What is it good for?
President Trump’s intensifying trade faceoff with China comports with his broader foreign policy, to use the term loosely. As with his approach to Mexican immigration and North Korean aggression, Trump’s provocative tactics are tailored for self-aggrandizing spectacle rather than international problem-solving.
Washington and Beijing completed a second round of eye-for-an-eye tariff threats this week, bringing the scope of the economic saber-rattling to more than $100 billion in goods. While that’s still a sliver of the world’s two largest economies, it’s also a dramatic expansion from the first round, which Trump kicked off with an ill-considered attack on steel and aluminum imports.
The rhetoric is also rising. People’s Daily, a Communist Party mouthpiece, warned of an “unimaginably cruel battle for the U.S.” Yearning for a state organ of his own, Trump attacked a Washington Post headline for emphasizing the Chinese penalties instead of his. Besides encroaching on another occupation for which he is remarkably ill suited — copy editing — Trump thereby revealed his overarching, everlasting goal: to pantomime toughness and draw attention to himself at any expense.
Much of the cost would be borne by Trump supporters in the agricultural heartland of the country and California, which counts China as its largest trading partner. China’s first round targeted such Golden State farm staples as nuts (including almonds and pistachios), fruits (among them oranges, plums and grapes) and wine. Its latest goes after soybeans, a huge Midwestern crop that relies heavily on Chinese consumption, as well as key California industries such as produce processing and aerospace.
The tariffs are subject to a waiting period, so there is still time to avoid a trade war that, as the recent stock market tumult suggested, can only harm both economies. Trump’s habit of inconsistency offers hope. So does chief economic adviser Larry Kudlow’s effort to cool the rhetoric and calm Wall Street. Kudlow’s predecessor, Gary Cohn, quit the White House over Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs.
Legitimate U.S. grievances over China’s failure to protect intellectual property, as well as the president’s more questionable obsession with the trade imbalance, would be better dealt with through the World Trade Organization and in concert with allies who share our concerns. While the hard work of diplomacy would not be as immediately gratifying as Trump’s foolhardy efforts to exhume the corpse of Smoot-Hawley — the 1930 tariff law widely credited with exacerbating the Great Depression — it would have a better chance of helping rather than hurting our collective prosperity.