President Donald Trump's new trade wars are all spectacle and no strategy, former State Department official Edward Fishman told Salon's Chauncey DeVega — and they could end up blowing up in his face.
Trump's so-called "Liberation Day" tariff regime introduced weeks ago imposes import duties of 10 percent to 49 percent on basically every country in the world, and even explicitly mentions some uninhabited Antarctic islands that have no trade or industry.
After widespread backlash from business leaders and members of his own party, and a catastrophic market slide, Trump imposed a three-month grace period in which every country except China will only be charged the minimum rate of 10 percent.
Fundamentally, Fishman argued, the trend toward more trade barriers began even before Trump, as the post-Cold War peace faded and rival powers began to challenge the United States again. However, "Trump isn’t just targeting adversaries — he’s going after our traditional allies, too," Fishman said.
"He treats a trade deficit with Canada or Japan as just as dangerous as economic dependence on China. That’s a radically different worldview than past presidents held, and I think it’s out of step with how most Americans see the world."
That is ultimately going to backfire on Trump, he argued, as it means even American allies will start looking for supply chains and trade deals that bypass the United States altogether, drastically eroding American power.
"A big part of Trump’s political success is turning the presidency into performance art," Fishman continued. "That was clear in how he rolled out the tariffs — with a Rose Garden press conference and a giant poster of all the rates — as well as how he made the actual decisions. The initial 25 percent tariffs on Canada and Mexico, for instance, came out of an off-the-cuff remark to a reporter during a televised Oval Office session on his first day back."
While this makes for "great television," Fishman said, it's a terrible way to build coherent and effective economic policy for the long term, for one simple reason: "Publicly browbeating other governments almost always backfires. Foreign leaders have domestic politics too, and if they’re seen as capitulating to an overbearing U.S. president, they pay a price. This is why Trump’s targets abroad have often ended up politically stronger. Their people rally behind them when he attacks."
This has already occurred even outside of tariffs; following Trump's public attacks on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, polling showed a surge in popularity for the war-beleaguered leader.
