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Trump’s big, not so beautiful, trade wall

24 0
09.04.2025

Globalisation helped make the United States the most prosperous nation in history. But lots of Americans didn’t feel that way, and accordingly voted to “liberate” themselves from it last November. Donald Trump is now delivering for them — and the consequences will reverberate across the globe.

“Now it is our turn to prosper,” President Trump proclaimed on April 2 in the Rose Garden as he announced sweeping “reciprocal” tariffs ranging from 10% to 50% on almost every US trading partner (plus a few uninhabited territories). China, labeled one of the “worst offenders,” was hit with a 34% tariff on top of the 20% duties Trump had already levied in February and March, bringing its base rate to 54%. Japan, the European Union, and South Korea, to name a few of the “cheaters” and “scavengers” who Trump said had “looted,” “raped,” “plundered,” and “pillaged” America, saw 25%, 20%, and 15% tariffs imposed, respectively. Even countries with goods surpluses with the United States were slapped with a 10% across-the-board levy.

“Liberation Day,” as Trump called it, heralded not the end of US-led globalization, which had been adrift for many years already, but America’s definitive turn against globalisation. Virtually overnight, the effective tariff rate on US imports will rise to over 22%, going from one of the world’s lowest to by far the highest of any major economy. This is a level not seen since the turn of the previous century — higher even than the infamous 1930 Smoot-Hawley tariffs, widely credited with starting a global trade war and deepening the Great Depression.

Trump has long described the new tariffs as “reciprocal,” saying that the United States is only doing onto other countries as they do to the US. But the formula the administration ended up using to compute its so-called reciprocal tariffs doesn’t look at the tariff rates and nontrade barriers other countries impose on US goods at all. Instead, the calculation assumes that bilateral goods trade deficits are necessarily and entirely “unfair,” treating America’s deficit with every country as “the sum of all cheating” and seeking to eliminate it instead of actual trade........

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