Trump's chaos spells disaster for US and opportunity for Europe

That we know for sure is that we don't know. And neither does Donald Trump, JD Vance, Scott Bessent, Marco Rubio, Peter Navarro or Howard Lutnick. The whiplash of policy shifts, empty "Liberation Day" threats followed by meek reversals, is not strategy it is confusion.

- Natale Labia

This is no "art of the deal"; it is chaos.

To imagine there is some "cunning plan" behind it all as Janan Ganesh wryly noted in the Financial Times by invoking Edmund Blackadder's hapless sidekick Baldrick - is either wishful thinking or a coping mechanism. What we are left with is uncertainty and if markets, investors and economies hate one thing unanimously, it is that.

Perhaps the most appalling part of this carnage is its utter futility. As part of his 2 April speech, Trump invited a retired autoworker to speak about Detroit's decline and how tariffs might revive it.

"I have watched plant after plant after plant in Detroit close. [The president's tariff] policies are going to bring product back into those underutilised plants... I can't wait to see what's happening three or four years down the road," he said.

But the idea that protectionism will bring back lost industry is not just naive, but fundamentally flawed. Tariffs don't breed globally competitive industries: they create inefficient, insulated ones. I did work on the Argentinian economy in the 2000s and yes, protectionist policies led to trade surpluses.

But they were not a result of strong exports they came from a collapse in imports. Non-resource exports barely moved. Protectionism hurt Argentina's competitiveness, leaving the economy stagnant and vulnerable. Instead of being able to choose between compelling alternatives, consumers were stuck with inferior, expensive, locally manufactured products.