Subject: Re: The two-pronged goal of the tariff actions
Okay, fair. Was thinking more of Europe there.

Even those as well. If your goal is to force "the re-alignment of the Western economies away from [China's] influence" then imposing a whacking big tariff on European imports alongside the Chinese tariffs is still a terrible idea.

One predictable effect of this tariff regime is to increase bilateral trade between other Western economies and China - because the U.S. exports a lot to China. You know our largest export markets? Number one and two are obviously Canada and Mexico - but number three is China, to the tune of about $145 billion.

After the U.S. and China end up with massive tariff barriers between them, you now have a $100+ billion hole in the Chinese market where U.S. exports used to go. That hole is going to get filled by Western exports. It's especially going to get filled by Western exports because you've erected trade barriers against your allies, who now have to find new export markets for their goods that are being priced out of the U.S. market.

This isn't a policy program that is going to isolate China from the Western economies. It's a policy program that will isolate the U.S. from the Western economies, and instead drive them closer to China. Contrary to your assertion, China is already the third largest export market for the EU (behind only the U.S. and the UK) - and this tariff regime is only going to drive Europe's and China's economies closer together.

A trade policy that was an effort to actually reduce the Western economies away from China's influence would have required cooperating with the other Western economies. You'd want joint action to raise tariff barriers against China while improving access to Western markets for Chinese competitors, to encourage firms to reduce Chinese industrial prowess by moving their production out of China into other countries.

I wouldn't have upped the blast radius this much, true.

The blast radius is how you know that this is after-the-fact trying to find a justification for this mess. This tariff program was unequivocally not designed with isolating China in connection with national security containment. That's why we have higher tariffs on countries like Vietnam and Lesotho than China. Heck, we have pretty much the same tariff on Taiwan as China. Every single nation's tariff (including that of China) is entirely based on nothing more than the size of their trade deficit and exports. No effort was made to adjust any number anywhere on the chart to anything specific about that nation (friend or foe, Asia or South America, big or small, military ally or security rival). Nothing went into the calculation but the relative proportion of trade deficit to exports.

Because of how the tariffs were structured, there isn't some master goal of the tariff actions other than to reduce trade deficits. Lots of people that have actually given some thought to international trade and security are coming up with lots of ways that the tariffs could be structured to meet some actual goals, but these comments all take the same form: here's some goals that the tariff program could be able to achieve, if only Trump were to modify everything to match the type of tariff program that I am suggesting here. It's just a nicer way of saying that Trump's actual tariff policy isn't going to achieve anything but economic disruption and have some nasty unintended consequences even for our China policy....but here's a much better plan that I'm going to pretend is actually hidden inside Trump's plan, if only he would change his plan to match the one I'm thinking of.