What The Hell America!

Sargent: The New York Times had a detailed report on Trump’s trade war with China that was very harsh as well. Its key point was that we’ve had enormous disruptions to global trade due to the trade war, but China hasn’t made any serious concessions. Jonathan Chait of The Atlantic pointed out that at the start of all these trade wars, Trump issued a warning, “Do not retaliate and you will be rewarded.” Well, China did retaliate, violating Trump’s warning, and it got rewarded for it. What does that tell us about the folly of the whole enterprise?

Somin: I think the enterprise is a folly even aside from this, but as I said before, Trump has so far gotten nothing from the tariffs against China that he didn’t already have before. Moreover, there’s contradictory rationales here. On the one hand, they’re saying, Well, the point of these tariffs are to get these other countries to make concessions. On the other hand, they’re saying, These tariffs should be a permanent policy so as to protect American manufacturing from competition. And obviously, it has to be one or the other; it can’t be both. If the plan is to give up these tariffs as a bargaining chip, then they can’t be maintained as a way of protecting American domestic industry. If, on the other hand, the goal is to maintain them, then you can’t really successfully use them to gain concessions from these other countries. And I think the Chinese, and perhaps others as well, have seen the incoherence of this policy and therefore they hope to exploit that.

Sargent: Well, it seems like the fact that these policies are a disaster is closely related to them being such a massive abuse of power. We don’t want the president to have the unilateral power to impose such a broad and sweeping tax on imports that will be paid for by working- and middle-class American consumers. And the massive fiasco this represents actually confirms why we don’t want that. Just to wrap this up, can you talk about that?