I do not see Trump as an imperialist. I believe that he, as a successful creator, throws out wild ideas as a way of discovering opportunities. I think this is often something that entrepreneurs do as a way to move forward or make discoveries.
I believe that Trump's wild texts and wild statements are a way to set people off-balance. This allows him the upper hand in negotiations. A bit of fear helps, too.
A recent example: His idea to develop Gaza which would entail moving the people out. It sounded so wild and removed from reality at the time. But it got the ball rolling. It forced the Arab states to react. The Arab states have never, prior to this, done anything of substance about the problem of Gaza. Not only did they finally act, but the world got to see how inept they are.
I am glad that we have a President who makes things happen. Weak, wrong directed diplomacy has been ineffective, and in my opinion, destructive. Trump is performative and strategic in his "wild" ideas.
I see his "imperialistic" behaviors as the opening the door to deals. I hadn't thought of tariffs as imperialist. Trump is using them as door openers, though not all want to engage to make deals. Why wouldn't we want more level playing fields? Especially if the world is now multipolar?
The problem as I see it is that the deals aren't good ones much of the time. Tariffs aren't a cure-all and in fact tend to make things worse for everyone (not just us, the people they supposedly are put in place to benefit). Trump praising McKinley for making America rich from tariffs isn't just simplistic (which I don't begrudge him for; all politicians do it and he's just really good at it), but it's factually incorrect. McKinley ABANDONED his own tariffs when he became president because they had literally created a financial crisis and proved so damaging to American workers that the Republicans lost ninety-three seats in the next congressional election and Democrat Grover Cleveland beat incumbent Republican Benjamin Harrison. When he became president, he told a crowd in Buffalo that “The period of exclusiveness is past. The expansion of our trade and commerce is the pressing problem.” His effort to cut out the middle man with trade with Canada makes no sense because we already had no middle man before 2020 thanks to NAFTA.
Therefore, none of this is about trade, as you correctly put it; it's about making things happen. But that in and of itself isn't good or bad; to what end those things are is what I'm at least judging, and I have a very hard time not seeing it as a type of imperialism akin to McKinley and Roosevelt's that is all about expanding and firming up the American sphere of influence. It's ultimately annoying to me when people who have fashioned themselves as anti-imperialists for the past decade or so sweep for Trump because something something no foreign wars; trade wars tend to trigger real hot wars, usually involving territorial expansion. This is because they create a more hostile environment in which real wars are no longer too costly to be worth it. The French economist Frédéric Bastiat was pointing this out back in the 19th century, saying essentially that "when goods do not cross frontiers, armies will."
This can be seen with the outbreak of World War I, demonstrated by Dale Copeland's book Economic Interdependence and War from 2015; Germany felt the squeeze from the protectionism being employed by Great Britain, France, Russia, and the United States and responded with aggression. The point isn't that they were right or wrong in doing so (too many people get caught up in the blame game with the First World War these days), it's that they were essentially given incentives they otherwise would not have had if not for protectionism. Jonathan Hillman has pointed out that "falling trade expectations made war a more attractive avenue for revising the status quo." One can even connect tariffs to the greater incentives for Germans to embrace radicalism in the 1930s thanks to the burden they added to the already-unreasonable war debt they had from over a decade earlier.
This is all to say that trade wars seem to feel good in the moment because they ARE doing something, but they invariably have had extremely dire consequences, especially in modern globalized history. It's almost as if that is what the new administration is essentially banking on, given the obsession with spheres of influence. But it's really just cavalier, deterministic pessimism masquerading as realistic pragmatism. Will this all result in war? Obviously we can't say. But I tend to see wisdom in harm reduction.
I accept what you are saying about McKinley/Roosevelt. I'm aware that Germany's economic issues contributed significantly to their aggression.
I can't think of any hot war (I'm not an historian) after WWII 80 years ago that has had any thing to do with trade wars. India/Pakistan? Israel/Arab? Korea? Viet Nam? The Troubles? Falklands? Gulf War? Bosnia? Kosovo? Afghanistan? Iraq? Libya? Ukraine? Yemen? Israel/Palestinian?
Future war with Russia?? War with China for many reasons??
The current tariff confrontation is "realistic pragmatism." "Harm reduction" can be a type of appeasement that can invite bad behavior towards us when seen as a weakness in our system.
Right those conflicts were not caused by US trade wars and tariffs, but I wasn’t saying that trade wars are the ONLY cause of hot wars; I was just saying that trade wars TEND to lead to hot wars. We didn’t have ANY trade wars from 1950-2000, and especially after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we went into overdrive with free trade. None of this is to say that free trade fixes everything (it obviously doesn’t especially when it comes to domestic manufacturing jobs), but it’s to say that using an old, largely disproven tactic to try and regain something that can’t be regained is likely a bad idea. The best recent example was that factory for building phones that Trump’s first admin pushed through (and it ended up becoming an assembly plant for screens or something) and it could never fill the jobs it was promised to “bring back.” The plant remained (and I think still remains) empty. The attempt at turning back the economic policy clock (and now the foreign policy clock) to the 19th century is what I find so distasteful about what Trump is doing. It’s peak “get action” for sure but…action for what? Stuff that doesn’t work? Disrupting what already existed on its own is a net neutral at best and a net negative at worst unless the replacement stuff is objectively better. This has nothing to do with how things have been—they clearly haven’t been great and not just because of the pandemic policy disruptions—it just has to do with how things will likely go with the policies being proposed. Something new is clearly going to be required. I’m a history guy, not an economics guy, so I can’t say what that would or should be.
