Translated from GegenStandpunkt 2-2025

Trump’s tariff offensive

A “common sense revolution” on the world market

The greatest victim of the American world order, according to Donald Trump, is the USA itself:

“For decades, our country has been looted, pillaged, raped and plundered by nations near and far, both friend and foe alike.” (Trump, April 2, 2025)

Can this really be true?

Of course not. The USA is and remains the richest and most powerful nation in the world, the greatest beneficiary of the Pax Americana that carries its name. This is certainly affirmed by credible witnesses: captains of industry and the specialists who hold successful capital accumulation close to their hearts as the standard of all economic reason; military leaders and the experts who cherish overwhelming destructive power because they can’t say often enough that world trade, which keeps the peace between capitalist nations, can’t keep the peace between them without a convincing projection of power; statesmen and women all over the world, and even more so in America itself, for whom the use of state power is both a profession and a calling. They all attest to America’s impressive track record on every crucial front: It is home to an astonishingly high percentage of people who are blessed with jobs that showcase their hard-working nature. They can do this because America is also home to a huge number of successful companies, even most of the world’s biggest; they make incredible amounts of money at home and around the world, concentrate an incredible amount of capital, and in the most advanced industries to boot. It is also home to the world’s largest market with a mass purchasing power second to none; therefore, American and non-American companies seek out labor-hungry masses around the globe to supply American companies and end consumers with wonderfully inexpensive intermediate and finished products. In particular, Apple devices and Nike footwear from the sweatshops of the global village testify to the privilege that average Americans enjoy due to their nation’s economic power. In this world, which is wide open to American capital, anyone who has a decent amount of money and wants a decent increase prefers to do it on Wall Street and in dollars, both in times of boom and crisis; this makes American financial institutions and guardians extraordinarily strong. This, too, is a special blessing for Main Street Americans; and this is often illustrated by their impressive level of debt: Their debt-financed private households not only accommodate all kinds of cheap goods from abroad, but also houses and cars that they would otherwise never be able to afford, no matter how hard they work – but as lifelong debtors of the world’s best financial service providers, this is quite often possible. For the same reason, the American state can afford a budget that accommodates far more than a welfare state – the size of which both parties lament – and timely servicing of a mountain of state debt – accumulated by both parties –, which has an absolute and percentage amount that would mean ruin for any other country, but poses no acute threat to the creditworthiness of the US state. It can also afford a military-industrial complex, for which Trump’s notorious penchant for exaggerated superlatives is for once appropriate. And the already world-historic clout of the American military is further amplified by a US-led NATO alliance and other global allies. This unique economic and political power of the USA ultimately makes it a magnet for the globally dispersed and mobile human capital that can be found at all levels of America’s affluent society: doing the dirty work that there is more than enough of even in wealthy America, populating the executive suites, and revitalizing the innovation centers where it contributes to America’s competitive edge.

The leading criticism of “America first!” is therefore that America has been coming first for a long time! The openness of its economy to a world market which it turns to account like no other country and the global reach of its power are the central characteristics of a world order that only has to be insulted as imperialism when America isn’t abiding by its own rules. If true, then it is Trump who, with his narrow-minded nationalistic vindictiveness, is making America poorer and weaker, possibly even bringing down the good empire whose returns dwarf those of all previous empires.

This is all well intentioned, and at any rate extremely affirmative, toward the power and wealth of this nation. Yet Trump is not fooling himself: Anyone who sugarcoats the nation’s situation like this is revealing themselves to be a globalist, or at any rate someone who doesn’t think about the fate of the – real – American people in the “rust belt” and beyond. But Trump does – and in a way that is decidedly unlike that of all the other American politicians, who for decades have ostentatiously bemoaned the decline of a human breed whose hard work they couldn’t praise enough: it was truly exemplary what these people gave of themselves for America! These have never been empty words. American politicians have always taken their laments seriously by doing their jobs all the more intrepidly: They were focused on increasing the power and wealth of the world power which the objects of their laments generously did so much for; their compassion has never stood for anything other than the need to advance this success all the more resolutely anyway, which is precisely why they felt it so deeply. But what has never escaped either the hard-working and pitied authority that is being appealed to nor Trump is the monotonous consistency with which such politicians turned their “I feel your pain!” proclamations into a big fat self-praise: The fate of these people is in the best of hands with a governing crew who knows that there is no alternative – neither to the wonderfully open world economy, nor to America’s world-leading responsibility for it, nor to the price that some Americans just have to pay by saying goodbye to their previous sense of entitlement.

Trump is now getting rid of this lie – this time even more. Following the dictum “Your hate is my motivator,” he has resolved in his second term to continue his struggle against the American establishment all the more decisively. In the hate of his supporters, which is as honestly shared as it is calculatedly stoked, Trump sees the necessity for a “common sense revolution” that satisfies the only need that hard-working, eager-to-compete Americans, as a unified people, are capable of: for a leadership that is not only strong, but all-powerful, with a determination to end the betrayal of the people. Domestically, this means eliminating anything that deviates from the only will of the people that has been certified, that embodied by Trump himself. Externally, this means a struggle to restore the only logical meaning of the “American world order.” This is one that benefits America and damages its competitors because “world order” is ultimately nothing but a competition between nations for the wealth of the world.

As far as the latter is concerned – trustworthy sources, namely the stronger powers among America’s foreign competitors, are also admitting that Trump is right. They are announcing new, high-powered initiatives aimed at the will and ability to be more competitive, which they themselves sometimes call “long overdue!”; against and with Trump, they are establishing a new era of global competition. Therefore, instead of unobjective complaints about Trump’s alleged ignorance of the workings of a globalized world, here is a look at the diagnosis and the therapy with which Trump is opening this era from on high.

I. The diagnosis: a trading system made in America that no longer serves America

For Trump, the impoverished inhabitants of the declining industrial regions of the USA are by no means losers. Their years of being exploited by successful US industrial companies have proven beyond doubt that they are true Americans. Even if they no longer look like it, living as they do in regions that no longer resemble the American dream, they are not a “vulnerable population group” like those who merely deserve the president’s contempt; they, rather, deserve the honor of representing the vulnerability of the nation itself: They are both victims of and witnesses to a world market that has impoverished and weakened the American world power itself, which is in fact the world’s biggest loser. Hence, a national emergency.

1. A lesson on the connection between the nation’s prosperity and security: it’s a no-go without truly domestic, widespread, profit-generating exploitation

If America, of all countries, is supposed to be poor and weak, then what, for the Trump administration, makes a nation rich and strong?

