Trump's war on trade
Trump was sworn in as the disruptor-in-chief when he became the President of the US. With both houses of Congress in his control he could unleash what he failed to do in his first term. Upending what has for the last six decades formed the arteries of progress for the larger world though is not without its safety valves.
Briefly, there is method to this madness in which he is being guided by some exquisitely trained economists from Harvard in pursuit of America's strategic ends through other means. Through tariffs he plans to regulate, manipulate, arbitrate and excoriate those he perceives stand in the way of America to retain her singular position of dominating greatness. More succinctly, he wishes to marginalise others from any possibility of matching America's exclusivity.
America remains unique even today — she is the largest economy and is likely to remain so for another decade at least, and much longer if Trump's plan to disrupt the world succeeds. The structure of American economy: eighty per cent of it is just services — the rub that the largely white mid-west holds against coastal America where lie its foundries of knowledge and innovation, the basis of the new economy.
It is being loudly feared in the US that Trump and his cohorts have the dream to return the country back to the 1920s America which paved the path to unmatched industrialisation and job market. The agriculturist was already by then the foundation on which the American society sustained.
But then came the base of knowledge and education laying foundations of an economy and society around information and innovation. Over time America exported its industrial base to the rest of the world where labour was cheap,........
© The Express Tribune
