Donald Trump is teaching the world a lesson, but not the one he thinks. The attack on Iran was meant to be a dazzling display of military supremacy. It has instead illuminated chinks in the US’s armour.
The US president’s formidable arsenal cannot summon up an insurrection from Iran’s tyrannised and leaderless opposition. It cannot force merchant ships to run a gauntlet of missile and drone attacks in the strait of Hormuz. The government in Tehran and the facts of geography that give it leverage over global trade are unchanged. Trump’s exasperation is showing. He urges tanker crews to “show some guts” by sailing into harm’s way. He calls on Nato members to provide naval chaperones and accuses them of cowardice and ingratitude for refusing. He comes across as peevish and flustered. Impotence is not a good look in a potentate.
The war has been a masterclass in strategic myopia in Washington. For the Iranian leadership, survival now counts as a kind of victory. For Benjamin Netanyahu, a friendlier regime in Iran was desirable, but a hostile one whose capacity to menace Israel has been reduced to rubble is an acceptable second-choice outcome. But that is not adequate compensation to Trump. He is burning dollars and haemorrhaging prestige every day that the Islamic Republic constricts the flow of oil and gas to the global economy.
American consumers will not be protected by their country’s status as an energy exporter. The prices they pay at the pump – and for pretty much everything else, given the ubiquity of hydrocarbon derivatives in manufacturing and agriculture – track the global oil market. Trump’s boasts of defeating inflation, already unconvincing to many voters, could soon sound downright insulting.
This is a lesson in more than military miscalculation. It was no secret that Iran could menace shipping in the strait of Hormuz. Intelligence agencies presumed it was on page one of Tehran’s retaliatory playbook. This is why previous administrations resisted the hawkish impulse to which the current president frivolously succumbed.
The essential difference is that Trump seems not to believe in economic interdependence. He has surely heard of supply chains. He must have come across input costs from his days as a property developer. But those are flimsy things compared with Tomahawk missiles and nuclear-powered submarines. He is used to operating in environments where his will, backed by threats of overwhelming force, can move any obstacle. He also has a zero-sum view of relationships, which precludes any recognition of mutual advantage. He measures success in any negotiation by the degree of humiliation inflicted on the other side.
Those instincts find their ideological expression in the Maga doctrine that treats economic globalisation as a conspiracy against US interests. In that analysis, the era of booming American prosperity and unrivalled international hegemony after the cold war was, in fact, a scam. Foreigners undercut domestic industry with their cheap exports. Treasonous politicians let blue-collar jobs leak offshore.
It is true that the benefits of globalisation were unevenly distributed, creating
a receptive audience for nationalism and protectionism in places where manufacturing was hollowed out. The Maga message also resonated more widely, as nostalgia for a mythologised American golden age, a nation unpolluted by degenerate liberal mores and mandatory racial diversity. That fusion of economic and cultural grievance is the foundation of Trump’s electoral base. His cherished policy instrument for restoring national glory is the tariff. He has called it “the most beautiful word in the dictionary”.
The alchemy of the tariff is the way it supposedly raises revenue from foreigners, permitting tax cuts for Americans, while also restricting imports, facilitating a renaissance of domestic manufacturing. The problems are many. Tariffs do raise money, but as a tax on importers. It is US consumers who ultimately pay via higher prices. Also, the goals of raising revenue and blocking trade are contradictory. The tariff can’t earn money from goods that stop coming.
Those were just the theoretical flaws, before the policy was put into deranged practice on “Liberation Day”. Every country on Earth was targeted, using a crude algorithm of perceived trade imbalance that made no distinction between allies, rivals and penguins on uninhabited rocks in the sea. Markets recoiled. Trump was forced into a partial retreat. Since then, the US supreme court has ruled that the president’s claimed legal basis for imposing tariffs as a matter of “economic emergency” is unconstitutional. The White House is scrambling to reassemble its broken anti-import wall.
The main beneficiary of the whole mess has been China. Xi Jinping came to the tariff confrontation with an understanding of US resource vulnerability and how to weaponise relative advantage in the context of economic interdependence. It was a lesson learned in observation of the way the US has used dominance in financial systems and advanced technology to assert geopolitical primacy.
Beijing’s response to Liberation Day, alongside counter-tariffs, was a restriction on the export of rare-earth elements over which China has a near monopoly. These minerals are essential to some American civil and military industries. Trump blinked. A trade truce was declared.
Trump was due to visit Beijing later this month but Washington has asked for a postponement, citing demands on the president’s attention in the Middle East. The Chinese side will not be sorry to put off a summit for which the White House had failed to describe a purpose. Analysts say the normal levels of official groundwork expected for a major state visit have not been happening. Xi will gladly swerve the diplomatic hazards inherent in hosting an unprepared Trump, made insecure and tetchy by plans gone awry elsewhere.
The deferred trip is a subtle but significant sign of a US president adrift on global tides he thought he could command. Trump had listed China among the countries he thought might send warships to escort vessels through the strait of Hormuz. That was never going to happen. The very suggestion implies detachment from geopolitical reality.
The refusal of Nato leaders to put their navies at Trump’s disposal was perhaps less predictable. Mostly it reflects rational aversion to a military entanglement for which European public opinion has little enthusiasm. It also indicates growing readiness among US allies to say “no” to a president who takes “yes” as an admission of weakness and a provocation to make further demands.
Xi was quicker to grasp that lesson. The Chinese president is unencumbered by European notions of a relationship based on common democratic values. He also taught his US counterpart something in return: a remedial course of study in the facts of globalisation; how much leverage there is in control of natural resources; how even the mightiest superpower is not immune to the logic of economic interdependence. But Trump is a slow learner. He still hasn’t understood that Liberation Day proved the fallacy of “America First” as trade policy. So he tests the same doctrine to new depths of destruction in war.
