Trump's International Threats Have Foreign Governments Reeling, but Resistance is Mounting
The new-old president is firing blanks and foreign leaders may tart to. catch on..
Donald Trump’s blizzard of executive orders since Monday’s inauguration has Democrats in Washington huddled in panic, stunned by the scale of his authoritarian push and his seeming full control of the levers of power in the nation’s capitol. But while the executive orders he has signed so far affecting foreign countries, have initially also shocked governments in the countries he is targeting, they are realizing he’s firing blanks.
A good example is Trump ’s sudden turn from Putin lafkey to a threat-making scold, which appeared in a post on his Truth Social website on Wednesday night and was clearly meant to be read by the Russian leader. In it Trump wrote:
“I’m not looking to hurt Russia. I love the Russian people, and always had a very good relationship with President Putin…All of that being said, I’m going to do Russia, whose Economy is failing, and President Putin, a very big FAVOR. Settle now, and STOP this ridiculous War! IT’S ONLY GOING TO GET WORSE. If we don’t make a ‘deal,’ and soon, I have no other choice but to put high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other participating countries. Let’s get this war, which never would have started if I were President, over with! We can do it the easy way, or the hard way - and the easy way is always better.”
That threat, phrased like a mob boss addressing someone who wasn’t meeting their payments on a mom loan, was essentially meaningless, as Putin surely is aware that there is virtually no Russian trade with the US to put tariffs on and that just about every meaningful sanction against Russia that could be made has been put in place already.
Meanwhile, while Trump is also threatening to slap high tariffs on countries that have major trade surpluses with the US or that he feels are in some way hurting the US, like Canada allegedly “allowing” Fentanyl to be “pour across” the border into the America, he seems still to erroneously believe that such US import tariffs are paid by the exporting country to the importing country. In truth import duties are paid by the importing customer, and then typically get passed on to the final customer in a higher sales price. And the exporting companies as well as the exporting country’s government both understand that even if Trump doesn’t.
Trump[ talks about creating a an External Revenue Service (ERS) to collect import duties from exporting companies, but even if he could get Congress to accomodate him and set an ERS up, it couldn’t and wouldn’t be able to stop those companies from raising the end price of their product to the American consumer.
As China, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and Britain have pointed out, such a pressure tactic simply turns into a tit-for-tat trade war that drags down the entire global economy (and in fact was a major reason for the Global Depression of the 1930s).
At some point — and it probably won’t be be long inm coming — the countries of the world will recognize that Trump is blustering and is making threats he cannot follow through on.
Already countries are starting to defend themselves by bssnding together to resist the threats. A good example of this is the number of Latin American countries that have rallied to support the Panamanian government when Trump threatened to take back the Panama Canal, given over to Panamanian sovereignty for $1.00 by President Jimmy Carter as a goodwill gesture in 1977.
The US as a country with a massive trade deficit and a shriveled manufacturing base is actually in a position of weakness on trade policy. As a result, US ompanies that need manufactured products in order to assemble their own domestic goods for sale in the US 9for example car makers that have computer-run engines and transmissions, typically have to import goods like computer chips and circuit boardsas they are no longer made in the US. And it would take time to get a domestic competitor up and running, or for a supplier in China, Taiwan or Europe to move a plant to the US.
Europe and the UK may also soon see the advantage of rallying to oppose Trump’s tariff threat collectively and to negotiate with the US as a trading bloc. They have an easy response should they decide to do that. Europe can offer easy terms to Britain for returning to the European Union. Britain’s Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves have been struggling amid a slumping economy to deliver on his campaign promises to increase funding for the struggling National Health Service (NHS), restore the problem-plagued privatized rail service, improve public education and reduce the cost of higher education, etc., all without raising taxes too much. They are surely starting to look at polls showing that public opposition to Brexit has moved up significantly to 55% while support for Brexit has plummeted to 31%. That’s a far cry from the narrow 52-48 percent vote in favor of the leaving Europe in 2016. Since that time, the British economy has taken an estimated $124 billion annual hit for eight years because of Britain’s being outside the tariff-free zone of Europe (once its largest trading partner). — That’s a huge amount of lost taxable income that Starmer and Reeves are likely looking recovering as a way of digging themselves out of their budget funding hole.
Meanwhile, Trump himself is going to confront a similar kind of problem as his ill-informed plans to remake the US economy and its tax system to further favor the rich and the huge corporations that are filling his campaign coffers with donations cause him to renege on his promises to improve the lives of his low-income MAGA base by lower prices, bring back manufacturing jobs, and ‘fix” the country’s broken health care system.
Stay tuned…