One factor to consider is that Trump’s tariffs against the ROW is just what he is trying to achieve, and not just what he says, but increasingly what he does.
I think the U.S. response to Vietnam is a very useful and enlightening case study, since the Vietnamese basically caved immediately and offered basically unconditional surrender, but the Americans still slapped them in the face and told them that wasn’t good enough.
I think it would be too simplistic to just wave that away as give a bully an inch, or New York mafia tactics. Since especially in the case of Mafia tactics, the prevailing logic would be to reward the first to surrender so as to incentivise others to do the same.
The only scenario where Vietnam basically offering Trump everything he asked for and still getting rejected makes sense is if what Trump wants is so outrageous that even he does not dare to openly voice it.
I think we might all be both vastly overestimating the scope of Trump’s ambitions, yet also underestimating the scale of it.
Using the Vietnam case study, it would appear that totally re-writing the rules of international trade isn’t what Trump truly desires. He is basically forcing the Vietnamese into a trade war. This also aligns with the speed at which he is threatening to escalate his trade war with China.
This and the fact that he has imposed tariffs against the entire world, including on the poor innocent penguins! Makes me suspect that Trumps ultimate goal is to completely disconnect America from world trade as we know it. That is what we are underestimating, that he might wish to go so far.
As for the trillion dollar question of why, well I think there are two obvious rationals for Trump to think this way.
The first is his prevailing belief that world trade has been a net negative for America. That allies and adversaries alike have used world trade to suck America dry of jobs and money. This belief would have been reinforce by the result of his first trade war against China, where the most he has managed to achieve was to get some exporters to move manufacturing out of China and to Vietnam and Cambodia etc (which might also explain the venom Trump’s tariffs have reserved for those countries despite no obvious offence having been committed by them against America or Trump). I think that experience is why he basically went and attacked everyone, he knows he cannot achieve his stated aim to re-shoring manufacturing jobs back to the US if he is stuck play the game of whack-a-mole of chasing manufacturers across the globe. So by imposing tariffs against everyone, he thinks he can ensure factories have no chose but to return to the U.S.
The second rationale for him to go scorched earth against the whole world is the same reason Skynet launched nukes against the Russians in the Terminator universe - to trigger the retaliation that he is counting on to destroy his enemies at home.
Trump’s support base are farmers. They will loose business if America effectively no longer trades with the rest of the world, but people still got to eat, so there is a realistic bottom to how much they can fall. But much of the rest of the US economy, especially the democrat support bases, can basically disappear altogether without world trade and massive internal demand contractions as a result of a crippling economic depression.
Why would he want that you ask? In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king. No matter how badly America as a nation and people gets screwed over, if Trump and his family comes out relatively better off, then that’s a good outcome as far as Trump is concerned.
If Trump could nuke the economic support base of his rivals, then that makes it easier for him to seek out a 3rd term and basically become the first President-King of America.
