An Experiment in Recklessness: Trump as Global Disrupter

 

News Analysis

An Experiment in Recklessness: Trump as Global Disrupter

 

The global trading system is only one example of the administration tearing something apart, only to reveal that it has no plan for how to replace it.

 

David E. Sanger

By David E. Sanger

David E. Sanger has covered six presidencies and served as a Times foreign correspondent over more than four decades. He writes often on the revival of superpower conflict, the subject of his latest book.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/08/us/politics/trump-tariffs-global-trade-war.html

Published April 8, 2025

Updated April 9, 2025, 12:00 a.m. ET

 

As the breadth of the Trump revolution has spread across Washington in recent weeks, its most defining feature is a burn-it-down-first, figure-out-the-consequences-later recklessness. The costs of that approach are now becoming clear.

 

Administration officials knew the markets would dive and other nations would retaliate when President Trump announced his long-promised “reciprocal” tariffs. But when pressed, several senior officials conceded that they had spent only a few days considering how the economic earthquake might have second-order effects.

 

And officials have yet to describe the strategy for managing a global system of astounding complexity after the initial shock wears off, other than endless threats and negotiations between the leader of the world’s largest economy and everyone else.

 

Take the seemingly unmanaged escalation with China, the world’s second largest economy, and the only superpower capable of challenging the United States economically, technologically and militarily. By American and Chinese accounts, there was no substantive conversation between Mr. Trump and China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, or engagement among their senior aides, before the countries plunged toward a trade war.

 

Last Wednesday, Mr. Trump’s hastily devised formula for figuring out country-by-country tariffs came up with a 34 percent tax on all Chinese goods, everything from car parts to iPhones to much of what is on the shelves at Walmart and on Amazon’s app.

 

When Mr. Xi, predictably, matched that figure, Mr. Trump issued an ultimatum for him to reverse the decision in 24 hours — waving a red flag in front of a leader who would never want to appear to be backing down to Washington. On Wednesday, the tariff went to 104 percent, with no visible strategy for de-escalation.

 

If Mr. Trump does get into a trade war with China, he shouldn’t look for much help from America’s traditional allies — Japan, South Korea or the European Union — who together with the United States account for nearly half of the world economy. All of them were equally shocked, and while each is negotiating with Mr. Trump, they seem in no mood to help him manage China.

 

“Donald Trump has launched a global economic war without any allies,” the economist John Lipsky of the Atlantic Council wrote on Tuesday. “That is why — unlike previous economic crises in this century — there is no one coming to save the global economy if the situation starts to unravel.”

 

The global trading system is only one example of the Trump administration tearing something apart, only to reveal it has no plan for how to replace it.

 

State Department officials knew that eliminating the U.S. Agency for International Development, the nation’s premier aid agency, would inevitably cost lives. But when a devastating earthquake struck central Myanmar late last month and took down buildings as far away as Bangkok, officials scrambled to provide even a modicum of help — only to discover that the network of positioned aid, and the people and aircraft to distribute it, had been dismantled.

 

Having dismantled a system that had responded to major calamities before, they settled on sending a survey team of three employees to examine the wreckage and make recommendations. All three were terminated from their jobs even while they stood amid the ruins in the ancient city of Mandalay, Myanmar, trying to revive an American capability that the Department of Government Efficiency — really no department at all — had crippled.

 

Secretary of State Marco Rubio was unapologetic about the paltry American response when he talked to reporters on Friday: “There are a lot of other rich countries, they should also pitch in and help,” he said. “We’re going to continue to do our part, but it’s going to be balanced with all of the other interests we have as a country.”

 

After last month’s devastating earthquake in Myanmar, American officials scrambled to send help, only to discover that the system that responded to major calamities had been dismantled.Credit...Sai Aung Main/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Similarly, there was no plan for retrieving a Maryland man who was wrongfully deported to a notoriously dangerous Salvadoran prison, a move a judge called “wholly lawless” and an issue the Supreme Court is expected to take up in the next few days. A Justice Department lawyer in the case was placed on administrative leave, apparently for conceding that the man never should have been sent to the prison.

 

Mr. Trump has appeared mostly unmoved as the knock-on effects of his policies take shape. He has shrugged off the loss of $5 trillion in the value of the American markets in recent days. Aboard Air Force One on Sunday night, he said: “Sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something.”

