The Newsletter That Forewarned of Trump’s Global Tariff War
Today was the big day that Trump announced his global tariff regime, branded as “reciprocal” and “discounted” but nevertheless waging a war of one against all. In August 2023—which might as well have been a thousand years ago—I wrote about Trump’s global-tariff plan and its consequences. I’ll have more to say about this shortly, but wanted to reshare that piece in full because…it foreshadowed this moment!
It’s kind of crazy that this hasn’t gotten more attention, but not long before being arrested, Trump met with “key” economic and political advisers for a two hour brainstorming session at a golf club in New Jersey.
The upshot was this:
a “universal baseline tariff” on virtually all imports to the United States…the creation of a ring around the U.S. economy…the former president called for setting this tariff at 10 percent “automatically” for all countries.
Tariffs for all imports into the US—literally for everyone.
Disastrous, of course. When the Core of the world-system decides to move toward autarky, it’s bad for everyone, including the Core.
An everything-tariff decreases market access for a large cross-section of developmental economies that rely on export-based strategies to not just grow, but also:
to continue banking political legitimacy on development and trade rather than revanchism or ethnically divisive demagoguery.1
So, yeah, not good. The world that Trump is accelerating through tariffs is a world of militarist ethnonationalisms—highly combustible geopolitics and “fluid” alliances. Militaries will grow. Economies will shrink. And the victims of our policies will rapidly become more numerous. None but the oligarchs shall be spared.
But Trump’s insane tariffs are not happening in a vacuum. What should also give us pause is that a “universal minimum tariff” is totally compatible with Bidenomics. It seems rather obvious, in fact, that it’s just taking global-Bidenomics to its logical conclusion. When liberal and progressive boosters of Biden talk about political economy, they focus almost solely on domestic initiatives.
But there’s an international tail wagging that Keynesian dog.
When you create geoeconomic blocs and repudiate the structures of international political economy that most of the world has counted on, you’re breaking up forces of international ordering without replacing them. You are a revisionist. If your strategy is primacist, it cannot be otherwise. And an everything-tariff is on-trend with this larger de-structuring of the world system.
Now maybe you’re still riding high off of Trump’s mugshot and are certain he’ll be in jail. Inshallah.
But 1) you can still run for and win the presidency from prison, and 2) Trump remains the agenda-setter for the Republican Party’s policies. As the GOP looks for ways to counter Bidenomics, you better believe the “universal baseline tariff” will be in their basket of ideas.
Remarkably, the media called tariffs a “trade war” when Trump did it, but stopped using that description when Biden did it. Now the Washington Post is back to calling it a “new trade war,” because the idea is coming from Trump. The joke’s on us, I guess, for not seeing the similarities.
Looking for an explainer on what tariffs are good for?