On Thursday, President Donald Trump spoke via video link to attendees at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. He touched on many subjects, but the one that stood out for me was his request for company bosses to locate their manufacturing activities in the U.S. He threatened to impose heavy tariffs on their firms’ products if they are made elsewhere and shipped to the U.S.

It is never easy to determine when to take President Trump seriously and when to view his utterances as attention-seeking or negotiating strategies. I watched snippets of his speech on television and from his tone and body language, I thought he meant business. One of the things he mentioned was a promise by the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS), to invest $600 billion in the U.S. President Trump added that he asked MBS to round up the amount to $1 trillion.

In part, the president owes his election to his promise to fix the harms that free trade did to certain sectors of the American economy. Globalization became a dirty word because of the rather inconsiderate way in which it was allowed to play out. Companies simply uprooted manufacturing plants and other industrial facilities, where tens of thousands of Americans used to work, and shipped those jobs overseas in search of cheaper labor. Entire cities and their surrounding communities left behind were decimated.

Because the overarching aim of any private enterprise is to obtain the maximum possible return on investment, in theory, there isn’t much about this freedom of capital movement that anyone can criticize. But, as we all know now, everyone, in business and in government, should have been paying a lot more attention to the left-behind communities and the devastating impact that free trade was having not only on them, but on society at large. After all, the profit-maximizing potential of any firm is severely diminished when the society that constitutes its primary market becomes heavily destabilized.

In essence, President Trump’s highly vocal efforts to attract investments into the U.S. should be seen as laudable. However, he seems to be repeating the very mistakes that he claims to be trying to correct. Capital flight from emerging economies has been a huge problem in the last few years. The dollar’s strength has a lot to do with it. Just as offshoring of jobs did untold damage to American communities, this draining of capital from developing nations is wreaking havoc on their economies. In fact, it is not only poor and middle-income countries that have been affected. British Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves is at the same Davos conference, where she is pleading with business leaders to invest in Britain to help fix its ailing economy.

President Trump will probably say that other countries’ problems, even those of America’s allies, are not his business to worry about. If so, he should think again. The other major issue he ran on was immigration. Nothing drives illegal migration more than economic devastation in the countries of origin. To that, the president might point to some of the draconian measures he is taking to stem the flow of migrants into the U.S. But anyone who has looked at the migration issue at a global level knows that there is simply no practical way to stop desperate people from overwhelming other nations’ borders.

Even if America were to find a way to barricade itself in by building walls everywhere along its boundaries, it would have to make sure then that it could survive on its own. The world outside its borders would eventually become so destabilized that there would be no point in trying to trade with anyone there. American businesses would be a lot less profitable if the only viable market they had access to was the domestic marketplace. Less prosperity for American corporations would quickly lead to losses of tens of thousands of jobs in this country, which would bring us right back to square one.

“America first” is President Trump’s favorite slogan. It does have a bit of a mean tone to it, but he is largely correct because that is how life works. We all have a tendency to, first and foremost, worry about ourselves and our immediate families. However, the president should make sure he doesn’t end up in effect turning his motto to “America only.”