by Matt Agorist, The Free Thought Project:
(The Libertarian Institute) The incoming Donald Trump administration seems determined to wage as many economic wars as it can. The president-elect reportedly plans to pursue another “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran with the goal of “bankrupting” the country. Now he is threatening new trade wars with Mexico, Canada, and China at the beginning of his second term. Trump has favored using broad sanctions and tariffs as weapons to try to force other states to give in to American demands, and coercion seems to be the only approach that he understands. As one Trump foreign policy adviser said to The Wall Street Journal, “His whole worldview is maximum pressure, it’s that simple.”
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Economic wars can be just as devastating as armed conflicts in some respects, and sometimes they can be worse. Broad sanctions strike the entire population and can cause widespread poverty and hunger. Economic warfare makes no distinction between the civilian population and their political leaders, and typically it is the weakest and most vulnerable people in a country that suffer most from this form of collective punishment. “Maximum pressure” campaigns in Venezuela, Iran, and North Korea have been responsible for depriving people of essential food and medicine by making it difficult or impossible to import needed goods or by destroying the people’s purchasing power and making goods prohibitively expensive.
Unlike states targeted by sanctions, the states targeted in trade wars have the means to fight back more directly. Trade wars do more immediate and obvious harm to the United States by needlessly increasing the costs for consumers and businesses. Like sanctions policies, trade wars penalize the poorest most of all and cause unnecessary hardship for everyone else. Far from putting American interests first, trade wars hurt American citizens first and then continue hurting them.
What all these policies have in common is that Trump is trying to compel other states to agree to maximalist or impossible demands on pain of severe economic punishment. Trump’s economic wars are not going to achieve anything except to impoverish more people. These wars are just another form of mindless “do-somethingism” where the government harms innocent people so that they can say that they are addressing a problem while doing nothing to resolve it.
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