Barackface: 19: China, India

The Convergence Age: Ten Forces Reshaping Humanity’s Future
Kalkiism: The Economic And Spiritual Blueprint For An Age Of Abundance
The Last Age: Lord Kalki, Prophecy, and the Final War for Peace
The Protocol of Greatness (novel)
A Reorganized UN: Built From Ground Up
The Drum Report: Markets, Tariffs, and the Man in the Basement (novel)
World War III Is Unnecessary
Grounded Greatness: The Case For Smart Surface Transit In Future Cities
The Garden Of Last Debates (novel)
Deported (novel)
Empty Country (novel)
Trump’s Default: The Mist Of Empire (novel)

The 20% Growth Revolution: Nepal’s Path to Prosperity Through Kalkiism
Rethinking Trade: A Blueprint for a Just and Thriving Global Economy
The $500 Billion Pivot: How the India-US Alliance Can Reshape Global Trade
Trump’s Trade War
Peace For Taiwan Is Possible
Formula For Peace In Ukraine
A 2T Cut
Are We Frozen in Time?: Tech Progress, Social Stagnation
The Last Age of War, The First Age of Peace: Lord Kalki, Prophecies, and the Path to Global Redemption
AOC 2028: : The Future of American Progressivism

Opinion: Trump’s trade ‘deals’ are economically self-defeating and a geopolitical failure

Opinion: Trump’s trade ‘deals’ are economically self-defeating and a geopolitical failure To President Trump’s supporters, the one-sided trade “deals” negotiated with the United Kingdom, Japan and most recently the European Union may seem like victories. They may seem like a vindication of the president’s supposed street-savvy negotiating style. ..........

In reality, they are self-defeating in their economics and harmful to America’s alliances.

......... At the risk of stating the obvious, the three “deals” are not trade agreements in any meaningful sense. They lack the legal weight that foreign trade agreements carry. Nor do they entail a liberalization of trade — rather, they ratify America’s imposition of new tariff barriers against some of its closest allies, while also extracting concessions from these nations under threat of even higher tariffs. .......... Because tariffs are effectively taxes on Americans, the U.S. economy and consumers are the first and foremost losers of these new “deals,” especially in sectors where imports from the three partner economies serve as inputs into U.S. economic activity. The BMW plant in Spartanburg, S.C., to cite just one example, uses a lot of EU-made components; barring special, yet-unannounced carve-outs, its production has just become less competitive. Jobs will be lost, just as they were lost in the aftermath of Trump’s first-term steel and aluminum tariffs across industries that rely on those metals. ........... the U.S. had real friends — at least until now. Europeans, the Japanese, or the Koreans have generally hoped for our leadership, comfortable in the knowledge that our decisions will be informed, at the very least, by a basic sense of decency. .........
Trump is transforming a rules-based, voluntary system of international cooperation, imperfect as it was, into a system of quasi-colonial extortion.
.......... Canada and Mexico have learned that even a proper free trade agreement negotiated with a Trump administration and ratified by Congress offers little protection against new arbitrary tariffs. ......... The EU is essentially promising a large transfers of wealth to the U.S., in the form of future military and energy purchases as well as outbound investment, while acquiescing to being subjected to a trade policy that would have been essentially unthinkable a few months ago. ......... If the Trump administration were purposefully trying to peel the EU, the U.K. and Japan away from America’s system of alliances, it would be hard-pressed to find a more surefire method than these deals. They put to rest a benevolent vision of America that has underpinned our soft power worldwide for 80 years.