{"text":[[{"start":9.64,"text":"Donald Trump came into office as the self-styled “Tariff Man” superhero who would tear apart global trade and refashion it under the muscular doctrine of America First. He seems likely instead to be remembered as the supervillain “Epic Fury”, who set the Middle East ablaze and endangered worldwide prosperity and the US’s standing with it."}],[{"start":34.33,"text":"A year on from his supposed “liberation day”, which imposed sweeping tariffs across the board, Trump has certainly delivered a rupture from the multilateral system which came before. But rather than regressing to the protectionism of the 1930s — not least because other countries have declined to join in — he seems to have stumbled back only to the early years of President Richard Nixon."}],[{"start":59.51,"text":"The troubles with Trump’s tariff offensive could have been predicted (and were, by some) before they began. He has multiple, often contradictory, objectives — eight by my count — and the US is simply not big enough in global trade to have the leverage to achieve them. Even before the Supreme Court ruled his use of emergency tariffs illegal in February, Trump had backed off at key moments because of pressures domestic (preserving car supply chains with Canada and Mexico) and international (China’s use of rare earths blackmail to force him to back down)."}],[{"start":null,"text":"
"}],[{"start":97.99,"text":"Nixon similarly started off in the late 1960s with a campaign of aggressive protectionism, in his case so-called “voluntary export restraints” from trading partners on steel and textiles. Like Trump, he used alliances as leverage, threatening to delay the return to Japan of the island Okinawa, occupied by the US since the second world war, unless Tokyo agreed to such quotas. In 1971, Nixon imposed a temporary 10 per cent across-the-board import “surcharge” while smashing apart the Bretton Woods fixed exchange rate system. As it happens, Nixon used the Trading With the Enemy Act, the forerunner of the international emergency legislation employed by Trump for his “liberation day” tariffs."}],[{"start":147.51999999999998,"text":"A year on from Trump’s “liberation day”, his retreats mean the effective average tariff rate has also settled at only around 10 per cent. There are other parallels. Like Nixon, who had to deal with the Arab oil embargo of 1973, Trump is facing inflationary pressure from a massive oil shock in the Middle East, though in Trump’s case of his own making. And like the increasing pressure on Nixon from the Watergate scandal, Trump’s popularity is being undermined partly by his handling of the Jeffrey Epstein affair and the files detailing the activities of the late sexual predator. "}],[{"start":187.29999999999998,"text":"These pressures led to Nixon’s aggressive protectionism running out of steam in the early 1970s. Today, my bet is that we passed peak Trump tariff last October when he backed down in the face of China, and the economic and financial market context since then has only made a trade war riskier."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":208.74999999999997,"text":"Doug Irwin at Dartmouth College, perhaps the foremost economic historian of US trade policy, told me: “Just as Nixon was confronting slower growth and higher inflation in the early 1970s, so is Trump today, and that does not make for a good environment for making tariff threats every few weeks. Every administration, it seems, has to settle on a policy at some point and move on to other things.” "}],[{"start":236.48999999999998,"text":"Once Trump’s reconstruction of his tariff wall is done, Irwin said, “perhaps the trade front will be calmer and more settled in 2026 and 2027 than in 2025 — just as the trade situation was much calmer in 1973 and 1974 than in 1970 or 1971.”"}],[{"start":258.43,"text":"This, however, is the point at which the narratives will almost certainly diverge. Nixon pivoted towards trade liberalisation, persuading Congress to pass the Trade Act of 1974 which gave the administration a freer hand to negotiate deals and put them to Congress for ratification. This enabled the US to participate in a new round of global trade talks launched in 1973."}],[{"start":285.81,"text":"Trump, by contrast, retains a horror of multilateralism: the US harshly criticised the WTO after the organisation’s failed ministerial meeting last weekend. His administration says it will try to manage trade with China by negotiating sales bilaterally rather than turning towards open trade governed by a set of global rules."}],[{"start":308.8,"text":"Two Republican presidents who started with a somewhat similar attitude to trade both hit the real-world limits of fighting a trade war. Yet it’s revealing how toxic the US attitude to trade has become that the 1970s original shifted towards liberalisation bounded by agreements, while the 2020s redux continues to regard open and rules-based trade with unremitting hostility. It’s not often that historians look back to Nixon’s presidency with nostalgia, but his legacy seems like a golden era of multilateral openness compared with the destructive economic nationalism of Trump."}],[{"start":359.32000000000005,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1775179573_9772.mp3"}