By Atilio Boron on April 15, 2024 from Buenos Aires
Few in the United States have realized the momentous change that has taken place on the world geopolitical chessboard. Photo: AFP
There is much talk, and will be for a long time, about the “tariff war” unleashed by Donald Trump. And there is a risk that the issue will be reduced to the commercial aspect, to the balance of imports and exports between the United States and its trading partners. But it would be a serious mistake to limit the discussion to that point.
The initiative of the New York magnate is a last-ditch attempt; a clumsy, ill-conceived move that, due to its improvisation, advances and retreats, does not deserve to be called a “plan”. Listing the gross errors of Trump’s announcement and his incomprehensible improvisation, an expression of the capriciousness that presides over all this character’s actions, would take several pages.
Let’s just point out a couple: among the countries penalized by his tariff policy, now suspended for 90 days, are two small uninhabited volcanic islands: Heard and McDonald, located in a sector of Antarctica claimed by Australia. Or that it has also decided to “punish” Australia with a tariff increase, a country with which Washington has a trade surplus of 17.3 billion dollars! The same goes for other countries, including the Emirates, Belgium, Panama, and the United Kingdom.
How can such stupidity be explained? To punish economies with which the US has a favorable trade balance with tariffs? The answer was offered on April 10 by the usually circumspect New York Times columnist.
Thomas L. Friedman, when he began his article on such a phenomenal display of improvisation and ineptitude, said that “if you hire clowns, you should expect a circus. And, fellow Americans, we have hired a group of clowns. Think about what Trump; his chief imbecile, Howard Lutnick (the Secretary of Commerce); his imbecile deputy director, Scott Bessent (the Secretary of the Treasury); and his imbecile deputy director, Peter Navarro (the chief trade advisor), have repeatedly told us over the past few weeks … Trump will not back down on these tariffs.
But he gave in, he capitulated ignominiously, and he had to swallow his bluster. And China stood firm, determined not to let the United States walk all over it, and it has more than enough ammunition to make that country pay dearly for the stupidities of its president. Let’s say, before continuing, that there is a diffuse but real consensus that in the selection of his team of government officials: secretaries, advisers, advisors, Trump has allowed himself to do something that no serious head of state can do: prioritize personal loyalty over technical ability.
It is no coincidence, then, that Friedman calls them “clowns” or “imbeciles”. And that is why they can propose a tsunami of tariffs without rhyme or reason, ignoring, for example, that to build an iPhone you need parts, designs and components contributed by 43 countries, as a study done for the American network CNBC showed years ago.
But let’s suppose that Trump insists on his policy of calling on US companies to return home. Can the country replace China in its role as the planet’s industrial workshop, as the United Kingdom was in the 19th century?
According to figures from recent years, China is responsible for 31.6 percent of global manufacturing, followed by the US with 16 percent, and Japan and Germany with 5 percent each. Furthermore, if we take into account that only 14.1 percent of Chinese exports go to the United States while the remaining 85.9 percent go all over the world, it is obvious that the boasts of Trump and his boys can hardly harm the Chinese economy when almost half of its exports go to Asian countries.
The world has changed a lot, and Washington still hasn’t realized it. Political multipolarity rests on a solid economic polycentrism. Neoliberal globalization and the Washington Consensus not only impoverished the United States — something that has recently been denounced by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders — but also deindustrialized its economy.
It is estimated that since the 1980s the country has witnessed the disappearance of some 90,000 industrial companies. If in 1950 the manufacturing industry represented a quarter of the US GDP, today it does not even reach 10 percent. And its manufacturing workforce, which in the middle of the last century was over 30 percent of the total, in 2020 barely reached 8 percent.
In other words, for the United States to become an industrial powerhouse, it needs companies, which it doesn’t have; capital, which was deliberately diverted towards financial speculation rather than production, unlike in China; and a skilled workforce, which is in short supply in the United States. It should be noted that in the year 2000, the US and China graduated approximately the same number of engineering and computer science students: a figure close to 200,000.
But in 2020, China graduated 1,380,000, while the US remains stuck at the same figure as twenty years ago: 197,000. Contrary to what Trump and his inept and reactionary circle of advisors say, it is not that “China steals technology from the United States” but that in the Asian giant a project of more than forty years of heavy investment in scientific and technological training has matured, the opposite of what is being done now in Argentina.
One last piece of information, provided by the troubled Thomas L. Friedman on a recent trip to China: that country, he wrote, “has 39 universities with programs to train engineers and researchers in the rare earth industry. Most universities in the United States and Europe have only offered occasional courses.” And rare earths, materials that are increasingly strategic for today’s computing and, especially, in their military applications, have their largest deposits precisely in China.
To conclude: in the desperate attempt to restore an international system that has already changed definitively with the solid formation of a multipolar world, Washington’s current strategies will only serve to further reinforce the growing interrelationship between the countries of the Global South.
The world has been “de-Westernized”, as Emmanuel Todd warned early on, and the United States is struggling to reverse the march of history by appealing to force and tensing the rope with China, which it accuses of wanting to be the new world hegemon. Those who spread this nonsense have not yet realized that we are already in a post-hegemonic scenario.
China is already a great economic power, equal to or greater than the United States, and its effective diplomacy is enriched by an ancient practice; it is strengthening its investment in defense because it knows that Washington is preparing an attack, but it is not in the plans of its lucid leadership to replace the United States in the role it has played since the end of the Second World War.
They know that this is impossible as well as undesirable. To sustain the empire and slow the pace of its decline, Trump has now sent Congress a military budget that for the first time crosses the trillion-dollar barrier, that is, one million million dollars, necessary to sustain almost 200, 000 military personnel in more than 800 bases scattered across the planet and which have been of no use to them in preventing the international system from being reconfigured in a multipolar key.
Money that will do nothing to improve the competitiveness of its economy but will enrich the tycoons who today swarm around the White House. Few in the United States have realized the momentous change on the global geopolitical chessboard, to use Zbigniew Brzezinski’s felicitous expression; and none in the current Argentine government. That is why our rulers are betting on being a docile colony of the declining power instead of, together with other countries in the region, occupying a more productive place in the new world that has been born.
Therefore, in a gesture that speaks of a mediocrity in line with that which Thomas L. Friedman perceived in Trump’s entourage, here the government of Javier Milei rejected the invitation made to Argentina – to our country, not to its government – to join the BRICS, a coalition that already has significantly greater economic weight than the G-7. We will pay dearly for such a snub.
Source: Pagina 12, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English