United States President Donald Trump’s tariff war against the rest of the world has sent stock markets into turmoil and prompted economists and governments to warn of impending global recession.
Trade wars can escalate into shooting wars. Trump’s naked gangsterism risks more military conflict, especially as he has raised tariffs on imports from China from 54% to 125%.
The brutal genocidal war that the US-Israeli war machine is waging on the Palestinian people also serves to terrorise people all around the world into obeying the imperialist gangsters.
Since the Barack Obama administration, the US has been beefing up its military bases surrounding and targeting China, including those in Australia, and used military pacts such as AUKUS and the Quad alliance to push regional governments into a new arms race.
Trump’s “Liberation Day” opening of his tariff war was justified to his supporters as an emergency response because the US had supposedly been “looted, pillaged, raped and plundered by nations near and far, both friend and foe alike”.
This is a bizarre inversion of reality.
The US is the world’s most exploiting nation, has the world’s biggest military with the most foreign military bases and, historically, is the biggest contributor to global warming.
The world’s majority has nothing to gain from escalating tariffs and counter-tariffs.
Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs hit the Global South countries the hardest. As Heather Stewart explained in the : “One of the most wilfully destructive aspects of Donald Trump’s shock and awe trade policy is the imposition of punitive tariffs on developing countries across Asia, including rates of 49% for Cambodia, 37% for Bangladesh, 48% for Laos.”
վٲԲɲ with a 46% tariff; Indonesian 32%; Taiwan 32%; and Malaysia 24%.
The US has imposed a 10% tariff on imports from Australia (only 6% of Australia’s total exports). The main economic effects in Australia will be indirect, through the impact of US tariffs on Australia’s major trading partners, China (32% of Australia’s exports) and Japan (12%), and on global economic growth.
Ironically, Trump’s tariff war might spark a global recession by sending the US into recession first, as some of the world’s biggest banks are warning. Even the billionaire fund manager and Trump supporter Bill Ackman urged Trump to allow a 90-day pause or risk losing business support — which Trump partially accepted on April 9 (maintaining a minimum 10% tariff on all countries while raising the tariff on China to 125%).
Ackman had on X on April 7: “If, on the other hand, on April 9th we launch economic nuclear war on every country in the world, business investment will grind to a halt, consumers will close their wallets and pocket books and we will severely damage our reputation with the rest of the world that will take years and potentially decades to rehabilitate.”
Other billionaires have been preparing to cash in on the stock market chaos. US billionaire Warren Buffet, who once famously quipped: “There's class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning”, has been selling off shares and building up a in preparation.
With $5–6 trillion in US stocks wiped out since Trump took office, billionaires who listened to warnings about the massively over-valued US share market, will be able to cash in on the crises by “buying cheap”.
But billionaire “winners” in an economic crisis only exist because the world’s working majority pay a terrible price for its eventual resolution.
Jobs are destroyed by the millions, people lose their homes and livelihoods and entire nations and communities are devastated.
As the Global Financial Crisis of 2007–09 showed, governments rushed in to bail out the banks, but hundreds of millions of working people suffered, became more indebted and insecure, and inequality sharply increased.
Right now the world’s governments and central banks are drawing up plans to again bail out the capitalist system in the event of a Trump-precipitated global economic crisis. They won’t be putting ordinary working people’s interests first.
A capitalist “solution” to the impending global economic crisis will also set back measures to respond to the climate emergency.
There was already a massive reduction in global funds for climate action after the COVID-19 pandemic, before Trump’s “drill-baby-drill” regime took office. Now, scientists we are at a frightening new phase.
A people- and environment-centered response to the Trump economic crisis means radically reprioritising spending away from the US-led arms spree towards urgent social and ecological needs.
Australia would be more secure in the Asia Pacific region if it were a good neighbour rather than being the deputy sheriff for US imperialism.
We need to replace the private superannuation scam — which gambles the forced savings of ordinary working people on stock markets — with a system of public-funded universal aged pensions.
Already, as has pointed out, tax concessions for superannuation cost the federal budget almost as much as the aged pension.
Finally, no progressive social reforms can be won and maintained if we do not have much stronger trade unions and other working-class organisations. In the 1970s, more than 50% of all workers were trade union members, but that figure has shrunk to 13%.
Labor Prime Ministers Bob Hawke and Paul Keating bear historic responsibility for weakening the only class capable of standing up to billionaire greed and power, through their Prices and Incomes Accord scam and the introduction of enterprise bargaining.
Anthony Albanese’s Labor has continued to attack workers’ rights with laws that allow elected union leaders to be sacked. The militant Construction Forestry Maritime and Employees Union has been placed under the control of unelected administrators. This fundamentally anti-democratic power can be used by any future government against the workers’ movement.
In this election, the only contesting parties committed to reversing this attack on working people are the , the and the . A strong vote for these parties will strengthen the struggle against the danger the billionaire class now poses to the world.
[Peter Boyle is member of the National Executive. He is running for .]