2 weeks Ago By Patrick Cockburn
At the start of the American Civil War in 1861, the newly created Confederacy placed an embargo on the export of its cotton to the UK and Europe in a bid to force their intervention on its side. The ill-judged measure entirely failed to achieve its goal and succeeded only in self-isolating the Confederacy from the outside world.A century and a half later, President Donald Trump is betting that the political and economic might of the US is such that it can win a trade war aimed at compelling the rest of the world to adopt a trading system more favourable to the US.
Like the Confederate leaders before him, he exaggerates American strength and is self-isolating the US rather than making it stronger.The US is the largest economic power in the world, but it imports just 13 per cent of global goods. Few countries depend entirely on selling into the US market, even if they would be hit by more limited and expensive access to it.
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addToArray({"pos": "inread-hb-ros-inews"}); }When Trump produced his shoddily-calculated list of tariffs in the White House Rose Garden, he unwittingly cut through the branch on which American hegemony has rested for 80 years. Instead of the US being the central decision-maker in international alliances and organisations, Trump has unilaterally abandoned this role, declaring that the US will in future act solely in its own much-neglected interests.Some will say that it is naïve to argue that the US ever did otherwise, but its hegemony did depend on cooperation with other powers whose vital interests it took into account.
Trump and the Maga Republicans are no longer prepared to pay the price for that leadership, a cost they denounce as a swindle directed against America by greedy foreigners. A fast-diminishing band of politicians and business leaders hope optimistically that Trump’s hit list of tariffs – effectively a sales tax on goods entering the US to be paid for initially by the importer, but ultimately by the American consumer – will be dialled down to more modest figures. They suggest that “reciprocal” tariffs, the bizarrely varying levels of which are the product of kindergarten mathematics, are simply negotiating positions.
The optimists may be right to some degree, since Trump notoriously looks for a deal, and it might be much in his political interests to announce that his “liberation day” has swiftly won some victories for voters worried by impending higher prices and turmoil in the financial markets. Soon, the White House may be able to announce new investment in manufacturing plants in the US and the reduction in some foreign tariffs and regulations negatively affecting US exports.if(window.
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adverts) { window.adverts.addToArray({"pos": "mpu_tablet_l1"}); }But the comforting belief that punitive tariffs will be dramatically reduced to more rational levels underlines a contradiction at the heart of Trump’s weird project.
If giant American and international companies are to be persuaded to invest in a protected US market, sealed off behind a permanent tariff wall, they need to be convinced that the wall is there to stay and will not crumble away as negotiations and lobbying get under way.This is likely to be a messy and corrupt business in “the swamplands” of Washington influence peddling. “Mr Trump is saying there will be no tariff exemptions,” an editorial in the Wall Street Journal cynically observes.
“But watch that promise vanish as politicians, including Mr Trump, see exemptions as a way to leverage campaign contributions from business. Liberation day is Buy Another Yacht Day for the swamp.”As for the reassuring idea that Trump is invariably open to a compromise, this belief becomes less alluring when it is recalled that the dealmaker-in-chief is a compulsively mendacious man who inhabits his own fantasy world and who is surrounded by a menagerie of courtiers, crackpots and conspiracy theorists.
After the last few explosive months since he returned to the White House, what foreign leader is going to bet his political future on what Trump does, or does not do, next?As of this week, we are in an age of uncertainty in which governments and businesses try not to make a wrong move until the smoke clears, though they know that with Trump as the main smoke-emitter, greater clarity may be slow in coming. As old certainties dissolve, everybody will need to take out political and economic reinsurance geared to keeping them safe in a more hostile and threatening international landscape. With Japan and South Korea and the EU, for instance, hindered from doing business in the US, they have an incentive to seek better access to the giant China market, and not to join US efforts to isolate China.
#color-context-related-article-3621639 {--inews-color-primary: #3759B7;--inews-color-secondary: #EFF2FA;--inews-color-tertiary: #3759B7;} Read Next square PATRICK COCKBURN .inews__post__label__analysis{background-color: #0a0a0a;color: #ffffff;}AnalysisTrump is trying to turn back the clock - but it will cost Americans dearlyRead MoreNo wonder Chinese citizens are asking foreign visitors, politely but with ill-concealed relish, if the US is now beginning its version of the top-down anarchy of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-76), with Trump playing the role of Great Helmsman, as Mao Zedong was known. China may be damaged by the 54 per cent tariff imposed on its exports to the US, but its leaders see opportunities opened up by America’s self-harm.
Retaliatory tariffs against the US are slow to come because the EU, China and other major players do not want to provoke Trump into escalating his trade war. But another motive is because they like the world as it is, and do not want to join Trump in destroying a status quo they find satisfactory – and certainly do not think that anything better is likely to take its place.The disruptive impact of the new tariff regime is seen most immediately in Northern Ireland where UK and EU authority over trade is delicately interwoven.
