Notes

The crisis of internationalism. The world economy is in turmoil. U.S. President Donald Trump imposed stunning tariffs on most of America’s biggest trading partners, then paused them for 90 days, and then jacked them up on China to 145 percent. The values of U.S. stocks, government bonds, and the dollar all plummeted—as did stock markets around the world. The International Monetary Fund revised its forecast for U.S. GDP growth this year downward by a third. And then this week, Washington and Beijing agreed to a 90-day truce of sorts, with the U.S. reducing its tariffs from 145 percent to 30, while China cut its tariffs from 125 percent to 10. It seems the one thing certain right now, here as much as with anything in the world, is uncertainty.

As Martin Wolf puts it in The Signal, “We’re somewhere completely new. What we’re going through has never happened before in global trade policy.” It seems like Trump’s “reordering of global trade,” as Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick put it, couldn’t possibly be in sharper contrast to former President Joe Biden’s effort to renew American economic leadership; Trump is explicitly putting “America first,” while Biden’s National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said it was “flat wrong” to claim that “American leadership” meant “America alone.”

But just how radically is the new administration changing America’s approach to global trade?

—Gustav Jönsson