The Trump administration’s first and elementary response is definitely not an aberration in the modern world of states – rather, it’s exemplary: Especially in a country that sees itself as the homeland of a hard-working people who enjoy the blessings of free enterprise, there is no mistaking it: a rich country is not one in which a lot is merely consumed, but one in which not just many, but if possible all human and material resources are being used to increase monetary wealth. Trump and his team are extremists when it comes to this principle of free market nations – but just as extremist as befits the richest free market economy among the rich ones: America needs a correspondingly superior mass and productivity of capital across the entire industrial spectrum – from the economic and strategic industries of the future to textile production. In this respect, it is no consolation at all for the Trump administration that the growing monetary wealth, in which the work of a model free market country proves its value at all times, is not harmed in the slightest if US industrialists need fewer Americans because they have made their work far more productive for themselves, or if they have had so much growth in the US that they can access land and people all over the world to generate their profits and supply American consumers with cheap products from there. It also doesn’t help that the ailing “middle America” is framed by a Silicon Valley on the West Coast and a Wall Street on the East Coast from which the entire world’s money and sources of finance are drawn. Such centers of success only underscore the unnecessary waste of resources that remain unused in the rest of the country, and the scandalous impoverishment of a population that can only make itself useful for this wealth as purchasing power and credit customers rather than as industrially employed labor. And this is not only a problem for the people affected, but also and especially for the companies themselves: The innovative American entrepreneurial spirit is in danger of being blunted in the long run if it becomes accustomed to cheap foreign labor for its enrichment.[1] Nor is the administration reassured by the success stories from economic experts and other friends of an extensively exploited working class who point out that where once beautiful coal mines and factories stood – and a population whose industrial usefulness could be seen – there are now Walmarts, Amazon warehouses, fast food chains, and the world’s largest army of “service companies” everywhere, employing twice or three times as many Americans as those who are no longer needed in industry. This obviously remains an inadequate substitute for the loss of what Trump and his team sometimes humorously label “good paying manufacturing jobs.” Administration partisans of the American working class probably long for their return more than the working class itself, as their demonstrative rollback of national labor laws has done so much to make clear that “good paying” means any pay at all that takes place in a re-industrialized America. Whatever the workers might gain from this re-industrialization, it is in such industrial jobs that everything America desperately needs comes together: not only the maximum use of land and people for national enrichment, but also the assured production of an even greater good. On the latter point, the Secretary of Commerce provides a clarification in a polemic against the country’s obtuse cosmopolitan media:

“Well, you’ve got to realize this is a national security issue. I mean, we don’t make medicine in this country anymore. We don’t make ships. We don’t have enough steel and aluminum to fight a battle, right? All our semiconductors are made overseas. So every button we press when we try to start our car or even use our microwave, these are all semiconductors. They’re all made elsewhere. We’ve got to start to protect ourselves.” (Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick in an interview with CBS, April 6, 2025)

So this is the Trump administration’s second answer to the question about what makes a country rich and strong: an economy that makes it free and independent of a world full of competitors. A national industry must be re-established that ensures that the nation has at its autonomous disposal everything it needs for its wealth and power, thus liberating it from the need to source everything from abroad – and not just the few strategic goods listed by the Secretary of Commerce. A policy that is satisfied with America using its dollars to buy what it needs on the world market not only makes its own country poorer, but also turns global trade into an intolerable threat to “national security.”

The prominent role that the Trump administration gives to the balance of trade makes it clear that the concept behind Trump’s concern with security is that global trade guarantee the strengthening of the nation, rather than make it dependent on competitors.

2. “Fair trade” – the American prerogative of success

The nation’s decades-long negative trade balance shows Trump in black and white what America’s main and general problem is. In a world that the Trump administration, unlike the common sense of professional free trade apologists, sees as the international competitive affair that it is, America is constantly getting the short end of the stick. And that means that the nation is not only losing wealth, but allowing its wealth to become the means of others against America; America is nourishing their strength through its weakness.

Complaints of an aggrieved world power in many voices

This also proves that global trade is unfair – otherwise, America wouldn’t have a deficit. From time to time, members of the administration joke by invoking the compensatory mechanisms which are certainly not provided for by the world economy, but by official economic apologetics for such cases. According to this, the weakening of a country’s currency which results from a trade deficit should lower its export prices, thus increasing its volume of exports, thus soon making up for its deficit. However, if the balance fails to materialize for decades, then the international trading system is obviously “broken,” definitely “corrupted” (Trade Representative Peter Navarro). But the evidence can be presented without such vulgar scientific contortions:

“We have a $1.2 trillion trade deficit, and the rest of the world has a surplus with us.... The rest of the world has been ripping us off for all these many years...Why does Europe have a trade surplus? Is there something about Europe that’s special? Seriously, are they a different world than we are? Why are they selling 200 billion a year more to us. It's because it's not fair. The rules are made not fair.” (Secretary of Commerce Lutnick, op. cit.)

In general, Trump’s various people responsible for the trade dossier offer a series of variations on the one criticism of the system that Trump has always cultivated: America has fallen victim to the abuse of its own world order.

“In the final months of World War II, Western leaders convened the greatest economic minds of their generation...At a quiet resort high up in the mountains of New Hampshire, they laid the foundation for Pax Americana. The architects of Bretton Woods recognized that a global economy required global coordination. To encourage that coordination, they created the IMF and the World Bank. The purpose of the IMF and the World Bank was to better align national interests with international order, thereby bringing stability to an unstable world. In short, their purpose was to restore and preserve balance. This remains the purpose of the Bretton Woods institutions. Yet everywhere we look across the international economic system today, we see imbalance...Nowhere is the imbalance I mentioned earlier more obvious than in the world of trade...For decades, successive administrations relied on faulty assumptions that our trading partners would implement policies that would drive a balanced global economy. Instead, we face the stark reality of large and persistent U.S. deficits as a result of an unfair trading system. Intentional policy choices by other countries have hollowed out America’s manufacturing sector and undermined our critical supply chains, putting our national and economic security at risk.” (Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent at the Institute of International Finance, April 23, 2025)

According to the administration’s trade representative, the alleged unfair trade practices include

“the barrage of non-tariff weapons foreign nations use to strangle American exports, unfairly boost their shipments to the US, and wall off their own markets. These tools include currency manipulation, value added tax distortions, dumping, export subsidies, state-owned enterprises, IP theft, discriminatory product standards, quotas, bans, opaque licensing regimes, burdensome customs procedures, data localisation mandates and, increasingly, the use of “lawfare” in places like the EU to target America’s largest tech firms. On top of that, many foreign competitors operate from sweatshops and pollution havens that morally and environmentally stain the global landscape from Asia and Africa to Latin America.” (Trade Representative Peter Navarro in the Financial Times, April 7, 2025)

The problem, however, is not merely in the partners’ violations of the rules, but the multilateral, egalitarian core principle of the post-war global economic order itself. This denies bilateral negotiations of the positive discrimination that America deserves:

“A central driver of this one-sided trade [i.e., American trade deficits] is the WTO’s “most favored nation” (MFN) rule, which requires member countries to apply the lowest tariff they offer to any one nation to all WTO members. America’s trading partners can maintain high, uniform tariffs across the board – with no incentive to negotiate fairer terms with the US.” (ibid.)

