... Great powers often decline through self-inflicted blows. By starting a trade war he was unable to follow through on, Donald Trump may have just dealt a severe one to the United States.
ften in history, there's no blow struck by the enemies of a great power more fatal than the one it inflicts on itself. The British invasion of Egypt in 1956, for example, and the ensuing pushback, walkback, humiliation, and loss of prestige for the country, came to be viewed as the own goal that firmly ended the United Kingdom's claim to being a global empire.
Donald Trump's sudden declaration of, and subsequent quick retreat from, trade war on China may end up being remembered the same way: an unforced error cementing the decline of a unipolar world order dominated by one single power and signaling the transition to something new.
The Trump administration's stated goals of reshoring the jobs that years of pro-corporate free trade deals had sent out of the country and reconstituting the US manufacturing base are good and arguably necessary. After all, it was only a few years ago that the United States had to rely on airlifts of vital medical supplies from its leading rival to grapple with a pandemic.
But the specific way Trump has rolled out the tariffs, and the decision to turn that project into one big pissing contest for global supremacy, has potentially done the exact kind of damage to global perceptions of US power that the president was trying to avoid.
To the extent that the Trump administration had a coherent set of goals in its ever-shifting public justifications for its tariffs, they were meant to not just kick-start the process of bringing manufacturing back to the United States but to force countries into renegotiating their terms of trade in a way that was more favorable to the United States and, more broadly, to isolate and put pressure on a rising China vying for global leadership. That last one was reportedly what Trump officials had been discussing two weeks into the tariff announcement, reasoning that most of the world's countries, China included, would face such an economic shock from losing the ability to sell their exports to the United States' sizable population of big-spending consumers, they would simply fold and agree to whatever Trump wanted.
So far, none of that has worked out.
The blanket, erratic, and often nonsensical nature of the tariffs has, far from showing signs of jump-starting the long process of reshoring manufacturing jobs, actually proven a major obstacle to that project, while also leading manufacturers to shed jobs or scale back their plans and plunging the entire US economy into uncertainty more broadly.
This reached a crescendo with the mass sell-off of US Treasury bonds earlier this month that briefly threatened to send the entire US financial system buckling. ...
