As promised, U.S. President Donald Trump delivered his deferred tariffs on Aug. 1, with punitive import taxes on nearly every good from countries around the world. In all, Trump announced new and arbitrary tariff rates on 92 countries, ranging from 15 percent (for many countries) to nearly 40 percent or more (for Laos, Myanmar, Switzerland, and Syria).

Though the new tariffs are overall lower than the sky-high rates Trump announced in April, which managed the rare trifecta of crashing the stock, bond, and currency markets, his latest moves still rattled global markets. The U.S. Dow Jones and S&P 500 both opened sharply lower, European stocks suffered, and nearly every Asian index was in the red.

As promised, U.S. President Donald Trump delivered his deferred tariffs on Aug. 1, with punitive import taxes on nearly every good from countries around the world. In all, Trump announced new and arbitrary tariff rates on 92 countries, ranging from 15 percent (for many countries) to nearly 40 percent or more (for Laos, Myanmar, Switzerland, and Syria).

Though the new tariffs are overall lower than the sky-high rates Trump announced in April, which managed the rare trifecta of crashing the stock, bond, and currency markets, his latest moves still rattled global markets. The U.S. Dow Jones and S&P 500 both opened sharply lower, European stocks suffered, and nearly every Asian index was in the red.

It’s another jolt of uncertainty for the global economy after a three-month reprieve, but there may be more uncertainty to come: The legal foundation for Trump’s tariffs was already deemed illegal by one court, remains under legal challenge in another, and may end up before the Supreme Court, meaning none of this week’s Sturm und Drang may ultimately stick. Trump’s love of tariffs, though, likely will.

“Trump has been on a tariff mission since the 1980s,” said Josh Lipsky, the senior director of the GeoEconomics Center at the Atlantic Council. “His campaign pledge was 10 percent on the world and 60 percent on China, and now look at where we are.”

The issue, both in April and in the latest salvo, is Trump’s continued misdiagnosis of both the problem and the solution. He says he is concerned by ballooning U.S. trade deficits, even though economists have spent decades........

© Foreign Policy