 

In their public appearances, Mr. Trump’s aides have often contradicted each other, even on the rationale for imposing the tariffs. Peter Navarro, the most enthusiastic defender of the tariffs, has repeatedly described them as a new, permanent feature of America’s economic defenses.

 

“This is not a negotiation,” he wrote in The Financial Times. “For the U.S., it is a national emergency triggered by trade deficits caused by a rigged system.”

 

Like Mr. Trump, Mr. Navarro has made the case that tariffs will become a major source of government revenue, as they were in the 1890s, before the creation of the income tax. (Among the skeptics of Mr. Navarro’s analysis is Elon Musk, who is leading the Department of Government Efficiency and is the world’s richest man. He called Mr. Navarro “truly a moron” and “dumber than a sack of bricks” on social media.)

 

But if you listen to Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, who has looked pained as he has had to defend the tariff strategy, the taxes on imports are a negotiation tool. He said on Monday that he is overseeing such talks with Japan, which is the world’s No. 3 economy and the United States’ most critical ally in containing Chinese power. But it is unclear whether that negotiation is about tariffs, nontariff barriers or geopolitics.

 

(Clearly, there are exemptions to the tariffs for gaining geopolitical advantage. Kevin Hassett, one of Mr. Trump’s top economic advisers, said on ABC on Sunday: “There’s obviously an ongoing negotiation with Russia and Ukraine, and I think the president made the decision not to conflate the two issues.” Russia pays no tariffs under the president’s current system; Ukraine, the victim of Moscow’s 2022 invasion, pays 10 percent.)

 

Mr. Trump, never one to be pinned down on strategy, declared that all explanations for the purposes of his tariffs work for him. “They can both be true. There can be permanent tariffs and there can also be negotiations, because there are things we need beyond tariffs.”

 

What is missing, at least so far, is a vision of the future.

 

Mr. Trump’s aides insist the speed at which they are working is a feature, not a bug, of the system. Move too slowly, Mr. Musk has insisted, and the bureaucracy would dig in, never to be dislodged. “Nobody’s going to bat a thousand,” he said at the White House in February. “We will make mistakes. But we’ll act quickly to correct any mistakes.” He cited the restoration of some aid to contain Ebola, and the rehiring of workers at the National Nuclear Safety Administration who oversee nuclear weapons.

 

But it is impossible to move through the empty corridors of the Ronald Reagan Building — where U.S.A.I.D., the Environmental Protection Agency and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars all have been subject to DOGE mandates to fire many workers — without it becoming clear that there is little plan for dealing with the work left behind. U.S.A.I.D.’s doors are locked; the E.P.A. has stopped collecting some critical data; no one knows what is happening to the Wilson Center’s Cold War archive but its scholars are largely gone. Over at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, monitoring Russian and Chinese malware has taken a back seat to avoiding coming job cuts.

 

When the question of whether departments are looking beyond the budget line and thinking ahead to what happens when capabilities and expertise disappear gets asked, the answer is a tinge defensive. The Department of Health and Human Services has pulled back billions of dollars for monitoring Covid-19 and improving responses to future viral outbreaks. When asked, the department said: “The Covid-19 pandemic is over, and H.H.S. will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a nonexistent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago.”

 

All this suggests a failure to look around corners — which is hardly new in the American presidency. Herbert Hoover signed the Smoot-Hawley tariffs in June 1930, thinking they would help create jobs, then went fishing. They instead accelerated the Great Depression.

 

The White House insists this time the result will be the opposite. It is a huge bet, one on which not only Mr. Trump’s presidency but the fate of the global economy rests. And no one can predict where the bottom is for the markets, or where the top is for the escalation with China.

 

“The speed and chaos surrounding President Trump’s policy rollout have created extraordinary global economic disruption; nobody alive has ever witnessed self-induced volatility on this scale,” Ian Bremmer, the founder of the Eurasia Group, a consulting firm, wrote this week.

 

At the beginning of the year, the United States had the strongest economic position of any of the Group of 7 nations, he noted.

 

Now, he concluded, “President Trump has become the principal disrupter.”

 

David E. Sanger covers the Trump administration and a range of national security issues. He has been a Times journalist for more than four decades and has written four books on foreign policy and national security challenges.