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 r...
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51