By Judson Berger
Friday, April 18, 2025
President Trump’s pause on tariffs and all that has
transpired since have brought little clarity — if anything, more confusion — to
the question of what the threats and pullbacks are meant to achieve.
Is it a remaking of global trade that sees America keep
the tariffs in place more or less permanently, even at reduced levels from
those initially set? Is it all “art of the deal” to compel nations to chop down
tariffs everywhere and bring about free trade? Are these even the right
questions to be asking — is there little more to this than the fact that, as Jeff Blehar has written, Trump loves tariffs and hates
trade deficits, and the result is whatever the result is, #YOLO?
As Ted Cruz told National Review’s Audrey Fahlberg, if it’s a
world without tariffs to speak of, “that will be one of the most extraordinary
economic victories any president has ever produced.” But if it’s sustained,
high tariffs for all trading partners, the Texan said, “the result, I believe,
would be disastrous.”
Reducing the U.S. trade deficit is a general, stated purpose of the tariffs.
Supporters also want to raise revenue, bring back manufacturing, and apply
pressure to other nations to change their ways. However, as NR’s editorial explains, last weekend’s reported exemptions for smartphones, computers, and other
electronics from reciprocal tariffs would not appear to align with those goals.
Trump added to the uncertainty by then denying there were any exceptions;
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick described the reprieve as only temporary. In
other words, per our editorial: “More tariffs are coming, including on
electronics, and businesses still can’t breathe a sigh of relief.”
Neither can they predict with any confidence how the
self-imposed crisis will resolve (if it does), and which goods from which
countries tariffs will affect, at which rates, along the way: Higher tariffs
might or might not snap back after 90 days; a
10 percent baseline tariff remains in effect; and there are separate
tariffs on Mexico and Canada, forthcoming sector-specific tariffs, and
ever-escalating, stratospheric tariffs on China.
The trade-war endgame is a riddle, wrapped in a Truth
Social post, inside a formula with Greek letters.
Henry Olsen and Jim Geraghty both conclude, reasonably, that tariffs will
stick around for a while, whatever their goal. One senior economist at Capital Economics speculated that the
long-term play may be to “repeatedly extend the ‘pause’ meaning that this will
end up looking a lot like the 10% universal tariff that he campaigned on,” in
exchange for minor concessions from other countries. The Washington Post reports, based on interviews with
people involved in or briefed on trade talks, that sought-after concessions
include “more natural gas purchases from American firms,” “fewer tariffs on
U.S. exports,” and “lower taxes on Silicon Valley tech giants.”
If this were all to restore America’s place in the global
economic pecking order, that would be one thing. But, as Rich Lowry writes — reinforcing once more the question of
what the shock is meant to achieve — “we’ve been outpacing the rest of the
advanced world since the early 1990s.”
The normal impulse is to want to
change the rules in the middle of the game when you are losing, not when you
are winning. . . . Here, Trump is using a defibrillator on a patient who not
only passed a stress test with flying colors but is beating everyone else in
the 100-yard dash.
Unless and until Congress reclaims the authority to set these policies, Trump alone
wields the paddles.
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