earthquake<\/a> in a century. Not all the targeted countries have significant exports to the US, but the open disregard for the old verities of \u2018trade and development\u2019 still matters. Those that have cultivated a dependence on the US market \u2013 such as Vietnam (46 per cent) \u2013 are unlikely to profit, at least in the short term, from their sudden and unexpected \u2018liberation\u2019 from established, export-oriented growth models.<\/p>\nEconomists looking to understand the likely impact of the latest round of Trump tariffs have done what economists tend to do: reached for the averages. Take the tariff rates for all the different countries, weight the average by how much the US imports from those countries, reach a percentage and plot it on a graph to show the historical trend line. The result of this procedure \u2013 that the average trade-weighted US tariff rate is set to return to where it was around 1909 \u2013 makes for an arresting statistic. But it\u2019s also a strangely comforting one, suggesting that we\u2019ve been here before.<\/p>\n
Yet tariffs looked nothing like this in 1909 \u2013 not in the US, not anywhere. They were organised primarily according to the goods they were levied on, not the states they were directed against. They were also largely set by legislatures, not executives. In 1909, even the most aggressively protectionist states \u2013 like the US \u2013 had single, national tariffs, hedged around with surcharges on rivals and discounts for clients. States such as France and Spain developed elaborate mechanisms to allow them to negotiate trade deals without compromising their prized \u2018tariff autonomy\u2019: the ability to set rates nationally, independently of what any other country was doing.<\/p>\n
National tariffs involved very, very long tables of commodities and the taxes levied on them: sometimes by percentage, sometimes with specific sums of money per a given corn bushel, beer barrel or iron rod. They were periodically revised in set-piece legislative debates, accompanied by acres of highly informed press coverage, furious debates among economists, and blue-ribbon commissions of officials and businessmen.<\/p>\n
Nineteenth-century economic nationalism, in the US as in the French Third Republic, embodied a kind of democratic ideal. It proclaimed the ability of farmers, manufacturers and sections of organised labour \u2013 often from the provinces \u2013 to lobby for, and receive, the wages of political representation. Representation, in turn, functioned as an information-gathering system for the state. Industries argued for the level of protection they thought they needed, based on their knowledge of market conditions; politicians tried to give it to them.<\/p>\n
Trade wars were frequent, but they looked more like they did under the first Trump administration: targeted at specific goods and specific countries, often as overtures to market-opening negotiations. Executives, first in Switzerland, Germany and France, then (by 1909) in the US, were granted limited powers by legislatures to levy retaliatory duties against foreign powers that they held to be guilty of trade discrimination. They could also negotiate \u2013 with somewhat more legislative input \u2013 preferential deals. National tariffs, however, were the baseline against which both trade wars and trade deals could be evaluated.<\/p>\n
With Trump, there\u2019s no baseline. The US has declared a universal trade war. Not by means of a new and more protective national tariff created through intricate legislative deliberation, but by a sweeping presidential assertion of economic emergency. Everybody is discriminating against the United States, Trump says, and always has been. The president\u2019s power to respond is, consequently, unlimited. Nineteenth-century tariff levels are being implemented with the beefed-up trade powers of the 21st century\u2019s imperial presidency. The US effectively doesn\u2019t have a single national tariff anymore; it has something closer to 180 \u2013 one for nearly every jurisdiction in the world (including 10 per cent slapped on Heard Island and McDonald Islands, an Antarctic territory inhabited only by penguins and seals).<\/p>\n
Except for a few gestures to steel and car production (members of the United Auto Workers were in attendance), Trump\u2019s Rose Garden announcement made few references to specific industries that he thought that his measures would assist or create in the US. This isn\u2019t surprising: the tariffs weren\u2019t informed by any new research into the actual condition of US industrial sectors and the level of protection needed to revive or expand them. Trump claimed that what mattered in setting the \u2018reciprocal\u2019 tariff rate was instead the relationship between the US trade balance with a given state, and a mysterious calculation of the total extent of \u2018tariffs \u2026 currency manipulation and trade barriers\u2019 that a given nation had \u2018charged to the USA\u2019.<\/p>\n
Online analysts quickly came up with a more likely story. The tariffs are what you get when you take the United States\u2019 goods trade deficit with a given country, divide it by the total value of goods imported from the country, and cut the resulting figure in half. Screenshots circulating on X and Bluesky implied that the method was probably suggested to Trump\u2019s team by ChatGPT or another large language model, which dutifully spat it out when prompted to come quickly up with a simple method for calculating reciprocal tariffs.<\/p>\n
What sort of worldview does this calculating method suggest? Production and consumption are no longer perceived as a complex system of multilateral flows and global value chains, financed and organised by private actors (many of them American). Products are instead reduced, as crudely as possible, to a single country of origin. Relations of interdependence are redescribed as relations of domination. The US trade deficit is no longer evidence of the country\u2019s ability to buy more from the world than it returns to it \u2013 a sign that it might, in the round, be profiting from the existing order of things. Instead, this administration sees the trade deficit as tribute paid to savvier, \u2018tougher\u2019 powers, who have colluded with a treacherous political class to reduce the nation to a condition of craven dependence.<\/p>\n
From this perspective, any trade deficit with any country at all \u2013 no matter how poor or how small \u2013 is evidence of the \u2018rape\u2019 and \u2018pillage\u2019 being visited on the United States of Trump: the infinitely powerful, infinitely vulnerable father-hegemon, locked in a permanent trade war of all against one. \u2018They do it to us, we do it to them,\u2019 Trump says: or, to put it differently, what the US does is now determined by what others do. Trumpian protectionism doesn\u2019t follow its 19th-century antecedents in building up tariff walls that define and cultivate an autonomous, self-asserting economic nation. It lashes out in all directions, dissolving its own coherence in a fruitless quest for recognition and obeisance. Threats and deals, deals and threats, with all the world \u2013 for ever. It\u2019s like nothing anybody\u2019s ever seen before.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n