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The 25% tariff taken on Thursday evening on $ 34 billion of Chinese goods exported to the United States and the reprisals, for an equal amount, ordered by President Xi Jinping go well beyond beyond the skirmish. Launching the world's two largest economies directly to an escalation that Trump has already announced could cover 10% tariffs on an additional 200 billion imports from China (probably in autumn) and later an additional 300 billion: this would be a total of punitive measures applied to all Chinese exports to America (from 505 billion).
If that happens, it will be a real trade war, which will last for months and perhaps years . But it will also be something more: the first real confrontation between the dominant power and the emerging power in the world. A confrontation on the economy as a means of regulating geopolitics: it is also on this basis that Trump's initiatives must be read.
Rights effective Thursday night have significant consequences on growth, but not dramatic: US and Chinese GDP growth will be 0.2-0.3%, according to the badysis of the company Oxford Economics. The muscles of the US economy are remarkable and can withstand the direct consequences of White House policy. Beijing may have more problems because its economy is very dependent on exports, which is why Trump thinks he has an advantage in the fight. The problem is that if confrontation becomes a war of duties at all levels, the destruction of entire pieces of global production chains will be a fact and the world will suffer: today the goods industries are integrated internationally and in this relations network United States and China occupy central positions.
And that seems to be a weak point in the US president's strategy (if a strategy). Its decisions find difficult answers in Beijing but also worry countries that have always been Washington's allies. Trump acts independently of Europe, Japan, Canada, Mexico and friends. Indeed, it also imposes and threatens commercial rates against them. More than an isolationist America, as some feared, that of today seems to be a lonely America, against everyone else. that Trump does not believe that the economic and political order that has been created in the last two decades, since China entered the world stage, is good for the United States. He wants to destroy them.
The fact that many rules and habits must be reformed is probably right . In fact, Beijing is said to be the champion of international standards, but it often has anti-competitive business practices. Moreover, at the very bottom, imaginable that the United States, the hegemonic power, are predisposed to a confrontation with China on whom will conceive the future world order. The great doubt that Washington will be able to cope with these challenges without allies, actually raising constant tensions with partners and enmities with almost every country.
The first consequences of a tariff war would be on Chinese and American consumers, who will see (and will already see in part) increase the prices of goods – imported goods but also those produced at the same time. inside – as if substantial taxes have been applied to them. A development in contradiction with the tax reduction made by Trump. And the consequences would have a large number of companies, at the head of the multinationals, who could see their models of supply, production and distribution destroyed. In a general battle, the political risks would not be less.
Between the two shores of the Atlantic, the conflict is already at extremely alarming levels and protectionism exacerbates: the end of the alliance between the United States and the United States. Europe would be the first step towards a new order or a new dangerous world order. Trade wars are a continuation of politics by other means: and in politics one can lose.
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