U.S. President Donald Trump famously tweeted during his first term, “Trade wars are good, and easy to win.” But the record of the trade war that Trump started with his so-called Liberation Day tariffs in early April suggests that things are a bit more complicated.
In an essay for Foreign Affairs appropriately titled, “Trade Wars Are Easy to Lose,” the economist Adam Posen argues that the United States has a weaker hand than the Trump administration believes. That’s especially true when it comes to China, the world’s second-largest economy and perhaps the real target of Trump’s trade offensive. “It is China that has escalation dominance in this trade war,” Posen writes. “Washington, not Beijing, is betting all in on a losing hand.”
Dan Kurtz-Phelan spoke to Posen, who is president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, on June 9 about the short- and long-term effects of Trump’s tariffs and the economic uncertainty they’ve caused, about what it would take to constructively remake the global economy, and about the growing risks to the United States’ economic position at an especially dangerous time.
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