Is Donald Trump Winning the Tariff War?
Donald Trump’s tariffs may not amount to the end of neoliberalism. But their potential success — a sign that the neoliberal consensus is no longer hegemonic — suggests that the old world is dying, and the struggle over what replaces it has only just begun.
Donald Trump holds a chart as he delivers remarks on reciprocal tariffs during an event in the Rose Garden entitled “Make America Wealthy Again” in Washington, DC, on April 2, 2025. (Brendan Smialowski / AFP via Getty Images)
Donald Trump is winning the tariff war — sort of. Last spring, new Canadian prime minister and former central banker (and Goldman Sachs alum) Mark Carney declared that nearly a century of American-led global economic order was coming to an end. “The system of global trade anchored on the United States . . . is over,” Carney said, calling it both a “tragedy” and a “new reality.” Trump was remaking the global trading system, and the world was left to scramble.
As Trump levied tariffs on US trading partners one by one — demanding they strike individual deals with his administration if they wanted some relief from the duties — it was clear that Carney, the Davos man incarnate, had correctly assessed what was happening. Trump was indeed reshaping the global order, leveraging the last vestiges of American hegemony in a bid to rebalance trade and revive both legacy industries and newer ones that are wary of foreign competition, such as the auto industry. But even for the United States, it was a big lift.
Is Trump Winning?
On the one hand, Trump has “succeeded” with his tariffs. They’ve become the new normal and countries are lining up to strike deals, if they haven’t already. For the most part, the Republican base has “adjusted” its long-held beliefs, ditching the banker elite–inspired commitment to globalization, open trade between countries, and limitless flows of global finance. In its place, they’ve adopted a kind of protectionist nationalism that channels, if imperfectly, the mercantilist thinking of dead centuries past. They see, or at least pretend to see, a boundless American future rooted in domestic industrial renaissance and foreign acquiescence bordering on tribute.
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