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Donald Trump’s decision to pause his tariff hike on all but China took much of the world by surprise. The U.S. president had insisted until the morning of April 9 that everything was going to plan and that the massive falls in share prices were just “medicine” that was needed if he were to make America great again. So when he announced his decision at lunchtime the same day that he would hold to 10% tariffs across the board it was something of a bombshell.
Of course there was one conspicuous exception. Because China had “disrespected the market” Trump decided to ramp up his tariffs on their exports to the U.S. to a startling 125%. This is likely to spark a trade war between the world’s two largest economies. Tom Harper at the University of East London believes that Trump may be underestimating China’s economic resilience as well as its sense of history, which has left the Chinese people determined not to bow
to western pressure.
Why roll back on the tariffs on the rest of the world? James Giesecke and Robert Waschik from the University of Victoria believe the answer is simple: the harm this would do to the U.S. economy. Their modelling suggests that “the U.S. would have faced steep and immediate losses in employment, investment, growth and, most importantly, real consumption, the best measure of household living standards”. In any case, writes James Scott of King’s College London,
tariffs or not, there’s unlikely to be a manufacturing rebirth in the US.
This weekend sees the start of talks between the U.S. and Iran aimed at coming up with a new deal to replace the nuclear agreement struck in 2015, which the Trump administration pulled out of three years later. Middle East expert, Ali Bilgic, of the University of Loughborough, writes that there’s a gulf of mistrust that the two sides will have to overcome if they are to agree on anything substantive.
Meanwhile voters head to the polls in Gabon at the weekend for the first time since the country’s interim president, Brice Oligui Nguema, took power after the ousting of former leader Ali Bongo. The result will test the country’s democratic transition, but Douglas Yates – an Africa specialist at the American Graduate School in Paris – reports that the likelihood is that the new government is likely to contain many of the same people as the former one.
Also this week: as the Trump administration puts pressure on U.S. universities to toe the government line over DEI policies, how universities in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union thought caving in to dictators would save their independence and the strange lack of a climate focus in the Australian election campaign.
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