Trump Always Wanted a Trade War—and Now He’s Got Several
The president’s seemingly arbitrary punishment of countries with wildly different practices suggests he was never much interested in negotiating.
When President Donald Trump announced Friday that he would slap billions of dollars’ worth of tariffs on certain Chinese goods, he opened up another front in what’s becoming a global trade war—one whose main aggressor is the United States. And the variety of Trump’s targets, starting with U.S. allies whose trade policies resemble those of the United States, and continuing with China, which is almost universally acknowledged to engage in unfair competitive practices, proves there’s something more going on here than a simple desire to punish bad actors and negotiate fairer deals. If that were the goal, China would not
