"In fact, they were features of the final blow-out of cheap energy and easy credit, and now different conditions are upon us."