So is destroying diplomatic relations with all their allies and trying to force ceding of power in central Europe to a former enemy who is allied to China?
Go on with ya.
He's a prick saving himself from prison whilst being willingly used to establish an oligarchic fascist state from the former USA.
The second order effects of what he's doing are pretty obviously terrible for usa, but quite frankly i dont think trump is smart enough to see that.
[To be clear i think trump is stupid, but i don't think his actions are entirely random. There is a chain of reasoning here, it just misses the forest for the trees]
Russia's invasion of Ukraine is more immediate concern there. Even if Europe still could count on the USA's NATO commitments 100% the war was a big wake-up call in terms of readiness.
E.g. one explanation given for these trade policies is that trump sees a war with china down the line and is worried that china has tons of factories that could be converted to make ammunition while usa does not.
2. Alienating allies won't help the US produce ammunition
It's almost like something has changed the past few decades that is far from inevitable.
Anyways, I hope you're looking foward to prices for everything going up.
No politician in Europe, NZ, AUD or Canada would risk massive hate from their own population to even suggest anything like that. Right leaning were pushed to align with russia so thats a double no-go.
Now again it’s not a defense of the administration or to flex some sort of agenda but it’s hard to argue, the EU has underinvested in its military for decades.
The proximate cause for these tariffs is not some future event. This is post fact rationalization.
The proximate cause is still the ongoing “information” war which determines the perceived reality that is litigated in elections.
Earlier politicians played theater, acting as if the red meat being fed to voters was real on TV, but dealing with reality as need be when it came to decision making.
This was a betrayal of voters, who saw their election efforts result in legislators who didnt do what they said.
Trump does what he says. He believes WWE is real, and acts as if it is. His base believes it is real, and now reality is crashing with the fiction.
The fiction will prevail, because his party has also been working to build the power to enact their will.
Everyone sees logic here, the same way that everyone saw the emperors clothes. The alternative is illogical.
This is the reason potential reasons “we dont know” have to be postulated (war / China can make more ammunition)
Trump has always liked tariffs [alas, I can't find the source for this pre-presidency, its been blown out by current events]. He thinks trade is a zero sum game, and thinks that someone else set up the petro-dollar system.
Trump has consistently and reiliably always cowered away from war. Using other means to stop it (see russia, NK, China, Iran). Yes I hear the "we're going to invade x, y and z" but they never acutally came to anything (is that because of his advisors?)
Trump doesn't think about future capacity, only future pride. Does this change "make american stronger, and other weaker" is pretty much the only calculus that he's doing.
Trump's thinking is roughly as following:
"Why do we have taxes when we can use tariffs to raise cash and bring power back?"
"Why don't they buy from us?"(china/rest of asia)
"why are we spending money on them, when we don't get any money back? They are weak."(NATO)
"Why are we punishing russia, they are offering deals" (Putin offering cash deals)
There is no 4d chess. Its just a man who's pretty far gone, shitting out edicts to idiots willing to implement them.
Here you go, Feb 2011: https://money.cnn.com/2011/02/10/news/economy/donald_trump_c...
"The comment repeated past statements from "The Apprentice" star, who has said he wants to put a 25% tariff on all Chinese imports, to level trade imbalances in the global economy."
Doesn't help that Google's custom time range search is complete garbage. Searched for "trump tariffs" from 1/1/1980 to 1/1/2010 and almost every link is about the current tariffs but with timestamps between 1980 and 2010.
e.g. "20 Nov 1987 — President Donald Trump issued a slew of tariffs on Chinese goods", "30 Jun 1981 — Ontario Premier Doug Ford announced Monday a 25% increase on electricity exports to some American states as a result of President Donald Trump's tariffs", "31 Dec 1999 — IMF says too early for precise analysis on Trump tariff impact", "1 Feb 2001 — Trump's Global Tariff War Begins"
Did find a couple of links that were chronologically correct - a 1999 Guardian story about Trump wanting to tax the rich(!) and a 1987 NYT story about Reagan putting tariffs on Japan.
(duckduckgo was even worse)
https://www.thetimes.com/us/news-today/article/why-trump-tar...
At most we might see a proxy war over Taiwan (i.e. the US supporting and arming Taiwan, with sanctions against the PRC). The risk would then be a widespread disruption of global trade, at which point the US would not want to be dependent on the Chinese economy or factories in any way.
E.g. one explanation given for these trade policies is that trump sees a war with china down the line and is worried that china has tons of factories that could be converted to make ammunition while usa does not.
If so, there is at least some logic to the base idea, but the implementation is crazy, probably not going to work that effectively, and going to piss off all amrrica's allies which would be bad if WW3 is really on the horizon.