Political science uses anaemic jargon. The ‘Overton Window’ frames all topics that at any given moment are deemed to be politically respectable. It moves. However, since Trump’s inauguration on 20 January we need more robust imagery. Potus47 – Mr Trump – is the captain of an ice-bound ship and he has been dynamiting the pack ice to get it free. Sequenced, linked charges have been exploded to create open water leads. The shock waves have global importance.
Tariff threats were one stick of dynamite that detonated, particularly those levied on China to push back its gaming of the era of globalisation since the PRC was admitted to the WTO in 2001. There is no categorical case which shows that tariffs are unnatural and always bad and that free trade is, as Richard Cobden argued at the abolition of the Corn Laws in 1846, natural as ‘nature and nature’s God intended it to be.’
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