by Marcus Breen
There is an unfortunate tendency to believe that warfare involves violence, guns, bloodshed and nationalism generated by stupid leaders intent on domination.
Thankfully, in non-violent warfare, only the last criterion applies to the tariff war imposed in the second week of March 2025. Then, President Trump introduced an excessive escalation of tariffs on the world, then reduced them all to 10 percent with the exception of China, before he then selected electronic devices for exception and so on.
The imprecision of the tariffs policy may appear to send the world into cloud cuckoo land. For China the “bone crunching” tariffs called for by Senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina, may have untold impacts, or over a period of a few years, little impact at all. Clearly, in all these matters, gazing into the future to assert any certainty is the pundits’ money spinner.
Free of capitalist ambition, the peace movement does not pursue our goals for money!
Curiously and could we say thankfully, the tariffs set at 145 per cent on Chinese products, may avert a hot war. For this, peace advocates should sleep easier.
Still, the Trump Administration seeks to discipline China as if it is a naughty child, too successful at its lessons. Stupid leadership is defined by the ill-informed behavior of one who cannot abide the smart plan. Given enough space and propaganda energy, the teacher, feeling powerless, reacts with a kind of jingoistic prejudice against a successful student, who is considered a rival for domination.
Trump is not new to tariffs. He proposed tariffs as a policy setting to resolve US economic and financial settings in 1986, when he took out a full page advertisement in the New York Times. Either a slow learner, or a fixated ideologue, surrounded by China haters and skeptics, he enacted his stupidity according to the capitalist theory that chaos combined with old ideas brings victory to the strongest.
China haters in the Administration like Peter Navarro and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant continue their incessant noisy complaints about China’s success. China analyst Shaun Rein (@shaunrein) noted about Bessant on X on 9 April: “An investment bank engaged me to advise Bessant on China’s economy and consumer trends… I took an instant dislike – Bessant is one of the most arrogant, and ignorant on China people I have ever met. He was uber bearish on China and was largely ideologically driven in his analysis.”
What Navarro and Bessant made of Thomas Friedman’s New York Times column of April 2, “I just saw the future. It was not America” one can imagine as mouth-foaming rage. Like poor losers, they encourage the stupid leader to follow a plan that is grounded in the simpler era of nineteenth century American history.
In those days, as some of our Chinese colleagues have reminded us, the US and its western colonial allies were combined in the Opium Trade to deny China its survival, sending it into desperate underdevelopment until the 1949 victory by the Communist Party of China.
As Thomas Friedman wrote in his column, China will continue to grow and prosper, and not because they watched the Star Trek television series and movies! China has a plan. And it is a long term plan with substance. Look at the White Paper issued as the tariffs against China escalated. Stunning in detail, calculating in approach, it offers a consistent theme: understand the real world of multipolarity and the rise of China aimed at winning for everyone: win-win.
In contrast, Trump’s US plan is one in which chaos is joined by a war-like mentality. For China haters, it is as if US-China relations are a football game that the US has to win, so that it can spend the next millennium running around going “nah-nah-na-nah-na!” while swimming in an unsustainable slop of consumer goods.
Or perhaps it is, as Corey Robin noted that: “Trump hates the rules-based international order. He loves the masculinity of manufacturing.” While really, the ultimate point, as Robin says is cruelty. Of which we should be in agreement – nothing about Trump’s tariff terror is meaningful unless it is considered against the stupidity of the cruel leader as reactionary mobilizer.
What is he mobilizing? The answer to this question is complex, with answers defined in line with the cruelty of America First, in which US workers who voted for Trump were offered improved living conditions. The cruelty will be in the failure of such promises.
Other matters will continue to play out. As the Financial Times journalist Simon Mundy wrote at the end of the first week of US tariff terror: “It’s impossible to predict the next twists and turns in the tariff war that Donald Trump has unleashed between the US and China. But it feels very much like we are living through a major structural shift in the global economy…”
Actually, there is nothing really new. Well before the tariffs, a “major structural shift” was under way. China was already well advanced in overcoming the under development that had been thrust upon it when 90 million Chinese were intentionally addicted to Opium, followed by the racist Opium War, which denigrated them further.
Trump’s action focused the entire planet on his economic efforts to change the character of the relationship between China and the US. A war-like barrage of trade settings, arbitrarily imposed on China has a deeply limited capacity, despite the cruel ideology of Trump and the Republican’s America First policy program. The limits are that the US is not China’s only trading partner. Yes, it is its biggest, but the world is already engaged elsewhere through China’s Belt and Road initiative.
As the structural shift plays out, the new normal may look like an arrangement in which China trades less with the US, and the US realizes its place as one of several great powers. It is sure to be a safer, happier world without war, of which neither hot nor cold has a place in human development.
Dr Marcus Breen was born in Melbourne, Australia and educated at The University of Queensland, The Australian National University and Victoria University, Melbourne. Since 2014 he has been a full-time faculty member of the Communication Department at Boston College. He is convening a MAPA group calling for No War with China/