This is indeed obvious for weeks, no questions here. However, the even more accelerated developments in the last 2 weeks, as well as what happened in France with the Ministry of Education opting for a Microsoft solution, even if there are so many good French options out there (Suite Hexagonne to name at least one), made it even more obvious and stringent.
- He wants to choke them with tariffs (and now has leverage to get the rest of the world to join in).
- They want Greenland to defend the North
- He wants to onshore manufacturing as a strategic wartime capability
Once you understand this, his policies make sense.
And the whole business of putting tariffs on everywhere is so countries can't export from them to evade the tariffs.
So because of this he seems to think effects on markets will be a one time correction that's worth the cost (not to mention is probably shorting it to pieces)
None of that makes sense as fighting China. Especially not the Greenland thing. He makes China looks good which is quite a feat.
> He wants to choke them with tariffs (and now has leverage to get the rest of the world to join in).
Like, how? You expect the countries to put tariff on Chine, risk to have tariffs put on them by both China and unpredictable USA? He is loosing leverage here rather then gaining it.
> They want Greenland to defend the North
Right now, Greenland sees America as the biggest threat to protect against. They even refused to talk to Vance on his visit.
> He wants to onshore manufacturing as a strategic wartime capability
That is inconsistent with tariffs on everything. If this was the goal, he would had targeted tariffs to ease manufacturing. It would exclude materials for example. It was NOT be calculated as ratio of trade deficit.
And this is also inconsistent with using tariffs as a leverage in negotiations which was your other point. This would require stability and companies being confident the policy wont change in the next few years. In reality, they dont know what will happen tomorrow.
Who will be dumb enough to believe American security promises anymore? America won't defend anyone no matter what they promiss.
If they wanted to sell defense, threatening annexation of countries they are supposed to have current defensive arrangement with is inconsistent with that. Allying yourself with Russia is inconsistent with that too.
And above all, an attempt to use past help as a reason to make the other country your colony for materials extractions while trying to sell their parts to Russia ... makes you untrustworthy.
Greenland is not threatened by China right now, they are threatened by America.
I mean, if that were the case, then their previous behaviour on Ukraine seems baffling, as it has made the defence umbrella look, at a minimum, kinda tattered. Like, we are now in a world where Poland is talking to France about hosting French nuclear warheads. If you told someone in 2010 that that would be happening in 2025 they’d think you were completely insane.
He wants to devalue the USD to make manufacturing more cost effective. For that he needs leverage. Plus tariffs raise money so can fund tax breaks. Read the essay I linked to in my other comment. It's all there.
You completely avoided interacting with the concerns I have in good faith. I understand that's the marketing pitch, I even understand there is some truth to it, but can you try to see the bigger picture and zoom out of an individual policy to see overall strategy? At the absolute best this is incompetence.
Even if we figured out manufacturing, wars are frequently won with technology, and those researches that fled Germany to get away from oppression are now fleeing America because colleges are robbing them of their dignity in expression and attempting to exploit them by taking the fruits of their labor, without the experiencing the "cost" of their own person-hood and individual beliefs.
If this was aimed at fighting China, Trump wouldn't be tariffing 99% of the rest of the world.
China has the upper hand because USA has turned against all its allies and countries will favor trade deals with the country which is not tariffing them. China will form stronger trade coalitions with the Japan/Korea/Europe and leave America to cannibalize itself.
> - Countries that retaliate will be outside the defence umbrella
See the weird bit is, if you wanted to go that direction, then starting by loudly proclaiming that the defence umbrella is, at best, flimsy, and maybe just broken, is perhaps not the best tactic.
Oh, yeah, I mean retaliation is inevitable; China’s already announced it, the EU is discussing precisely _what_ it wants to do (the EC has historically preferred doing weird stuff to straight-up mirroring for this sort of thing), and as you say Japan’s talking about it. Really the game theory of the situation makes it more or less inevitable.
Sometimes these models get tripped up with a mistake. They'll add a comment to the code saying "this is now changed to [whatever]" but it hasn't made the replacement. I tell it it hasn't made the fix, it apologises and does it again. Subsequent responses lead to more profuse apologies with assertions it's definitely fixed it this time when it hasn't.
I've seen this occasionally with older Claude models, but Gemini did this to me very recently. Pretty annoying.
reply