Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Fix Global Trade

Donald Trump’s embrace of tariffs should come as no surprise. For decades, he has claimed that other countries are ripping Americans off—and promised to use tariffs to remake a global trade system that, in his view, has been deeply unfair to the United States. But almost no one anticipated a trade and tariff policy as extreme and erratic as the one the world has seen since Trump proclaimed “Liberation Day” at the beginning of April.

The sweeping tariffs on U.S. partners and rivals alike unleashed panic in the financial markets and in capitals across the world. Even a pause and negotiations on many of those tariffs has done little to assuage the concerns of foreign leaders, businesses, and consumers, who remain uncertain about the effects of the tariff regime, and the strategy behind it.

The economists Kimberly Clausing and Michael Pettis both agree that the global economic system was in need of an overhaul—but they disagree about what that overhaul would look like.

For a special two-part episode, Dan Kurtz-Phelan spoke with each of them about Trump’s signature economic policy. Clausing, a professor at UCLA, makes the case against Trump’s protectionism and sketches out a progressive blueprint for the global economy. And Pettis, a professor at Peking University in Beijing and a longtime skeptic of the free trade consensus, argues that this reckoning in global trade has been decades in the making—and considers what an alternative economic system could look like.

In these separate conversations, they discuss the state of the world economy, the logic behind Trump’s tariff gambit—and whether the U.S. president’s attempt to rewrite the rules will pay off.

You can find sources, transcripts, and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.