Thank you very much for the historical clarity.
I do not see Trump as an imperialist. I believe that he, as a successful creator, throws out wild ideas as a way of discovering opportunities. I think this is often something that entrepreneurs do as a way to move forward or make discoveries.
I believe that Trump's wild texts and wild statements are a way to set people off-balance. This allows him the upper hand in negotiations. A bit of fear helps, too.
A recent example: His idea to develop Gaza which would entail moving the people out. It sounded so wild and removed from reality at the time. But it got the ball rolling. It forced the Arab states to react. The Arab states have never, prior to this, done anything of substance about the problem of Gaza. Not only did they finally act, but the world got to see how inept they are.
I am glad that we have a President who makes things happen. Weak, wrong directed diplomacy has been ineffective, and in my opinion, destructive. Trump is performative and strategic in his "wild" ideas.
I see his "imperialistic" behaviors as the opening the door to deals. I hadn't thought of tariffs as imperialist. Trump is using them as door openers, though not all want to engage to make deals. Why wouldn't we want more level playing fields? Especially if the world is now multipolar?
The problem as I see it is that the deals aren't good ones much of the time. Tariffs aren't a cure-all and in fact tend to make things worse for everyone (not just us, the people they supposedly are put in place to benefit). Trump praising McKinley for making America rich from tariffs isn't just simplistic (which I don't begrudge him for; all politicians do it and he's just really good at it), but it's factually incorrect. McKinley ABANDONED his own tariffs when he became president because they had literally created a financial crisis and proved so damaging to American workers that the Republicans lost ninety-three seats in the next congressional election and Democrat Grover Cleveland beat incumbent Republican Benjamin Harrison. When he became president, he told a crowd in Buffalo that “The period of exclusiveness is past. The expansion of our trade and commerce is the pressing problem.” His effort to cut out the middle man with trade with Canada makes no sense because we already had no middle man before 2020 thanks to NAFTA.
Therefore, none of this is about trade, as you correctly put it; it's about making things happen. But that in and of itself isn't good or bad; to what end those things are is what I'm at least judging, and I have a very hard time not seeing it as a type of imperialism akin to McKinley and Roosevelt's that is all about expanding and firming up the American sphere of influence. It's ultimately annoying to me when people who have fashioned themselves as anti-imperialists for the past decade or so sweep for Trump because something something no foreign wars; trade wars tend to trigger real hot wars, usually involving territorial expansion. This is because they create a more hostile environment in which real wars are no longer too costly to be worth it. The French economist Frédéric Bastiat was pointing this out back in the 19th century, saying essentially that "when goods do not cross frontiers, armies will."
This can be seen with the outbreak of World War I, demonstrated by Dale Copeland's book Economic Interdependence and War from 2015; Germany felt the squeeze from the protectionism being employed by Great Britain, France, Russia, and the United States and responded with aggression. The point isn't that they were right or wrong in doing so (too many people get caught up in the blame game with the First World War these days), it's that they were essentially given incentives they otherwise would not have had if not for protectionism. Jonathan Hillman has pointed out that "falling trade expectations made war a more attractive avenue for revising the status quo." One can even connect tariffs to the greater incentives for Germans to embrace radicalism in the 1930s thanks to the burden they added to the already-unreasonable war debt they had from over a decade earlier.
This is all to say that trade wars seem to feel good in the moment because they ARE doing something, but they invariably have had extremely dire consequences, especially in modern globalized history. It's almost as if that is what the new administration is essentially banking on, given the obsession with spheres of influence. But it's really just cavalier, deterministic pessimism masquerading as realistic pragmatism. Will this all result in war? Obviously we can't say. But I tend to see wisdom in harm reduction.
I accept what you are saying about McKinley/Roosevelt. I'm aware that Germany's economic issues contributed significantly to their aggression.
I can't think of any hot war (I'm not an historian) after WWII 80 years ago that has had any thing to do with trade wars. India/Pakistan? Israel/Arab? Korea? Viet Nam? The Troubles? Falklands? Gulf War? Bosnia? Kosovo? Afghanistan? Iraq? Libya? Ukraine? Yemen? Israel/Palestinian?
Future war with Russia?? War with China for many reasons??
The current tariff confrontation is "realistic pragmatism." "Harm reduction" can be a type of appeasement that can invite bad behavior towards us when seen as a weakness in our system.
Right those conflicts were not caused by US trade wars and tariffs, but I wasn’t saying that trade wars are the ONLY cause of hot wars; I was just saying that trade wars TEND to lead to hot wars. We didn’t have ANY trade wars from 1950-2000, and especially after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we went into overdrive with free trade. None of this is to say that free trade fixes everything (it obviously doesn’t especially when it comes to domestic manufacturing jobs), but it’s to say that using an old, largely disproven tactic to try and regain something that can’t be regained is likely a bad idea. The best recent example was that factory for building phones that Trump’s first admin pushed through (and it ended up becoming an assembly plant for screens or something) and it could never fill the jobs it was promised to “bring back.” The plant remained (and I think still remains) empty. The attempt at turning back the economic policy clock (and now the foreign policy clock) to the 19th century is what I find so distasteful about what Trump is doing. It’s peak “get action” for sure but…action for what? Stuff that doesn’t work? Disrupting what already existed on its own is a net neutral at best and a net negative at worst unless the replacement stuff is objectively better. This has nothing to do with how things have been—they clearly haven’t been great and not just because of the pandemic policy disruptions—it just has to do with how things will likely go with the policies being proposed. Something new is clearly going to be required. I’m a history guy, not an economics guy, so I can’t say what that would or should be.