Stephen Miran, the chairman of Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers, breaks down this diagnosis of a systematic injustice against the American founder of the wonderful world market and its strongest competitor to its fundamentals. According to him, America has given its force and money to the world, but the costs have not been reimbursed:

“Today I’d like to discuss the United States’ provision of what economists call ‘global public goods,’ for the entire world. First, the United States provides a security umbrella which has created the greatest era of peace mankind has ever known. Second, the U.S. provides the dollar and Treasury securities, reserve assets which make possible the global trading and financial system which has supported the greatest era of prosperity mankind has ever known. Both of these are costly to us to provide. On the defense side, our men and women in uniform take heroic risks to make our nation and the world safer, preserving our liberties generation after generation. And we tax hardworking Americans mightily to finance global security. On the financial side, the reserve function of the dollar has caused persistent currency distortions and contributed, along with other countries’ unfair barriers to trade, to unsustainable trade deficits. These trade deficits have decimated our manufacturing sector and many working-class families and their communities, to facilitate non-Americans trading with each other.” (Stephen Miran at the Hudson Institute, April 7, 2025)

This much is abundantly clear in all this: the American soul is still intact under Trump II. America has not lost its self-confidence that its rivals don’t stand a chance under fair competitive conditions. It still has enough of a cosmopolitan sense of responsibility to declare that its competitive problems are a problem for the entire global community – which needs to take practical steps to solve them. It has certainly not forgotten the art of presenting its insistence on monopolistic control over the world’s balance of power – what Miran refers to as the “security umbrella” whose global reach would have been worth a nuclear world war to the USA if necessary – as a favor to its vulnerable competitors and as an unappreciated burden for America itself. The same applies to the overwhelming dominance of the dollar: a good deed for which America is being punished. In short, the only sustainable and fair balance in the trade universe is one in which the success and security of the USA is on one side, and the usefulness and servitude of all the others is on the other.

The historic reason for the USA’s aggrieved sense of fairness and its consequences[2]

Such complaints obviously have nothing to do with the transparent whining of a sore loser. This is rather the unshakeable certainty of a government that sees the world trading system as an American product. Its high-handed demand for a competition that guarantees the advantage of one competitor and holds all the other competitors liable for it reveals the firmly principled longing of American nationalists for the historically guaranteed starting point of the prevailing world trading system. For American enthusiasts of a well arranged balance of power, it was indeed beautiful: the unrivaled superiority of American economic power faced a world of states that had been damaged or even destroyed by war, was hungry not only for American goods, but above all for the money capital that only America had to offer on the required scale. World trade took place only as a result and only so that America opened up the world for the expansion of its wealth and the strengthening of its power out of its own freedom and unquestionable superiority – the only secure basis for a truly American peace. Yet even this beautiful founding moment contained a contradiction that the professional representatives of the USA’s innate right to success ignore.

America was making the war-ravaged world its own by enacting a world market – by committing the other states not to quasi-colonial services, but to equal participation in a free capitalist competition with America as their own national path to success. From the very beginning, America didn’t want to do anything less than that and had, in the framework of its self-proclaimed responsibility for world peace and the rule of law, established through force that the entire world of states would pursue the accumulation of capital and that the individual nations would get precisely as far as they succeeded at this in the competition between nations. Every state was supposed to turn itself into a subdivision of the world market; on it, they were supposed to buy and sell everything that could be used for capital accumulation: from raw materials and machinery to labor and securities. To get this going properly and to keep it going, America used precisely those instruments (developed at Bretton Woods) that Trump’s associates now see as an American disadvantage – a weak point in America’s world dominance that points to a general dysfunction in the world system. First, it pleased its competitors with massive dollar loans that enabled them to earn substantial sums from the dollars that America – at that time, due to its quasi-monopoly on the world’s gold – had simply made the world money. Second, with the “most favored nation clause” denigrated by Navarro – first in the GATT treaty and half a century later as the core principle of the World Trade Organization (WTO) – it prescribed equal treatment for all competitors, thus ensuring the elimination of trade-related reservations and the generalization of all bilateral trade relations. Third, America took into account the danger posed to the world market by the losers of free and equal competition – these were, from the outset, expected – through precisely the institutionalized “global coordination” mentioned by Bessent: America put its money and credit behind an International Monetary Fund, a collective credit authority, in order to actually “better align the interests of individual nations with the international order and thus bring stability to an unstable world.” Multilateral credit for the losers was intended to ensure that the freedom of world market competition, which was so useful for the winners, was not hindered by state insolvency or unilaterally erected protective walls... In this way, America, in order to permanently open all nations for the use of American capital, adopted the standpoint of the world’s trade. It pursued its success not only as a competitor on the world market, but as its creator and guarantor.

Particular competitive defeats for the USA itself, or even only a noticeable diminishment of its economic dominance, were evidently never envisioned in either the system or in the national self-confidence of this nation. However, such possibilities were not excluded in the designing principle of world market competition. America, which acts as the architect and military and monetary guarantor of the world market, at the same time participates on it as a competitor itself. The difference between the establishment of conditions favorable to America on the world market and the intended success of America was not eliminated with the establishment of this free competition, but created. So the system wasn’t broken whatsoever when competitors emerged to dispute America’s absolute superiority. And it has been precisely the most useful addresses for American capital’s diverse needs for ‘workbenches’, investment spheres, sources of cheap primary and finished products, etc., that have achieved the status of serious competitors. These countries have used the designing principle of American imperialism exactly as it was offered to them, and achieved results that nevertheless contradict the founding purpose of this imperialism precisely because they refute the total superiority of the USA as a competitor. The use and abuse of the American world order are thus one and the same.

It was therefore inevitable that the USA’s decades-long complaints about the course of global market competition would turn into complaints about gross foul play. Ever since America began experiencing persistent trade deficits and the first signs of a rusting industrial sector caused by a number of US capitals preferring to make use of land and people elsewhere in the world that has been opened up to them, and because foreign competitors have been outright stealing market share from them – also and especially on its domestic market – the same conclusion has been reached over and over again: respect for the unique power of the USA and its corresponding absolute right to success has been lost. Time and again, America has sought to correct this.[3] However, the persistence of the negative balances soon ensures that the blame is not only placed on foreign competitors, but above all on the country’s own political elite, which has allowed the deficits and signs of a general industrial decline in the face of rising competitors to go unchallenged, apparently feeling no obligation to use the power at its disposal. The complaints became all the more acute the moment America proclaimed itself the sole superpower and creator and guarantor of a “new world order” following the suicide of the Soviet Union. Because the “peace dividend” of the American victory in the Cold War was ridiculously small in terms of the competitiveness of the American business site, especially in comparison to its victory in the hot world war, it is seen as the brazen lie of an elite that is out of touch with the people. Trade deficits, the “rust belt,” the increasing number of illegal, i.e. unwanted, immigrants, and, of all things, efforts to increase free trade with Canada and Mexico in this situation: all of this proves that American nationalism, which was supposed to have reached the ultimate stage of satisfaction with its victory over the ultimate enemy, is not only not getting its money’s worth, but is being suppressed by a cosmopolitan elites. They obviously did not take the victory over the Soviet Union as an opening to finally just drop any discernible consideration for stable and reliably functioning allies, something that was barely comprehensible during the Cold War, and to serve America exclusively. On the contrary, they decided to serve only a globalized world and its beneficiaries – abroad and among their own, homeland-forgetting elite. The final confirmation of the suspicion came with China’s ever further development into a workbench and investment paradise for American capital; with its ever further integration into the world market and with its rise to become a serious rival of the USA as an economic and world power, it becomes clear: It is precisely through the benefits that US capital derives from this that the nation has become entangled in a dependency that links the nation’s lost prosperity with its lost security.

