How Trump Could Turn His Trade ‘Strategy’ Into a Strategy
There’s an offramp from global economic mayhem to a tolerable outcome for the US. The odds are against it, but it isn’t impossible.
Three men in search of an offramp.
Photographer: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images North America“This is not a negotiation,” said Peter Navarro, President Donald Trump’s “senior counsellor for trade and manufacturing,” in an article for the Financial Times on April 7. Actually, it is, said Trump two days later. Except for China, except for the 10% “baseline tariff,” the president lowered his trade-policy blunderbuss for another 90 days — not because he’d just crashed the stock market, cast doubt on the safety of US Treasuries and brought the economy closer to recession, you understand, but because countries were suddenly queueing up to offer the US great trade deals. “This was his strategy all along,” said Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
Let’s not laugh. For one thing, the situation isn’t funny, and its costs are mounting. For another, laughing at this administration’s comical incompetence might not hasten a reset. Let’s call Bessent’s remark a useful clarification. Imagine that this whole farcical production constitutes, as he says, a strategy, or that it might at least become a strategy. Where could it go from here? And might the results conceivably be good?