Predatory Tariffs

 What disgusts me so much about Trump's recent threat to impose 25% tariffs on our two neighboring North American trade partners and allies, Mexico and Canada, is not only what a pointlessly idiotic and destructive policy act it would be—but also what a crude abuse of lopsided economic power. After all, even the people defending the policy can characterize it in no other terms. 

The host of Wall Street Trump apologists who have come out of the woodwork in recent weeks—since anyone in power will eventually find people willing to rationalize their actions—all make some version of this same argument (Bessent foremost among them): Trump won't really impose such completely ruinous and self-destructive tariffs, they say; he's just using this as a "bargaining tactic." 

And I have no doubt this could be true—or even, that it could work, in the short term. That's what comes of having unprecedented power. If you entrust the reins of the world's largest economy to a single man who has the mentality of a schoolyard bully, I have no doubt that he can in fact wield it to extort concessions out of other people. The United States has that kind of leverage. 

If you are completely indifferent to and unconstrained by the rights and interests of other people, and you have concentrated a dangerous amount of power in one executive office, and your country happens to have the world's largest economy, and you happen to elect a toddler tyrant in diapers to that one executive office, he probably will be able to frighten people for a time into doing his bidding. 

Whether any of this yields positive results in the long term is quite another question. It seems to me that pride goeth before a fall. If the United States wields its economic power in a way that breeds resentment and weakens the economies of other nations, who may be in a position to retaliate or join forces in mutual self-defense, that cannot be good for our ultimate interests. 

What especially disturbs me is Trump's pattern of always deploying these raw flexes of power against countries that are otherwise allied to us. He picks on liberal democracies like Canada because he regards the accountable exercise of state power—the checks and balances of a liberal order—as weakness. The only governments he respects are those run by strongmen: Putin, Xi, and Orbán. 

And what will happen when people see that the world's largest economy walks all over the rights and interests of other democracies, but bows down to authoritarians? The results can't be good for the long-term outlook for democracy... Plus, Trump and his cretinous Wall Street apologists seem to be completely overlooking the fact that our trading partners can actually fight back. 

It is especially ironic for the United States to now be putting the screws on Mexico through tariffs, because it was the U.S. that insisted on free trade in the first place. Particularly in agriculture, free trade served our interests far more than it did theirs. Our farmers won a new market to dump cheap, heavily-subsidized crops; whereas Mexico's producers were thrown out of business. 

So when Trump threatens Mexico with tariffs, they have one massive bargaining chip of their own (and Claudia Sheinbaum did not hesitate to invoke it this week): they can turn the tables on our farmers. If we abrogate the terms of our free trade agreement with them, they can come right back and impose tariffs of their own, cutting off a key market for our subsidized crops. 

It's hard not to feel that there is a kind of chickens-coming-home-to-roost aspect in all of this. You reap as you sow. The U.S. used its economic power decades ago to extort agreements from other countries that forced them to accept our cheap crops at the expense of their own domestic industries; so if we pull the plug on those deals now, they can easily say: well, no more crops. 

The through-line in this is not that one policy (free trade) was clearly more virtuous than the other (tariffs). Rather, both were brute flexes of economic power. As Halford Mackinder once wrote—in the days when "free trade" was a euphemistic justification for British imperialism that covered a multitude of sins—the perfect mask for the ugly realities of international realpolitik: 

"In my belief, both free trade of the laissez-faire type and protection of the predatory type are policies of empire, and both make for war." (Mackinder writes this in his Democratic Ideals and Reality, in which he also expanded upon his famous "Heartland theory" of international relations, and addressed a number of geopolitical issues in the immediate post–World War I era.)

Indeed, this is really the problem with Trump's tariff proposal. It's not that, in every industry and every circumstance, free trade is always the best policy and protection is always the worst. The problem is that either policy can be wielded in an abusive way—a way that leverages power unjustly, in a high-handed manner, to extract gains from one country and siphon them off to another. 

In the history of its relations with Mexico over the past few decades, the U.S. government has tried both. They first wielded the "predatory type" of "free trade"—and now threaten the "predatory type" of "protection." And Mackinder is exactly right: both "are policies of empire." I certainly hope they don't, in this case, "make for war"—but Trump has threatened that against Mexico too. 

And so, I say, to all those Wall Street apologists who want to normalize Trump—all those Bessents of the world who want to gaslight us into denying the evidence of our senses—I say to them, what Emerson did, to those who denied the reality of U.S. imperial predation in his own era: "Go, blindworm, go/ Behold the famous States/ Harrying Mexico/ With rifle and with knife!"