The “global dollar”: an “exorbitant disadvantage” for the superpower

It is precisely this effect of the successful expansion of American capital that causes die-hard nationalists to doubt the global triumph of the American “way of life” – the freedom of capital to shape the world as it sees fit. Claiming the world for America is a right of the nation that American capital and all competitors must serve. Interestingly, under the Trump administration, this lament and this claim is based on a success story of American capitalism that surpasses all other negative balances, but which, for these politicians, is not a success story at all: the continued global dominance of the dollar which has even been significantly expanded since the great financial crisis. This, of all things, is seen as a problem for American competitiveness. What Trump’s chief economic policy advisor Miran – quoted above – means when he says that the “reserve function of the dollar” is problematic for America is that a good half of all global foreign exchange reserves are held in dollar debt securities; according to him, the relevant demand for dollars – negative trade balance or not – prevents a beneficial reduction in the exchange rate of the dollar that slows down American exports and accelerates the deindustrialization of the country. “Reserve function” is a very cautious way of saying that the dollar is far more than just a currency that has to prove its value through the nation’s trade successes; this is made clear by the fact that decades of trade deficits – as well as an enormous mountain of national debt – haven’t diminished its strength in the slightest. The debts that are profligately taken on in dollars by the American government, its entrepreneurial citizens and their hard-working employees are the assets used by the states of the world to decisively prove their solvency. And that’s just the beginning of the dollar’s special status. Even decades after the abandonment of the link to gold, and despite the emergence of several other currencies that have achieved a certain prominence in global trade and capital movements, the dollar remains the currency of choice, almost the only money worth considering for fairly large segments of global business. A trade journal summarizes the figures:

“Nowadays, the US only accounts for about a quarter of the global economy, but more than 57 per cent of the world’s official foreign currency reserves are in dollars, according to the IMF. While much has been made of its relative decline in central bank reserves over the past few decades, the reserves statistics arguably underplay the dollar’s centrality. There are many other pots of sovereign and quasi-sovereign money that are not captured by the IMF’s data on foreign exchange reserves, and whether you are a bank in Mongolia, a pension plan in Chile, a European insurance group or a Singaporean hedge fund, dollars are the ultimate reserve asset. The dollar is equally central in trade, with 54 per cent of all export invoices denominated in dollars, according to the Atlantic Council. In finance, its dominance is even more total. About 60 per cent of all international loans and deposits are denominated in dollars, and 70 per cent of international bond issuance. In foreign exchange, 88 per cent of all transactions involve the dollar.” (Financial Times, April 18, 2025)

What the numbers show is that the dollar is the means by which the whole world conducts its business. It is used by international finance capital to fuel global growth; it is used to quantify the growth in wealth, to speculate on further growth, to hedge speculation, i.e. to speculate on it again. And when global finance capital, with its dollar-driven global dollar earnings, gets itself and the world into a crisis, it also seeks and finds a “safe haven” in dollar debts, so that upswings and downturns create a demand for dollars and dollar debt in equal measure. The whole world makes use of the extraordinary value of this national credit money, even when US capitalists are not involved. Capital accumulation in the countries of the world turns US debt into capital and the national currency into world money. For the state that creates the dollar itself, this is a double blessing: it possesses a financial power that need not be bothered by the fact that it is not backed by American trade successes; it enjoys almost unconditional creditworthiness, unlimited freedom from debt – what is often called America’s “exorbitant privilege”; and it therefore possesses a power to blackmail which it increasingly likes to use in the form of financial sanctions; their extraordinary impact is based precisely on the fact that global business and the need for dollars are more or less synonymous. It is precisely this competitive success of the dollar that Miran sees as the nation’s competitive weakness: he sees in its “exorbitant privilege,” i.e. its extraordinary financial power, the deceptively sunny side of its powerlessness to promote the competitive strength of the American industrial location, and thus in this respect an exorbitant disadvantage. Where a US Treasury Secretary once proclaimed: “Our currency, your problem,” Miran says: “Your world currency, our problem.” Is the man crazy?

Clearly – at least, that’s what American politicians and economists say, pointing to the achievements and advantages of the previous dollar imperialism, which they do not want to do without under any circumstances. What Miran is referring to, however, is a real contradiction of the special power that America wields with its “global dollar”: With the dollars it issues, the dollar credits it lends abroad, and the dollar debts it incurs abroad, America – consumers, capitalists, and the government – is serving the money, credit, and capital needs of businessmen and states all over the world; the exceptional position of its money, and thus of its own financial power, is thereby created and permanently confirmed. Of course, there is a downside to this usage agreement: to maintain this exceptional global economic position, the American state is actually dependent on the success of its competing trading partners earning dollars, on their successful access to American debt in all its forms. The fact that the world’s profit seekers and states need America’s debts as their assets means, conversely, that they need America as a willing debtor. It requires the willingness of this unique economic power to allow a world of competitors to make money from it, to afford the deficits with which it supplies global capitalism with the debt that its competing profit seekers in turn collectively turn into value, thus confirming and perpetuating the unsurpassable financial power of the USA through their own successes. This contradiction of the USA’s unique economic success is unbearable for a US government that insists the global use of the dollar must necessarily represent the expansion of an American regime across the world of states without creating any tangible dependence on the foreign countries in question. The world market will therefore only be worthwhile for America when it doesn’t actually need it, i.e. if it can always use it as a freely calculable means of expansion.

Only then will the third answer to what makes a free-market nation rich and strong be in effect: the successful use of the wealth of the entire world. Otherwise, the abbreviation Trump once scribbled in the margins of a speech applies: “Trade is bad.”

II. The therapy: a “reset of American power” through a global tariff offensive

What the Commander in Chief makes of all these diagnoses, at any rate, is: tariffs. As is well known, it is not only his favorite word, but also the most important economic policy lever in his arsenal. This is how Trump is putting into practice his certainty that he has a market that is absolutely indispensable for the world, a market power that can be forged into a political weapon that is unbeatable and – just as importantly – can be sovereignly wielded from the president’s office.[4] What he intends to achieve economically and politically through the use of this lever is, strangely enough, the subject of a great deal of guessing by the experts; however, the government itself is as transparent as can be: it wants to achieve everything that makes a modern nation rich and strong.

