Ian Welsh is right-on here.
Trump’s Negotiating Is Failing
Oh it may seem like a response to America’s decline, an attempt to reshore industry, withdraw from Imperial over-reach and so on. Superficially it looks like that, but he’s just picking too many fights all once, his tariff threats are incoherent and unplanned, he’s defunding research and forcing brilliant scientists and engineers and scholars out of the US, has no industrial policy worth speaking of and is destroying America’s governing capacity with capricious cuts to the federal bureaucracy.
More to the point, he’s giving everyone else reason to route around America like it’s damage: to stop using the US dollar, to move to using local currencies for trade and to stop buying American goods and services, and yes, to stop selling to the US. The smart move, and it’s going to happen if he keeps this up, will be stop enforcing US intellectual property, end the DMCA clones and the prohibition on breaking digital locks, and to stop paying American internet giants their usurious fees.
The US isn’t agreement capable: you can’t trust them to keep their deals. This was true before Trump, but he’s super-charged them. Iran is right to say “well, we’ll talk after you keep the last deal we signed with you” and everyone else is coming to the same conclusion. If he won’t keep America’s deals, or even his own (the USMCA trade deal with Mexico and Canada is his) what’s the point of even talking? Just stop doing business with the US, period.
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