By Andy Dean @Adobe Stock
A Triumphant or Tragic Map
After WWII, the US was the only big economy standing. It made sense for the US to develop policies that gave advantages to other countries at our expense. After all, the US could afford it.
Eighty years have passed since WWII, and those concessions were given. Meanwhile, much has changed, including currency manipulation and trade barriers.
Among unanswered questions: Will President Trump be willing to modify tariffs and give concessions to nations all over the world? At risk are American interests, including those of consumers. The orthodox economist who opposes tariffs in principle, notes Roger Kimball in Spectator US, maintains that it is inconsistent that Trump might like tariffs both for what the tariffs actually do and for what threatening them can bring about.
Mr. Kimball, readers wonder, doesn’t making good on threats only add to Trump’s power to leverage negotiations?
Whatever discomfort the tariffs may cause at home, they’ll cause a great deal more abroad, and the President will be in a position to make demands of other nations on subjects ranging from immigration and fentanyl to NATO spending and cooperation with Trump’s initiatives in foreign policy. And Trump can call off the trade war or alleviate its effects on any foreign country he chooses any time he wants to.
Does Congress have the nerve to see this strategy through? As Mr. Kimball notes, the GOP House majority is brittle. Key Republican senators, including majority leader John Thune, come from states that “need foreign trade as much as the senators themselves need Trump’s voters. … if some of those states need the trade more than their senator needs Trump’s goodwill, the President will have a revolt on his hands well before next year’s midterms.”
Roger Kimball believes that Trump will be no worse off than if he had never used that authority in the first place. Trump’s legacy has never been tied to the GOP’s electoral process.
The party is (Trump’s) vehicle, not the other way around, and if (it)stands in the way of his aims – however grand they may be – so much the worse for the party. He’s bigger than any elephant. And if he’s not really planning to run for a third term, unpopularity need not concern him, either. He knows the American public very well, and a segment of it will love him no matter what, perhaps all the more if he overreaches.
Like other Trump policies, tariffs are not about utilitarian calculations, economic or otherwise. Like Trump himself, they are about grandeur – triumphant or tragic, argues Roger Kimball.
Trump has only flown higher after every bankruptcy and setback. Indeed, the bigger the setback, the bigger the comeback, as he proved last year. Notions like success and failure are just points on a map.
… Trump isn’t only redrawing the map; he is the map.
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