1. The beautiful versatility of tariffs

– By paying the tariffs, which Trump envisions as an entry fee to the US market, foreign companies[5] are supposed to make America’s enormous national debt disappear and fill its treasury – so quickly and so permanently that Trump is even drafting a plan to abolish the nation’s tax authority in favor of a correspondingly expanded customs authority.[6]

– Making imports more expensive by giving preferential treatment to companies that dutifully enrich themselves through the use of human and material resources in the US is not – at least not yet – the explicitly stated purpose of the tariffs. The government insists – at least for the time being – that tariffs will definitely not lead to price increases in the USA, or at most only in the short term; the greed of foreign producers for the indispensable purchasing power in the US market will ensure that they will swallow the tariff costs themselves. And if the price increases do turn out to be somewhat more permanent, then they will certainly be worth the benefit: the need to avoid the same tariffs through which foreign manufacturing companies will be reliably and adequately financing the American treasury will push them to relocate their factories and, if possible, their entire supply chains to America. America will then have all the resources it needs to secure its economic superiority and its national security; the world market will then become a place of secure enrichment for America. That is an advantage that far outweighs the insipid enjoyment of inexpensive commodities by US consumers.[7]

– Foreign countries, in order to avoid tariff-related damages to their own exporters, will abandon the trade practices whose fraudulent nature has been proven beyond doubt by America’s trade deficits. At last, truly fair trade conditions will prevail – those under which U.S. exporters cannot lose. As long as the relevant nation’s balance sheet is correct, other countries’ companies can still export as much as they want to America.

– Miran, the Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, goes one step further. He sees the imposition of tariffs as an effective lever for transforming all American trade relations into an uncomplicated tribute relationship that will inevitably ensure fairness toward the American world power. At the beginning of April, he presented the world with a buffet of options for relieving America of the burden of its economic and military services:

“We are under siege by hostile adversaries trying to erode our manufacturing and defense industrial base and disrupt our financial system; we will be able to provide neither defense nor reserve assets if our manufacturing capacity is hollowed out. The President has been clear that the United States is committed to remaining the reserve provider, but that the system must be made fairer.  We need to rebuild our industries to project the strength needed to protect reserve status, and we need to be able to pay our bills to do so. What forms can that burden sharing take? There are many options, here are a few ideas: First, other countries can accept tariffs on their exports to the United States without retaliation, providing revenue to the U.S. Treasury to finance public goods provision.  Critically, retaliation will exacerbate rather than improve the distribution of burdens and make it even more difficult for us to finance global public goods. Second, they can stop unfair and harmful trading practices by opening their markets and buying more from America. Third, they can boost defense spending and procurement from the U.S., buying more U.S.-made goods, and taking strain off our servicemembers and creating jobs here. Fourth, they can invest in and install factories in America.  They won’t face tariffs if they make their stuff in this country. Fifth, they could simply write checks to Treasury that help us finance global public goods.” (Miran at the Hudson Institute, April 7, 2025)[8]

Academic expertise is baffled by the sense and logic of Trump’s fondness for tariffs: customs revenues are supposed to bubble up continuously, but the tariff deterrent against producing abroad is supposed to undoubtedly work? Does Trump want more protectionism for America or to push other countries toward more free trade? Didn’t Trump win the election mainly by promising to stop inflation, and now prices are just going to go up? Isn’t Trump destroying the profit calculations of American industrial companies with his tariffs on imported industrial goods – e.g., steel and aluminum? Investigative journalism ponders the question of what secret plan could be behind this in order to warn against even looking for it; it meticulously investigates the question of which Trump whisperer is currently in the lead in order to send the message that the US President doesn’t listen to his advisors anyway.[9] Yet Trump could not be clearer: he is characterized precisely by the radical consistency with which he takes a devastating political balance sheet from all the negative items in the nation’s economic balance sheet – location & trade. The negative balance sheets certainly show evidence of fraud on the part of America’s trading partners, but when a country with the greatest wealth and the greatest power in human history falls victim to such fraud, it is impossible to blame other countries for this embarrassment. [10] In that case, America itself is to blame. It has allowed itself to be exploited and victimized because it has lacked the political will to treat America’s economic interests as what they are: unconditionally valid rights to success whose redemption the American state power itself is directly responsible for. From this political failure derive all the negative consequences – for the location, national security, the social and moral condition of the people – that he and his advisors and interpreters so readily and so dramatically portray. America is no longer the master of its own conditions of living and success – simply because it does not act like it is. This balance of power must be corrected, in fact reversed; this may cost the American economy a lot, but only then will the economy pay off for America.

2. “Liberation Day”: Trump demands capitulation from all trading partners

The solution that Trump presents to the world on “Liberation Day” derives from this diagnosis of political failure. He breaks down all his trade policy objectives into a simple formula for the respective tariffs being levied on trading partners: First, a universal “baseline tariff”; second, a country-specific “reciprocal” tariff. In the latter case, the respective US trade deficit has been divided by the total exports of the respective partner country to the US and, citing “currency manipulation and trade barriers,” is added to an “actual” tariff rate that is levied against America in each case; this has then been halved – “because we are a very kind people” (Trump) – to determine the “reciprocal” tariff that America will now levy against the respective country. After just one week, the reciprocal tariffs are temporarily suspended and transferred to a 90-day negotiating marathon with almost two hundred countries. The government cites one negative and one positive reason for the sudden pause: on the one hand, Trump believes that the crash on the global stock markets, the US Treasury bond market, and even the value of the dollar itself that began immediately after “Liberation Day” means that the global masters of money are plagued by unjustified fears and not quite sticking to their guns. Where pundits discover large-scale speculation against America, its debt, and its money, Trump reacts very confidently, very graciously: “I thought that people were jumping a little bit out of line ... they were getting a little bit yippy, a little bit afraid.” On the other hand, according to Trump, the tariff announcement, which was explicitly designed to “shock and awe,” has already done its job as an ingenious and extremely successful negotiating ploy. He enthusiastically reports first-hand on the victims’ gestures of submission: “These countries are calling us up, kissing my ass!” and “’Please, please, sir, make a deal, I’ll do anything, sir, I’ll do anything!’” These are now the partnership tones that America wants to hear.

What Trump wants with his offensive is therefore clear: Trump does not care about the economic policy coherence and reliability that is demanded by the experts because he is not concerned with a specific economic policy goal, but rather with the basis of all goals, all of which he insists on equally: he is concerned with nothing less than the capitulation of all competitors to the USA’s right to dictate the terms of trade solely at its own discretion. In this respect, the use of the tariff weapon is always aimed at modifying the economic terms of trade in favor of the USA, but at the same time it clearly consolidates an American right to all-encompassing success into the tariff rates. The government’s assertion that access to the US market is “not a right, but a privilege” means that the basis of all deals with America is its prerogative to succeed. Trump demands that all trading partners acknowledge that they have a contractual obligation to the USA: Their trade success with America does it an injustice per se, so they are being asked to pay to the same extent that they take wealth from the US market.[11] So while the negative US trade balance does creates debt, it is not a debt on the part of the USA to foreign countries, but rather the exact opposite: anyone who makes money from America at the end of the day owes America a guarantee that America will earn at least as much from them and in any case will remain the undoubted beneficiary of the relationship. This must now be recognized as a condition of business by all states and all global capitals of any origin. They must deliver the benefits which America is entitled to in every respect: by filling the American state coffers, by contributing to the re-industrialization of the USA as a location for business, by removing their own barriers to US exports to their own markets, so that the American interest in enrichment becomes the premise of their state’s materialism. Or through some combination of all of the above: Trump himself – in keeping with the sovereignty he wants to regain for America through this action – decides at his own discretion when the situation satisfies him.

