No. of Recommendations: 15
It's clear that Trump wants to isolate China and start forcing the re-alignment of the Western economies away from their influence.
Then why the tariffs against Chinese manufacturing competitors? Or against the Western economies?
If you wanted to isolate China, you would impose whopping tariffs against China...and not against countries like Vietnam and Japan, who are competing against China to supply countries in Asia (and globally) with manufactured goods. A huge part of China's competitive advantage is scale - so you want to create incentives for relocating manufacturing out of China into low-cost countries that aren't China. You also wouldn't impose tariffs against all the countries in the region whose cooperation we need in order to contain China - why are you punishing Australia and South Korea and Cambodia and Burma and Laos and the Phillippines with massive tariff increases? You also wouldn't impose whacking high tariffs against the rest of the Western economies, because doing that only creates economic incentives for them to increase their exposure to Chinese influence, and burns their electorate against feeling friendly towards the U.S. It's hard to be the leader of a re-alignment of Western economies against China if you're kicking all those Western economies in the teeth with 10x tariff increases.
Again, maybe this is a goal that someone trying to find an after-the-fact justification for the completely thoughtless tariff structure might land on, as a rationalization for an utterly irrational economic policy. But it doesn't really make sense, and it's inconsistent with nearly every other part of the tariff program other than the China tariffs.
