- by Anna Pha
- The Guardian
- Issue #2141
Photo: US Government
Trump is a performer. He knows how to whip up a crowd and win over a large section of the working class contrary to their interests. It’s easy to see him as just thoughtless, shooting from the hip. The policies being introduced by his administration have a solid ideological and political foundation, inherently dangerous and with no guarantee of success.
It must be stressed that the tariffs and other policies are not Trump’s ideas. They are drawn straight from the playbook of the Heritage Foundation – an ultra-conservative US think tank.
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 was compiled in collaboration with a broad coalition of over 100 conservative organisations as a Presidential Transition Project for the first 180 days of a future Trump administration.
The chapter headed the “Case for Fair Trade,” states: “The United States of America is the world’s dominant superpower and remains the world’s arsenal of democracy. To maintain that global positioning – and thereby best protect the homeland and our own democratic institutions – it is critical that the United States strengthen its manufacturing and defence industrial base at the same time that it increases the reliability and resilience of its globally dispersed supply chains. That will necessarily require the onshoring of a significant portion of production currently offshored by American multinational corporations.”
“In turn, this unfair and nonreciprocal trade has resulted in chronic US trade deficits with much of the rest of the world. This systemic trade imbalance serves as a brake and bridle on both GDP growth and real wages in the American economy while encumbering the US with significant foreign debt.”
It continues, claiming, “Both the unfair, unbalanced, and nonreciprocal trade institutionalised by the WTO and Communist China’s economic aggression are weakening America’s manufacturing and defence industrial base …”
The US’s foreign debt peaked at around US$8 trillion (AU$12.7tr) with China and Japan holding the most. Since World War II the US dollar has acted as the reserve currency in international trading which the US has manipulated to prop up its own economy. That role is under threat as the BRICS group of countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) and other nations increasingly trade with each other in their own currencies: BRICS is also developing a blockchain-based independent payments system.
To bring US corporations back from overseas to the US is one of the aims of the tariffs. The hoped-for attraction being larger profits without tariffs. This is simplistic. There are other costs such as labour, energy, etc, that could be higher in the USA. Some products just can’t be made in the US, others would take decades and cost a fortune to start making.
TARGETING CHINA
“In light of Communist China’s broader geopolitical and military agenda, the American President who takes office in January 2025 must view the US–China trade relationship and associated policy reforms within the context of the broader existential threat posed by Communist China.”
China’s ‘crime,’ that it “unabashedly seeks to supplant America as the world’s dominant economic and military power is not in dispute. Rather, it is a prominent feature of Communist Chinese dictator Xi Jinping’s rhetoric. Xi has promised that the deed will be done by 2049, the 100-year anniversary of the Communist takeover of the mainland.”
The Project’s main aim is a unipolar world under US hegemony with the US dollar as the reserve currency.
The US is a global power in decline in a world that is transitioning from a unipolar, post-Soviet one with the US at its helm to a multi-polar one with China and the Global South on the ascendency. China has made it clear that it does not want to be the new global boss power. ‘A shared future for mankind’ is more than just a slogan.
Project 2025 sees Russian use of exports as “a weapon of war” as proof that the US needs tariffs and ‘onshoring.’
The US had a trade deficit of more than US$750 billion in 2024. US$270.4b of that was with China, US$157.2b with Mexico, and US$133.1b with Vietnam.
For the Heritage Foundation, trade deficits are a measure of “the large amounts of America’s manufacturing and defence industrial base and supply chains that have been offshored to foreign lands.”
Project 2025 treats Chinese international students as an army of spies: “Every year, more than 300,000 Communist Chinese nationals attend US universities or are hired at US national laboratories, innovation centres, incubators, and think tanks. To put this in perspective, according to the Chinese Ministry of Education, only 20,000 American nationals were studying abroad at Chinese universities on the mainland in 2018.”
These Chinese nationals now account for approximately one-third of foreign university and college students in the United States and about 25 per cent of graduate students specialising in science, technology, engineering, or maths (STEM)
“As a result, Chinese science and engineering students frequently master technologies that later become critical to key military systems, amounting over time to unintentional violations of US export control laws.”
For Heritage, the US dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency is crucial, facilitating low-cost borrowing, effective sanctions, and trade dominance. Tariffs attempt reinforce this by tackling the trade deficit and financing sovereign initiatives, yet BRICS’ de-dollarisation efforts – promoting alternative currencies – threaten the US dollar’s foundation.
Tariffs are a bid to preserve economic power; losing dollar hegemony would render this approach unviable.
Ironically, in driving other nations into cooperation, the tariffs Project 2025 encourages could make the USA less important to the rest of the world.