That is the substance of the “reset of American power” that Commerce Secretary Lutnick proclaims as the goal of the tariff offensive. And that is the meaning of the “chaos” which leads observant experts to conclude that they are dealing with a madman: Trump is not only imposing a disastrous tariff formula on the world that will be catastrophic for all countries – including and especially for the import-dependent USA – but with his sudden tariff pause for negotiations, he is not even giving them the chance to adjust to it and at least enjoy the “investment security” that global business supposedly subsists on above all else. But that is precisely the point: no one on the world market should feel secure as long as America is not secure in its superior power.

On the one hand, the Trump administration is adopting a radical competitive stance: it is proclaiming an explicit rejection of American “hegemony” because it sees in it, of all things, a crippling responsibility on the part of America for its competitors and, from the standpoint of a world power, a renunciation of the USA’s self interests.[12] Under Trump, America should finally also compete; it should finally make full use its of unique power to strengthen itself directly at the expense of others.[13] On the other hand, Trump is displaying a sense of justice that only a 21st century US president can truly cultivate: as the president of a country that has long since won the competition between nations precisely by means of the imperialism of a world order – the “hegemony” that Trump despises as the self harm of a do-gooder – and sees itself cheated from the associated benefits. In this respect, Trump represents the – typically American – point of view of a competitor beyond the competition, thanks to whose wealth and military power all other competitors owe their respective prosperity and their “way of life” in general to. However, this is precisely not to restore the effectiveness of the means and methods of its unique success, but to politically claim the benefits to which America is entitled once and for all and to be reckless toward these means and methods – be it through tribute, the granting of more free trade or, if necessary, even the annexation of new territories if America needs them for its “national and international security” (Trump). Under Trump, America must therefore re-establish its supremacy in the world of states by acting like this unquestionably superior power.

The primary and general goal is not changed by the temporary withdrawal of country-specific tariffs, nor by the conclusion of deals that seem to observers to be rather paltry compared to the content and tone of Trump’s original demand.[14] The back and forth of trade war demands and their “PAUSE!” (Trump on X, April 9, 2025), while permanently retaining the sword of Damocles with the possibility of raising them again, is the appropriate form for the content of Trump's “act of liberation”: it expresses a true sovereign’s combination of mercilessness and patronage toward a world of vassals – the only sure basis for making the global market worthwhile for America. Hence: “I will never change my policies!!!” and “I am a very flexible person. I don’t change my mind, but I am flexible.”[15]

3. The main targets of the American liberation offensive

From the very beginning, America’s campaign of trade policy liberation to regain its supremacy in the world of states has had two particular addressees who are therefore at the top of the list of sinners that Trump proudly presents to the world on “Liberation Day”: the EU and China. According to Trump’s logic, the offense they are particularly guilty of is revealed by their particularly great success at exploiting the Pax Americana. More than any of the other competitors, they embody the impossible situation that the competitive order guaranteed by American force and fueled by American money does not reproduce exceptional American benefits – so it must be broken. For the Trump administration, these cases in particular show that America has fallen victim to its own world order.

There is at least some truth to this: the two competitors that have made the greatest historical contributions to the successful American instrumentalization of an entire world of capitalist competitors have, precisely because of this, grown into subjects that thwart the purpose of this order – assured, absolute American superiority. They are now being treated accordingly.

China

According to Trump’s tariff formula, China’s particularly large trade success with America results in a particularly large punitive tariff: 34% on all Chinese commodities – in addition to the existing 20%. China not only complains about this, it is also fighting back: with measures designed to demonstrate that there is no alternative to America’s dependence – on China’s market, business location, and exports – which is what Trump is fighting against. It immediately announces retaliatory tariffs of 34%, which in turn challenges Trump to demonstrate to China that America can always do more damage to China than vice versa: “China played it wrong, they panicked – the one thing they cannot afford to do!” (Trump, 4.4.25) Trump then decides to increase the tariffs to 104%, which China responds to with a further increase to 84%, and three days later Trump finally raises them 125% to 145%, depending on the product group, which, according to Secretary of the Treasury Bessent, “amounts to an embargo” (4.24.25). Here, too, China largely keeps pace with America, raising its tariffs to 125%, thus making US commodities “no longer marketable” in China (Bloomberg, 4.12.25); it also introduces export controls on the rare earths that America remains dependent on, reduces its imports of American crude oil by 90%, and puts several US companies on its list of “unreliable entities,” barring them from trading and investing in China. China’s combative response is combined with a demonstrative spirit of resistance, even of optimism: China is taking on the trade war declared by Trump in order to win it. One month after these repeated escalations – and following global speculation by international finance capital against American shares, American government debt, and the dollar itself – Trump and Xi agree to a 90-day pause in negotiations. During this time, American tariffs on Chinese goods is reduced to 30% and Chinese tariffs on American goods to 10%.

With regard to the Trump team, this is an impressive combination of willingness to escalate and de-escalate. What this demonstrates, on the one hand, is the self-confidence that America will always win a trade war against China if it only demonstrates the necessary will to fight. This courage has a real basis. Chinese capitalism in general, and Chinese success on the world market in particular, testify to the productive power of American debt: set up as an investment sphere for American capital, which has found a vast and indispensable field of business there for several decades; geared towards earning dollars worldwide – especially in the American dollar homeland – which promotes its quality as an undoubtedly valuable means of business; enabled to endlessly expand its capitalist export industry by endlessly expanding the American national debt into which the Chinese dollar earnings are poured. On the other hand, it also marks a significant moment of practical recognition for Chinese bargaining power – for the status that China has achieved as this product of global dollar capitalism. Although the country has by no means emancipated itself from the USA’s market, money, or debt, and so cannot escape severe damage from the American state’s blackmail maneuvers, China has certainly achieved a feat for global dollar capitalism that America cannot do without: neither for the strength of its domestic capitalism nor for the strength of its dollar-denominated financial power. America needs the same Chinese export success that it enables the People’s Republic to achieve with its financial power in order to certify that American debt represents real financial power.

The notoriously divided American parties have long been in complete agreement that this is an intolerable problem; and that the entire world market cannot continue as it is, precisely because of China’s success on it. In order to secure America’s overriding right to superiority, without which it does not feel secure as a nation, Chinese progress must be combated.

