The Folly in Trump's History

The decline of manufacturing has more to do with automation and technological leaps than trade deficits

- RISHI RAJ

AT THE HEART of Donald Trump's economic vision, which centers around reciprocal tariffs, lies a desire to revive American manufacturing and reclaim jobs lost to globalization. His aim is to shield domestic industries and restore the industrial might of a bygone America. The idea is rooted in reciprocity, leveling the playing field against nations accused of unfair trade practices.

While critics have been pointing out the flaws in Trump's logic as well as economics, economic historian Niall Ferguson has offered a critique laced in a historical framework through a series of essays which perhaps describes the President's efforts as something like chasing a mirage. Drawing on his extensive study of empires, Ferguson has warned that Trump's tariffs risk dismantling the very foundations of American power, plunging the nation into economic turmoil and geopolitical isolation rather than greatness.

Ferguson's analysis, which is steeped in the history of imperial rise and fall, has cast Trump's tariffs as a reckless assault on Pax Americana—the US-led global order that has defined the post-World War II era. In his essays, he has compared the policy to smashing a laptop with a "Minecraft hammer," a crude tool ill-suited to the intricacies of global trade. For eight decades, the US' empire thrived on economic interdependence, with it being the guarantor of free markets and global stability. Ferguson has pointed out that tariffs are a "wild decolonization," which are unraveling the networks that sustained US hegemony. Far from reviving manufacturing, they threaten to erode the prosperity and influence that globalism, for all its faults, has delivered.