Trump’s path to success in trade war uncertain

WASHINGTON — The United States and China hit each other with punishing tariffs Friday as the two nations tipped into a longfeared trade war that is only expected to escalate.

President Donald Trump has said trade wars are “easy to win.” Now, as he opens a global skirmish with allies and adversaries alike, the question is whether he has a plan to achieve the results he wants or whether he is heading into a costly and futile clash without resolution.

The president appears to be betting that threatening trading partners like China, the European Union, Mexico and Canada with tariffs will eventually force them to bend to the United States.

His strategy is being buoyed by a strong economy that is giving Trump more latitude to impose tariffs that might otherwise pose too much risk. Job growth was strong in June, according to a new government report, as employers added 213,000 net new jobs and the unemployment rate rose as more people entered the labor market and began looking for work. Manufacturing job growth was particularly robust.

Those numbers are backward-looking, but there is little reason to think that the initial batch of tariffs will knock the entire economy off course. The $34 billion worth of Chinese goods subject to tariffs, and an equivalent retaliation by China, is tiny compared with the $20 trillion U.S. economy. Global stock markets largely shrugged off the trade war Friday.

But the tariffs are still inflicting pain on some in particular industries, including farmers and small manufacturers who have long supported Trump. And with little sign of a negotiated resolution between the United States and China — or any other trading partner — the conflict threatens to escalate, eventually affecting hundreds of billions of dollars of additional products.

“Trump’s soundest argument in his election campaign was that he would not waste American lives and treasure in pointless wars of choice,” Adam Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, wrote in March in an op-ed article. “His launching a trade war would prove, however, to be his economic Afghanistan — costly, open-ended, and fruitless.”

Trump’s approach has garnered support from certain corners of American industry, particularly sectors that have seen significant job losses connected to China’s rise.

But many of Trump’s supporters say they are unsure, exactly, how the trade war will work out, given the escalating threats emanating from the White House and the lack of a clear strategy toward resolving the president’s differences with the United States’ trading partners.