Suppose the EU retaliates against the US; Northern Ireland would then be part of that retaliation, though the rest of the UK would not. As with Brexit in 2016, changes in superficially dry-as-dust regulations over tariffs swiftly disturb explosive constitutional issues and the balance of power between nationalists and unionists.if(window.
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adverts) { window.adverts.addToArray({"pos": "mpu_tablet_l2"}); }It is doubtful if anybody in the upper reaches of the Trump administration thinks about such minutiae as the effect of Trump’s liberation day on Northern Ireland.
It is even unclear how far they think about globally important issues like the effect of a US trade war against the rest of the world on the status of the US as the world’s sole financial overlord. What happens if capital that has previously flowed towards the US as a place of safety begins to see it rather as an unsafe and divided country ruled by an unpredictable despot?Not that everything can be blamed on Trump. President Joe Biden’s decision-making capacity was degraded by senility for much of his term in office.
The inability to produce sane and competent leaders is often the most damaging symptom of a political system that can no longer cope with its problems. Trump recognises this crisis, promises to reverse it, but only speeds up national decline. Whatever Trump thought he was doing on Tuesday, he more or less officially confirmed the abdication of the US as the world’s sole superpower.
Further ThoughtsOne of the negative consequences of living in “the age of Trump” is that important stories in the media get buried and ignored because of the latest piece of Trumpery. I hope this will not be the undeserved fate of a very lengthy and detailed piece called The Partnership: The Secret History of the War in Ukraine, which appeared in the New York Times on 29 March. The subheading adds that it is the hidden history of America’s involvement in the Ukraine war, but, as one reads on, it becomes clear that the US, in their base in Wiesbaden in Germany, were not only supporting the Ukraine armed forces, but were directing them on a tactical and strategic level.
The article is highly detailed and is about the military, rather than the political, side of the conflict. It describes the “evolution and inner workings [of the Ukraine-US alliance] visible to only a small circle of American and allied officials, that partnership of intelligence, strategy, planning and technology would become the secret weapon in what the Biden administration framed as its effort to both rescue Ukraine and protect the threatened post-World War Two order”. As happened with so much of what Biden and his senior officials, they achieved the exact opposite of what they intended.
By seeking total victory over Russia, which was not feasible, they destroyed the very order they were seeking to preserve, because they committed Ukraine to a forever war it could never win. if(window.adverts) { window.
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adverts.addToArray({"pos": "mpu_tablet_l3"}); }In another passage from the article, the authors write: “One European intelligence chief recalled being taken aback to learn how deeply enmeshed his Nato counterparts had become in Ukrainian operations. ‘They are part of the kill chain now,’ he said.
The partnership’s guiding idea was that this close cooperation might allow the Ukrainians to accomplish the unlikeliest of feats — to deliver the invading Russians a crushing blow.” They certainly got a lot of Russians and Ukrainian soldiers killed and wounded, over one million by all accounts, but aside that achieved nothing. Beneath the Radar Writers like Hannah Arendt have identified the “banality of evil” or “the normalisation of evil” as one of the toxic developments of the 30s.
Cruelty, violence, torture, mass murder simply become the way the world worked. Nothing to see here. For my part, I have to force myself to watch the very public atrocities in Gaza on the television and I turn it off when some bland official spokesman expresses vague regrets and tries to explain away the burned and broken bodies of the children.
The mass slaughter and starvation of the people of Gaza has become a normal feature of the nightly news in a horrifying way that Arendt would have recognised. Nobody can deny they knew what was happening. Here is one typical news item from the latest BBC report about everyday life in Gaza this week: “At least 27 Palestinians have been killed in an Israeli air strike on a school in northern Gaza that was serving as a shelter for displaced families, the Hamas-run health ministry says.
“Dozens more were wounded when the Dar al-Arqam school in the north-eastern Tuffah district of Gaza City was hit, it cited a local hospital as saying. if(window.adverts) { window.
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adverts.addToArray({"pos": "mpu_tablet_l4"}); }“The Israeli military said it struck ‘prominent terrorists who were in a Hamas command and control centre’ in the city, without mentioning a school. “The health ministry earlier reported the killing of another 97 people in Israeli attacks over the previous 24 hours, as Israel said its ground offensive was expanding to seize large parts of the Palestinian territory.
” Cockburn’s Picks With so much of the Western media convinced that President Donald Trump will fail in his tariff war – an opinion I largely share – it was useful to read this well-balanced article in Unherd by Wolfgang Munchau, explaining how Trump might succeed, at least in part..
