This is a good perspective that has helped me have a clearer picture.
- The tariffs are not a response to the decline of American capitalism.
- The legitimation crisis from which Trumpism emerged was a result of the strength of American capital, not its decline.
- Trump claims that the result of concessions made by prior administrations in order to bring other states into the US-led system have diminished American economic and political supremacy.
- A plan that would involve pushing finance off its pedestal and replacing it to some extent with domestic manufacturing.
- Globalization cannot simply be reversed at the stroke of a pen. Its unravelling would involve much more than simply imposing tariffs*; it would require an array of capital controls as well as a comprehensive industrial policy – measures that would constitute a more serious challenge to the dominant fractions of capital than anything Trump is willing to contemplate.
- Tariffs on their own are insufficient to reverse globalization*, and these specific tariffs will do nothing to strengthen working-class power, nor improve living standards; in fact, they may well do the opposite.
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*– Harold James of Princeton University: “The amount that the United States gets from tariffs at the moment is something like $86bn. And the tax revenue, that’s about $2.5tn. So these are just orders of magnitude apart from each other.”
– Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times: … the other thing is that globalisation that we’ve constructed over the last 40 years relies on these immensely complex supply chains, which were put under a lot of pressure during the pandemic. If Trump keeps going in this direction, even if he tries to narrow it down just to China, do you think international business can continue in the way that it’s been doing, or will they have to fundamentally restructure?”
– Harold James: “Well, they will have to restructure, and they’re also gonna be very uncertain, because who knows how long these tariffs will be in place. So if you’re thinking about a long-term strategy, do you really want to put a lot of investment? Having a new chip factory is a tremendously costly exercise – you can’t just build it overnight. It takes years before it comes online. Like, there’s a new plant in Arizona, it takes a long, long time for it to actually be made. And so, in that time, things might change again and the world might be different…
I think there was likely to be somebody like Trump, so in that sense, he’s caught a particular mood and a mood of anti-globalisation. So that sense that globalisation hadn’t worked, that it wasn’t working for many people, is absolutely there, and Trump is the response to it. But there are so many idiosyncratic things about Trump, and I think in particular, the way in which the decision is made and the lack of consultation and the lack of anybody who can stand up to him is in a way, it’s a frightening example of the way in which a particular personality can prevent the finding of rational solutions. And so it seems to me that the tariff decision and the way that it’s made is a bit like the decision that President Putin made in February 22, where there aren’t people who — in the military or in the intelligence services — say, President Putin, you can’t assume that you’re going to knock out Ukraine that quickly, you’re gonna decapitate the government that quickly. And what I think Trump believed was that this measure on the second of April would quickly lead to a world in which everybody agrees to America’s terms and that America becomes top dog again. And that is purely a fantasy.”
(Financial Times, 10 April 2025)
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