It's national security to destroy all of your alliances? In that case, what is the reason Russia is exempt from these tariffs? Reverse-psychological warfare?
First of all there is (EDIT: almost) zero trade between the US and Russia currently, same with North Korea. (EDIT: perhaps some token signal of wanting to negotiate over Ukraine? or perhaps even more “sinister” - getting US political opposition to falsely argue Trump is a Russian agent and make themselves look silly)
Second, yes part of the strategy is to force allies to self assess themselves and their dependence on US power. Trump and Nixon had a personal relationship and his fundamental strategy in business is based on creating uncertainty, it’s literally like point 1 of his “Art of the Deal” and however another part of that strategy is being willing to walk away.
We are living through a turning point in history where current US administration has reversed the open policy to China and for national security reasons are working to re-industrialize and militarize quickly as a strategy to deter Chinese ambitions.
It’s fine to disagree and argue the neoliberalism strategy of globalism isn’t dead but politically it is. Of course that world order is fighting to survive where it can, UK, France, Germany all putting up resistance to the rise of neo-mercantilism and nationalism but we will see if canceling elections, restrictions on speech and jailing politicians will work to block it.
>They didn't actually "trust" us before. I'm not sure how you'd measure that anyways. From my reading of foreign news they're mostly taking it in stride, having seen this coming since last year, and not being particularly surprised by it. This zeitgeist only exists in half of America right now.
It's hard for me to overstate how wrong this is. In my country Denmark, everyone, everywhere is talking about this and people are generally worried. I hear it in the supermarkets.
We absolutely did trust the US until now. For instance, the entire Danish public sector runs on Microsoft. Nobody ever considered that to be an issue. Now there is political talk about how that can be undone. Several of my peers who read HN and considered US-based, YC-backed to be the ultimate way to launch a startup are talking about the liability involved. Mind you, this is not the typical "I hate America!" rhetoric that has always existed to some degree everywhere, this is risk management: "Can I trust that the US is stable enough for me to bet on?"
You may not think it matters because the US is as strong as it is, or maybe you don't care. But the trust and thereby soft power that has been destroyed in these few months is generational.
I'm not sure what your argument is. I thought it was "they've done illegal things before", to which I'd say "backroom dealings aren't the same as a huge sign basically saying 'look at me breaking the law over here'", but that's so trivially obvious that I'm sure your argument can't be that.
(c) Should any trading partner take significant steps to remedy non-reciprocal trade arrangements and align sufficiently with the United States on economic and national security matters, I may further modify the HTSUS to decrease or limit in scope the duties imposed under this order.
Lobbyists and trade negotiators can read 700 words of strawman "napkin math", or 40 pages by CEA chair, or interviews with administration officials, to inform their negotiating position.
This is nonsense. The “non-reciprocal trade arrangements” mentioned don’t obviously exist at all, and, to the extent they exist, they are certainly not measured in any meaningful respect by the formulas going into the tariffs.
Having spent a whopping ten minutes finding official data (and I have no idea how good this data is as a whole — probably mediocre but far better than whatever nonsense the USTR is doing):
(a) The EU seems to thing that they run a trade surplus with us in goods and a deficit in services, and they’re close to balancing out.
(b) The US’s own data shows a net surplus with some countries and a net deficit with others. See here, page 28:
If the US was trying to negotiate sensibly and to identify anything remotely non-reciprocal, they would be rewarding the countries with positive numbers in that table! The US should be delighted to trade with Australia, Brazil, Belgium, the Netherlands, etc! By all means, we should buy more widgets and sell more fancy services!
As a silly analogy: if your housemate goes on a wild drunken rampage and starts trashing everything in sight while screaming “you need to reciprocate and wash the dishes more often and I will continue trashing things until you wash the dishes reciprocally,” the situation is not a viable negotiation tactic.
Indeed. Taxation is as old as civilization. Civilization is built on taxation. The first writing systems, the first numbers, the first money, it was all invented to enable taxation. People should finally quit being so childish about this. Unless you want to go back to the stone age, taxation is unavoidable.
What do you picture will happen because of protests, exactly? That the administration realizes the error of its ways? Because it seems more likely to me that they would use it as an excuse to implement more autocratic measures.
Protests let people at home who are feeling alone in their frustration that there are many more people who feel like them. I also felt like you did until someone framed it that way for me.
A protest isn’t supposed to be a singular event, it’s a series of events that crescendos into a movement—and it’s the crescendo that scares the people in power.
Then, since there are more people who voted for the current administration, there can be even more powerful counter protests. Then we can have people fighting in the streets, then a civil war.
Are you really trying to say that people should not protest, unless they are the overwhelming majority or easily ignored, because their protest will (or even just might) turn into a civil war?
