Global South President's Favourite Tactic Creates an Axis of Resistance

As nations in the global south intensify their discussions on how to respond to Donald Trump's trade war, the early 20th-century British advocate of tariffs Joseph Chamberlain may hold some lessons.

- Patrick Wintour

Like Trump, Chamberlain viewed tariffs as a cure-all and believed imperial preference – the system of preferential rates with the British Empire – could not only advance national self-interest but act as glue binding the British colonial alliance together.

Chamberlain's son Austen argued that through "this mutual trade we can strengthen our common interest, we can spin a web ever increasing in strength between every portion of the empire and we can make our interests so inseparable that when days of stress and trial come, no man can think of separation and no man can dream of breaking bonds so intimate and so advantageous to all whom it concerns".

Trump, by contrast, did not initially seem to regard tariffs as a means to nurture any alliance. Quite the opposite – they became a raw reassertion of US economic dominance, designed to redress the US historic trade imbalances.

For the most part it appears to have worked, to the extent he has been able to pick off vulnerable US-dependent economies, forcing them to lower their tariffs or make vague pledges to invest in the US economy. But in the past few months Trump's tactics are starting to produce a discernible political counter-reaction.

It is premature to claim tariffs are leading to a full-scale political realignment, but the resistance shown in recent weeks by the leaders of Brazil, Russia, India and China, suggests how Trump's tariffs might in the medium term backfire, creating an axis of resistance based on the belief that it is possible to bypass the power the US economy gives the president.