A Threefold Curse

 As Trump announces another unprovoked round of global tariffs on U.S. trading partners—the Wall Street Journal published a piece today illustrating the devastating effects these new trade barriers are already having on one small country: the African nation of Lesotho. 

Ever since taking office, Trump has seemed to pursue this vulnerable nation with especial sadism. In his first major speech to Congress after returning to power, Trump name-checked Lesotho as one of the places from which he proposed to strip global aid—deriding it as a place "no one had ever heard of." 

Trump's aid freeze proceeded to impact the small nation particular cruelly. The Journal reports: "American-funded school buildings with roofs, classrooms and bathrooms were at various stages of construction when Trump gutted U.S. aid programs funding the work."

Then came the so-called "Liberation Day" tariffs in early April. During the brief time when they were in effect, almost every nation in the world saw increased export duties. But, once again—Lesotho seemed to be inexplicably singled out for extra punishment. 

For some reason—known only to Trump, DOGE, and the AI algorithm they used to generate the policy—Lesotho was subjected to the highest tariff rates of any country in the world. 

The WSJ piece notes that these tariffs were ultimately eased during Trump's trade war pause—but not before dealing incalculable damage. Lesotho is almost totally dependent on textile exports to feed its population. Trump's tariffs have already caused widespread unemployment in the sector. 

Reportedly, Lesotho has declared a state of disaster in response to these crippling tariffs. The WSJ article describes an HIV-positive worker who have been laid off from her job in the garment sector—only to suffer the added injury of discovering that U.S. medical aid had been withdrawn as well. 

When I read the reports of how Trump has destroyed the textile sector in Lesotho and similar nations—casting hundreds of innocent people into destitution—I always think of Heinrich Heine's poem about the Silesian weavers of the nineteenth century (early victims of unfair global competition). 

Heine's weavers could no longer weave for pay—as a result of competition from the new mechanical looms in England. But—he wrote—they were still weaving; except now they were weaving the grave clothes of the German political order that had failed them and cast them into ruin. 

We can only imagine the dispossessed and unemployed weavers of Lesotho and the global South muttering the same "three-fold curse" against the United States today—which invited them; indeed, encouraged them; to become export-dependent; then punished them for it—

—the U.S. political order that told the world that it had no choice but to "globalize"; that it must abandon traditional subsistence agriculture and welcome competition from cheap U.S. crops, but would be rewarded for it with new export industries—and now takes that from them too—

“A curse on the King of the wealthy, whom often

“Our misery vainly attempted to soften;

“Who takes away e'en the last penny we've got,

“And lets us like dogs in the highway be shot,—

               “We're weaving, we're weaving! (Bowring trans.)