What Trump I had initiated in this regard was continued and systematized under his hated successor: punitive tariffs on Chinese goods; export bans on high-performance chips and chip manufacturing facilities to block China’s access to the relevant technology; bans that apply not only to American companies but also to foreign companies if they use American technology; stricter measures to prevent or even destroy the business of ZTE, Huawei, and other Chinese tech companies; various investment restrictions in the American homeland to prevent Chinese capital from making itself at home there. Democrats and Republicans even joined hands to create a “CHIPS and Science Act” under Biden, which pumped billions into rebuilding a domestic semiconductor industry and securing an American lead in AI, quantum and biotechnology, etc. The erection of a “high fence around a small yard” was intended to secure the autonomous control over all the strategic goods that America needs to assert its claim to superiority over China and everyone else.[16] Finally, the Biden administration pursued an innovative trade policy in the near and distant Chinese neighborhood with the – unfinished – project known as the “Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity” (IPEF) – not a classic free trade agreement that offers partners easier access to the coveted US market, but rather a bit of foreign policy for the hard-working American working class: America offered its Asian partners the prospect of becoming recipients of American technology and pieces in the mosaic firewall against China’s economic and military progress. The Biden administration certainly did not present this need for correction as a general objection to free and open world trade. But it at least began implementing something like an indemnity requirement for the USA – securing an American lead, particularly in strategic goods, as a general condition of competition on a world market, as a collaborative project between states that should continue to see the world market as their free and open means. In short: a “rules-based world order” whose first rule is America’s superiority.

With his current trade policy offensive, Trump is giving this consensus a contradictory update:

On the one hand, America’s problem with China is now being treated – with exemplary directness and transparency – as the ultimately political question of power that it is: a question of power about which there can no longer be any indecision. China in particular must realize that it has no alternative but to submit to America on trade policy. The global economy, which largely depends on trade between these two countries, cannot continue without this question of power being settled. On the other hand, this battle obviously cannot be decided just like that – Trump is not ignorant of this either. However, he does not give up; as the greatest dealmaker of all time, he is in his element: he is forcing the non-negotiable on China as a subject of negotiation – China’s capitulation to the American claim to supremacy as the premise of the global economy. With his tariff offensive, Trump is essentially carrying out, with an impressive combination of brinkmanship and flexibility, a test of what the current balance of power and dependencies – right down to the question of whether Chinese students will be allowed to attend American universities – will yield for the purpose of blackmailing China into a deal that is beneficial to America. Trump is competing with his political control over crucial technologies and the market without which China cannot be the economic power that it is; China confronts him with its political control over crucial raw materials, supply chains, a market, and an investment sphere without which America cannot be the capitalist superpower that it is. So the reciprocally useful relationship, which is always included in the competition between America and China, leads to the fundamental question to be decided by the leaders at the negotiating table: who needs whom more, i.e. who can harm whom more.

Europe

The EU is also making it clear that it is quite willing and able to enter a trade war with America if Trump is not going to be reasonable; that it will not put up with Trump’s offensive and doesn’t have to. It sees itself as perfectly capable of inflicting a damage on the USA’s trade policy that can’t leave Trump cold. At the same time, however, it makes a point of saying that it doesn’t want this trade war at all, but is trying to avoid it by threatening its own punitive measures. It wants to deter America from a battle that it does not want to fight itself. The willingness of the Europeans, despite their fighting spirit, to refrain from a direct counter-attack against Trump’s offensive is certainly to their credit: “Very smart!” says the dealmaker in the White House. However, if the negotiations with the EU about signing a guarantee of American supremacy don’t progress in the American direction, then it will be punished all the more severely: e.g. with the threat of immediate tariffs of 50% on all EU goods, so that the EU doesn’t confuse negotiations with America with the right to make its own demands. However, when the head of the EU Commission calls Trump and assures him that the EU has no intention of being stubborn and just needs a little more time, Trump returns to the pause in negotiations and praises himself for the wisdom of postponing the tariffs for a while longer. Meanwhile, he doubles the planned tariffs on steel and aluminum to 50%, which he introduces the following week ...

Here, too, there is a striking interplay of aggressiveness and willingness to negotiate that reflects a dual perspective. On the one hand, the Trump administration sees the EU as a repeat offender of common sense: it’s bad enough that it’s a bunch of competitors taking aim at America’s supremacy as the world’s largest economic and monetary power; it’s even worse that the EU doesn’t even acknowledge this. It invokes an unbreakable transatlantic friendship, but this is quite obviously a mere ploy to use America’s power and wealth against it.[17] A globally powerful parasite, in other words, whose special relationship with America is now being terminated. In general, the Trump administration sees the EU as an unwieldy monster, a collective violation of fair trade: it distorts the actual clarity of the balance of power between America and the individual European states, that is, the undoubted inferiority of each single European country compared to the American economic power. As an economic bloc with a common market of American size, moreover one with a – largely – common currency that, while not equivalent to the dollar, nevertheless represents a powerful alternative to it as world money, and finally one with a supranational trade policy authority in Brussels who has all this at his disposal as a means of blackmail – the EU is using all this to prevent the USA from asserting its superiority in the way that the Trump administration sees as absolutely necessary. The demonstrative submission of the EU as a collective in terms of trade policy is not possible, but precisely for this reason it is all the more urgent. With the renegade Great Britain, America certainly does not have a simple reason to celebrate, but at least a counter-party without an artificially increased negotiating power; in this respect, nothing stands in the way of a good deal. The EU, on the other hand, has – in the polite words of the US Treasury Secretary – a “collective action problem” (Bessent on Fox News, May 23, 2025) that prevents it from practically recognizing the overwhelming superiority of the USA.

There is a certain glimmer of hope for the American economic power, however. This lies in the fact that the European collective is a contradiction not only for America’s entitlement to their subordination, but also for the members of the collective themselves. Their decision, as joint proprietors of a Europe-wide market and – to a large extent – of a European money, to be far more powerful than they could ever be on their own includes giving up the ability of each individual state to wield this power for itself. The imperialist benefit of this association which each individual nation promises itself is at the same time a contradiction to a nationalism which wants to get its money’s worth from it. For this reason, MAGA’s objection to the Brussels trade authority has an influence on the nationalisms within Europe that feel cheated of the national benefits of European imperialism – a welcome American interference in their internal affairs.

Footnotes

[1] “Cheap labor is fundamentally a crutch, and it's a crutch that inhibits innovation. I might even say that it's a drug that too many American firms got addicted to... And whether we were offshoring factories to cheap labor economies or importing cheap labor through our immigration system, cheap labor became the drug of Western economies.” (Vice President J.D. Vance at the American Dynamism Summit, March 18, 2025)

[2] For this section, see the book “American power and its use,” Section B: “Global Capitalism,” translated from GegenStandpunkt 3-97.

[3] For example, in the mid-1980s, the USA pressured its most important trading partners—particularly Japan, Germany, France, and Great Britain—to deliberately devalue the dollar in order to improve the US trade balance with them, first with the “Plaza Accord,” and then with the “Louvre Accord,” to halt the devaluation when it had gone too far for American taste. Stephen Miran built on such golden moments of international cooperation with his now famous proposal for a “Mar-a-Lago Accord,” which subsequently earned him a position in the White House. See footnote 8.

