- by William Briggs
- The Guardian
- Issue #2126
Donald Trump. Credit: open sources
The world is bracing itself for the coming war. No shot will be fired, at least not immediately. No troops will be paraded, but the incoming Trump administration has already declared war; trade war. The president-elect has announced that he will be imposing tariffs on all imported goods from all countries. He has declared war on the global economy, but has marked out China as enemy number one. It is a war to preserve US dominance and for the survival of a moribund capitalism.
China is to be hit with 60 per cent tariffs. There will be a response. The tsunami of economic devastation can only be imagined. Global GDP will shrink. Economies that are barely registering any signs of life will be stricken, and those who will suffer the most will be the working class.
The International Monetary Fund has predicted a global economic shrinkage in GDP terms of as much as 7 per cent if such a trade war globalises. Global recession, global depression is facing the world. In seeking to shore up US capital, global capitalism will be directly threatened.
Smaller, more subservient economies will be eager to show their vassal status in the hope that they might be spared the harsh rod of US economic policy. The Australian government and capitalist class are desperately trying to either accommodate themselves to US interests, or at least to calm the nerves of the public by downplaying the potential fallout.
Even if this wish were to be granted and Trump gave a loyal ally some ‘exemption’ from economic sanction, the Australian economy would still suffer significantly. China is Australia’s biggest trading partner. The big-hitters in terms of export dollars to China are in the extractive industries. If China’s economy should contract, then it would need less raw materials from Australia. Finding alternative customers for minerals, iron ore, and coal on the global market is fraught with difficulty.
China, as the prime target of the US ‘attack’, will almost inevitably counterattack. In all likelihood Beijing will impose sanctions of its own, thereby limiting US access to supply chains. Wang Dong, director of Peking University’s Institute for Global Cooperation and Understanding, made it clear that “this is a two-way process. China will of course try to engage with President Trump in whatever way, try to negotiate, but if, as happened in 2018, nothing can be achieved through talks and we have to fight, we will resolutely defend China’s rights and interests.”
What tends to get lost in the bourgeois media’s analysis of Trump and his economic policies is that most of the tariffs he originally put in place remained under Biden. Things will get a whole lot worse. This can be seen from the appointment of anti-China hawks to important economic, security, defence, and foreign policy roles.
Trump is fixated on an economic practice that is nationalist and entirely statist. The fact that economic nationalism is on the rise is a reaction to globalisation. Globalisation was an attempt by capital to find a way out of the destructive “tendency for the rate of profit to fall.” Once again Marx is proven correct. The waves that crash against the seawall of capitalism cannot be turned back.
Capitalism, as Marx described, is not simply crisis-riven but threatened with eventual breakdown. We are experiencing this and this drives the US to war with China. That war is fought on many fronts. Economics is one important battleground.
Trump and his presidency spell danger for the region. Biden, for his part, differed only by degrees. Biden too was introducing new tariffs on China, especially in the area of green technologies, so vital for the global economy and for the planet.
Billions of dollars in arms shipments, missiles, planes, and materiel have poured into Taiwan over the past 4 years. Biden repeatedly stated that he would intervene, militarily, in the event of ‘conflict’ in Taiwan. What we can expect is that this position will be maintained and worsened as Trump runs the line that the USA must come first and that there can be “peace through strength.”
The differences between the two administrations will be ‘proven’ by a string of analysts and commentators. This or that policy or decision might seem to be different, but the actual reasons, the motivations for the US drive to war, first economic but potentially in a more lethal form, will not have gone away.
The USA believes that it must confront, contain and roll-back China. A socialist China with a strong economic base is anathema to the USA. China must be contained in order for the USA to maintain supremacy, both ideologically, economically, and globally. Whether a Republican or Democrat occupies the White House does not change that primal world view.
That same world view, coupled with the reality that capitalism is coming inexorably to an end game, make trade war inevitable. And, as 19th century French economist and politician Claude-Frederic Bastiat once said, “if goods don’t cross borders, soldiers will.” He might also have said, ‘if you want peace, promote free trade.” But then capitalism does not want ‘peace.’ It wants domination and wars to feed the military industrial complex.
