Trump’s steel and alluminum tariffs are scheduled to go into effect around 24 March, and Europe’s getting angry about it. The European Parliament has come out swinging, exploring options from “appealing to the WTO” to a “full-out trade war”.
Look, we probably know what Trump will do on tariffs. He’ll make grandiose and ridiculous claims and threats, back off, and then take credit for fixing a non-existent problem. That’s his go-to move, because all parts of that move focus attention upon himself without actually causing a crisis that could reflect badly upon him.
For example, in Pennsylvania, he said that “a lot of steel mills are opening up… steel is back, and aluminum is back.” But the tariffs have yet to go into effect. It’s what he did with NATO, when he dismissed the alliance as “obsolete” and, in return for a few vague maybe-sorta assurances of reform, declared, “It’s no longer obsolete.” Heck, his whole campaign schtick was saying, preposterously, that America was broken. Going into 2020, he’ll say, preposterously, that he fixed it. The new campaign slogan, we also learned in Pennsylvania, will be “Keep America Great”.
Here’s what Europe should remember about Trump. It’s all a show, and everything he says is bluster. When it comes to concrete policymaking, he seems deeply ambivalent about, and even terrified of, doing anything that could have real-world consequences. The only true ‘accomplishment’ of his administration was tax reform, and that was done almost entirely by Congress. In nearly every other area — with the important exception of climate change — he’s either deferred hard decisions (the Iran deal), or pushed them onto other institutions (dreamers, gun control, others). On some visceral level, he seems to understand that actually doing anything could only harm him.
Even his much-Trumpeted and increasingly hazy decision to meet with Kim Jong-un was, in this light, less a bold decision than a way of buying time. With his militaristic rhetoric, he had given himself only one pair of options: launch a strike, or back down. Talking is a way for him to avoid that decision.
So I’m not convinced that Trump wants a trade war. Such an event would explode the myth of his deal-making prowess. What he does want is what would be, for him, a deeply gratifying spectacle: Europe kneeling at his feet to beg for the tariff exemptions that he, as a capricious but pitying tyrant, would grant. If Europe can stomach that charade, and Trump’s preening after the fact, then the feared trade war will probably turn out to be a ghost war. After all, Trump prefers fighting with imaginary enemies that he conjures himself.