이번주 시사영어 강의 기사 : 하버드大 교수가 보는 트럼프의 관세 정책

[조국현]

이번 주에는

트럼프의 관세 정책을 바라보는

하버드 대학교 교수의 강의를 들어보면서 영어훈련하겠습니다.

하버드大 교수다운 고급스러운 글을 감상하시죠.

[빨간색 부분은 강의 듣기 전에 먼저 고민해 보세요. 영어 고수가 되기 위한 훈련입니다]

[영어훈련 하면서 글쓴이의 논리를 감상하시면, 여러분의 논리력도 강해집니다]

Trump’s imaginary victories

By Jeffrey Frankel [Professor of capital formation and growth at Harvard University]

The torrent of far-out policy moves that Donald Trump has announced during the first month of his second presidency has left pundits struggling to find method to the madness.

Some say it is all a negotiating tactic: Trump starts by staking out an extreme position, so that he later has space to exchange “concessions” with the other party without giving up anything valuable. They point to Trump’s 1987 book, “The Art of the Deal,” which encourages readers to “do things that are bold or controversial” (though there is no guarantee Trump has even read the ghostwritten work).

This interpretation aligns with the common characterization of Trump as a “transactional” leader — one who makes deals that produce short-term benefits, without regard for longer-term considerations related to credibility, ethics, democracy or the rule of law. There’s just one problem: He has demonstrated far more reckless bluster and hasty reversals than strategic thinking.

This is certainly the case with tariffs — a tool that Trump views as a foolproof means of compelling other countries to bow to his will. On Feb. 24, he confirmed that 25 percent tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico would be “going forward on time, on schedule,” on March 4. Trump announced the tariffs soon after his inauguration, on Feb. 1, saying they would go into effect three days later. By the time Feb. 4 had arrived, however, he had postponed them for 30 days. So, will March 4 be the day of reckoning, with Canada or Mexico making major policy concessions or else facing the wrath of “Tariff Man”? Not very likely.

It is not just that the tariffs would violate the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which his first administration negotiated. This extreme step would be very damaging, for the US as well as the targeted economies.

Consider the auto industry, which is highly integrated across North America. In the short run, corporate strategies and investments in production facilities would be radically disrupted. In the long run, US auto companies would face significant efficiency losses — for example, because they could no longer source labor-intensive components cheaply from Mexico — which would undermine their global competitiveness.

Moreover, the concessions Trump asks from Canada and Mexico are not really in their power to deliver. For starters, he demands that they halt the flow of fentanyl into the US. But most of the fentanyl is brought in by US citizens, rather than migrants crossing the Mexican border, and very little comes from Canada.

In fact, we have now arrived at the non-method to Trump’s madness. First, he declares war, delighting his supporters, even though these declarations — such as his designs on Greenland, Panama or Canada — are so outrageous that they initially seem like a joke. He sticks with them, requiring a radical adjustment in expectations as the initial shock begins to wear off. But when the intrinsic unrealism becomes apparent after all, he kicks the can down the road and eventually declares victory, despite few real gains.

We have seen this before. During Trump’s first term, he insisted that the North American Free Trade Agreement (“The worst trade deal ever made”) be scrapped, and replaced with the USMCA (“The largest, fairest, most balanced trade agreement ever achieved”). But the differences between the two agreements were minor.

Trump 1.0 also included the use of tariffs to compel China to agree to an “historic trade deal,” dubbed "phase one," under which China committed to purchase $200 billion of additional US exports by the end of 2021. But those purchases never materialized.

And it is not just trade: Trump threatened in 2017 to “rain down fire and fury” on North Korea if it did not abandon its nuclear weapons program, and then acted like his 2018 meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un amounted to a major victory. In reality, the meeting was a US concession that North Korea’s leadership had long desired — and Kim went on to complete the development of long-range missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads.

In all three cases — the summit with North Korea in 2018, the USMCA in 2019 and phase one with China in 2020 — the original confrontational buildup and the resulting climactic “transaction” got a lot of public attention, but the ultimate failure to affect the course of events did not.

As Trump touts his nonachievements, the costs to the US — including damage to the international trading system, as well as to the US government’s credibility and America’s soft power and global leadership — pile up, to say nothing of the potentially catastrophic costs of strategic failures like the incipient rupture with Europe.

It is not that Trump has no real “victories.” He can destroy USAID, for example, because the domestic political constituency for international development assistance is small and weak. But the millions of people around the world who will suffer as a result will know whom to blame. Here, too, Trump’s success will cause outsize harm to America. This is not a strategy.