[4] Trump says it nicer, of course: “It’s a giant, beautiful store, and everybody wants to go shopping there. And on behalf of the American people, I own the store, and I set prices, and I’ll say, if you want to shop here, this is what you have to pay.” (Trump in an interview with Time, 4.25.25) Although the department store metaphor turns the matter on its head in economic terms – he actually means selling – it must be admitted that the political message is also unmistakable. Trump II is using the usefulness of this weapon not only to strengthen the nation economically, but also – chronologically speaking, even first – to compel political services from foreign powers. He uses tariff threats to force the big neighbor to the north and the big and small neighbors in the southern backyard to assist in getting rid of refugees and illegal immigrants as well as in the fight against drug smuggling, or he simply uses this weapon to clarify the generally servile relationship that other countries have with America. This article deals with the way in which Trump intends to get a new grip on global trade as such for America.

Another question is whether Trump is allowed to use his tariff weapon as independently as he does. At the end of May, the US Court of International Trade found that Trump had exceeded his authority with the majority of his tariffs, because the emergency rule he invoked does not apply in most cases, and it immediately lifted most of the tariffs imposed. The next day, an appeals court issued a temporary injunction against the lifting of the tariffs. New material for the Trump government’s battle with a judicial system in which Trump is increasingly certain that conservative judges “in his own way probably hates America” when they put obstacles in his way. The status at the beginning of June: the tariffs are allowed to enter into force provisionally, while the dispute in the courts continues in parallel.

[5] Trade tariffs are paid not by exporters, but by importers; they usually compensate themselves by raising their own selling prices, thus “passing the tariffs on” to consumers. But given America’s market power, Trump is simply certain that in this case, it will be foreigners, not Americans, who will be asked to pay. His chief economic policy advisor recently interpreted it this way: “Analysis of what economists call the ‘incidence’ of tariffs indicates that a large share and burden of the tariffs are ‘paid for’ by the country on which we’re applying the tariffs. Countries that run large trade surpluses are pretty inflexible—they can’t find other sources of demand to substitute for America’s … America is the largest consumer market in the world. By contrast, America has plenty of substitution options: we can make stuff at home, or we can buy from countries that treat us fairly instead of from countries that take advantage of us. This difference in leverage means that other countries end up bearing the cost of tariffs.” (Stephen Miran at the Hudson Institute, April 7, 2025)

[6] “For far too long, we have relied on taxing our Great People using the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Through soft and pathetically weak Trade agreements, the American Economy has delivered growth and prosperity to the world, while taxing ourselves. It is time for that to change. I am today announcing that I will create the EXTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE to collect our Tariffs, Duties, and all Revenue that come from Foreign sources. We will begin charging those that make money off of us with Trade, and they will start paying, FINALLY, their fair share. January 20, 2025, will be the birth date of the External Revenue Service. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” (Trump on X, January 14, 2025)

[7] “Access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream.” (Bessent, March 6, 1925) “I don't think a pretty little girl who is 11 years old needs 30 dolls. I think she can have three or four dolls... She doesn’t need 250 pencils. She can have five.” So, a moral improvement of the people is also being planned.

[8] Miran earned his job in government with his idea for a so-called “Mar-a-Lago accord”: In order to, on the one hand, significantly depress the value of the dollar to boost the trade balance and reduce the US national debt, and, on the other hand, preserve the dollar’s indispensability as a global reserve currency, government holders of US debt should sell them en masse and, in return, purchase fifty- to one-hundred-year government bonds or otherwise pay a usage fee for the government bonds they already hold:

“How can the U.S. get trading and security partners to agree to such a deal? First, there is the stick of tariffs. Second, there is the carrot of the defense umbrella and the risk of losing it.” (Miran)

[9] The term “sane-washing” thus finds its way into the vocabulary of analysts, who constantly warn against what they themselves are doing. One journalist concludes by clarifying this:

“Trump did not decide on the final plan until less than three hours ahead of his splashy event, according to the Washington Post newspaper, but found Vice-President JD Vance and other staff constantly deferential. The Post quoted a person close to his inner circle as saying: ‘He’s at the peak of just not giving a fuck any more. Bad news stories? Doesn’t give a fuck. He’s going to do what he’s going to do. He’s going to do what he promised to do on the campaign trail.’” (The Guardian, April 12, 2025)

[10] “Pernicious economic policies and practices of our trading partners undermine our ability to produce essential goods for the public and the military, threatening national security.” (Fact Sheet, The White House, April 2, 2025) But: “I don't blame other countries at all for this disaster. I blame previous presidents and other government officials who failed to do their jobs.” (Trump, 4.2.25)

[11] Trump is so consistent in this that he has imposed the numerically highest tariffs on exports from Lesotho: 50%. The country subsequently reports that its export economy mainly consists of sewing clothes for export on behalf of American textile companies; and that it is simply too poor to import the necessary quantity of goods to achieve the required balance of trade with America. The same applies to Cambodia (49%) and Sri Lanka (44%). What does this show? In the opinion of all reputable economists, the most striking, because most affirmative, criticism of the Trump government imaginable: it is scoring a colossal own goal, destroying trade relations that are causing the opposite of damage to America, namely the absolutely successful preparation of entire countries for American companies and American consumers. After all, their poverty is so wonderfully useful!

[12] “The mission of American foreign policy – and this may sound sort of obvious, but I think it’s been lost. The interest of American foreign policy is to further the national interest of the United States of America, right … The way the world has always worked is that the Chinese will do what’s in the best interests of China, the Russians will do what’s in the best interest of Russia, the Chileans are going to do what’s in the best interest of Chile, and the United States needs to do what’s in the best interest of the United States … And I think that was lost at the end of the Cold War, because we were the only power in the world, and so we assumed this responsibility of sort of becoming the global government in many cases, trying to solve every problem.” (Secretary of State Marco Rubio in an interview with Megyn Kelly, January 30, 2025)

[13] This standpoint of unmodified competition is what Trump likes about old President McKinley, who established America as a world power by linking the nation’s territorial expansion to a trade policy aimed at hostile takeovers of foreign markets.

[14] The agreement with the UK provides for a reduction of the tariffs imposed by Trump on British car exports to the basic tariff rate of 10% for the first 100,000 vehicles per year; the previously imposed tariffs of 25% on British steel and aluminum exports, including aircraft engines, will be completely lifted; the UK is also promised preferential treatment in future trade decisions in the pharmaceutical sector. In return, the UK has promised the USA duty-free – reciprocal – imports of up to 13,000 tons of beef per year, the lifting of 19% tariffs on US ethanol, several multi-billion Boeing orders and preferential treatment for US pharmaceutical companies in approvals and trade procedures.

[15] Long-time Trump friend and investor Kevin O’Leary, known in America as “Mr. Wonderful,” put it this way in an interview with the BBC: “I think the whole world has to get used to this. We are going to watch sausage being made.” (BBC, 4.9.25)

[16] See “The issues of the American election campaign” translated from GegenStandpunkt 4-24, incl. footnote 4; also “How the US wants to modernize its imperialism” translated from GegenStandpunkt 1-23.

[17] Trump also says this much more beautifully: “Let’s be honest. The European Union was formed in order to screw the United States. That’s the purpose of it. And they’ve done a good job of it. But now I’m president.” (Trump, 2.27.25)