Tariff blades and sharp edges

The cat is out of the bag. Tariffs are not economic tools; they are political weapons of mass destruction to bludgeon countries around the world.

- ANITA PRATAP

This is President Donald Trump's way of using brute force to assert American supremacy. For months now, world leaders swallowed the excuse that the US had the right to raise tariffs to offset its trade deficit. But the cat snarled out of the bag when Trump slammed 50 per cent tariffs on Brazil, even though the US enjoys a $7.4 billion trade surplus with South America's biggest economy. He revealed his real motive when he said on "Truth Social" that he was imposing tariffs on Brazil for the "witch-hunt" trial against his Brazilian Buddy—Jair Bolsonaro, the rightwing, populist former president, nicknamed "Trump of the Tropics".

So how is this going down in the tropics? Not well. Our late prime minister Morarji Desai once told me, "Never underestimate the defiance of a small country against the coercion of a big country." He was referring to the Indian subcontinent dynamics. Brazil is big, but much smaller than the US, economically and militarily. The Desai formula still works—coercion meets defiance in the tropics.