International Perspectives on the MAGA 2.0 Tariffs

In this first dossier edited by the Heatwave media collective, we present a series of short articles by communists from various countries about the local impacts of the second Trump administration's international policies — focusing specifically on the tariffs. We will publish about one of these articles per week and then compile them into a zine-type PDF for readers to print and distribute. This will also be mailed to subscribers as an insert to issue 2 of our magazine. Contributions are still rolling in, but at this point we plan to include pieces by Clearinghouse (Australia), Réalité (France and Italy), Chuang (China/international), Raffaele Sciortino (Italy), Marco Túlio Vieira, et al. (Brazil), and Jamie Merchant (U.S.). If you would like to submit a piece, send a draft (under 2,000 words) to heatwavemag@proton.me.

Below is our overview of the dossier, with questions for consideration.

Even before "Liberation Day," our social media feeds were awash with the speculation and drama of the second Trump administration. The exigencies of daily life make it difficult if not impossible to stay up-to-date on all the horrors and indignities. The list of disappearances, detentions, and deportations grows larger every day. Foreign policy, intelligence, and security fiascos mask the sheer violence of U.S. imperial ambitions. Elon Musk's DOGE has liberal elites, Democratic Party officials, trade unions, and nonprofit organizations scrambling for some kind of United Front.

Then, on April 2, 2025, Trump signed Executive Order 14257, an extensive set of global tariff policies that amounted to what he called a "declaration of economic independence" for the United States. The order imposed a minimum 10% tariff on all U.S. imports and implemented punitive, so-called "reciprocal" tariffs on some 60 nations deemed to be engaging in unfair trade practices. Impacting more than 100 countries, Trump's "Liberation Day" announcement was ostensibly intended to rectify the U.S.'s persistent trade deficit. With the stoke of a pen, he raised tariff rates to levels not seen in over a century. Global stock markets — already strained over the first few months of the administration — experienced sequences of panic selling. In the immediate aftermath of April 2, every major index plummeted, each new day bringing another fall. Crude oil prices and other commodity futures dropped precipitously. In that brief week, we witnessed the largest global market crash since 2020.

At Heatwave, we have taken pains to consider this recent flurry of events against the background of late 20th and early 21st century social conflict. Still, events proceed too rapidly to have the last word on the matter. The "national emergency" of American economic decline is decidedly a global matter. Today, economic nationalism and American revanchism are rattling the infrastructure of global capitalism, the imperial ordering of world production. The trade wars dominate every news cycle. Worst hit among the belligerents is China. Now several administrations old, the U.S.-China trade war escalated rapidly over the last couple months in an exchange of retaliatory tariffs. In the early weeks of maneuvering, the Trump administration raised the minimum tariff on Chinese imports to an astounding 145%.

Domestic fears of inflation have driven bouts of panic buying, as consumers worry over future price hikes and the prospect of recession. Across the planet, factories idle as manufacturers assess the impact on global supply chains. Auto manufacturers have ceased exports to the United States, while domestic factories have laid off thousands of workers. Despite this, UAW President Shawn Fain maintains support for the tariffs and holds out hope for the restoration of manufacturing employment. This perspective neglects the reality that achieving such a revival in the U.S. would mean devastating American living standards, unless markets can bear iPhones priced at $3,500 (if it were even technically possible to construct these monstrosities within a single country). Only then would labor costs be competitive with China and the newly industrializing economies of South and Southeast Asia within the orbit of Chinese capital — Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Indonesia, and Malaysia. Aggressive tariffs imposed on these manufacturing assembly exporters threaten to disrupt supply chains for leading firms like Apple, Foxconn, and Nike.

All of this seems bad for global capital. While many leftists take to social media to laugh at falling lines and mock MAGA tech bros, some of those very same Trump supporters and media personalities have become vocal detractors. Esteemed publications like the Financial Times have picked the policy apart in a desperate effort to suss out some kind of low cunning. It would be a mistake to read conspiratorial motivations into an administration that designed the same sort of tariff policy that is easily generated by ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, and other large language models. Certainly, at times Trump and many of his supporters seem confused on what tariffs even are, blinded as they are by the mirage of the Pax Americana. From this perspective, there doesn't appear to be a shrewd agenda from intelligent rightwing policy architects, but instead a vulgar populism by people who may have no idea what they're doing. At some levels of the administration, that is no doubt the case. But viewed from the more general perspective of U.S. imperial ambitions, the chaos need not be wholly calculated to be effective. Moreover, as several contributors here point out, the events as they have unfolded cleave quite closely to the course of action advocated by Stephen Miran, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, in Hudson Bay Capital's late 2024 whitepaper "A User's Guide to Restructuring the Global Trading System." In short, what matters is more function than form. Quite simply, in international trade and imperial architecture, blunt instruments sometimes work best. From this perspective, it matters not who designed the instrument or whether it can be mobilized for cross-purposes, but who is using it, when, and how. Thus, the repeated rollout and recoil of tariffs functions like a whip, intended if anything to discipline trading partners into renegotiating trade deals to bypass multilateral agreements and the transnational organizations that enforce them (e.g., the WTO). If it just so happens to weaken the dollar in the process, all the better for U.S. export competitiveness. In fact, Miran may have designs on just such an outcome, while hedging his bets that the position of the U.S. in the imperial structure of production is enough to maintain the dollar as reserve currency. Time will tell.

"Manufacturing" functions as ideological cover for MAGA, to be sure, but one that doesn't really align with the actual policy prescriptions of the administration. Nor does "manufacturing revival" explain the clearly punitive nature of 100+ reciprocal tariffs across the board. Sustaining these arrangements would very obviously be bad for American manufacturing over the course of Trump's reign. So as Trump raised the tariffs on Chinese exports yet again, he simultaneously backed off most of the reciprocal ones. Stocks rallied, as the economists say. By mid-May, even China returned to the negotiating table, as both nations agreed to roll back the tariffs imposed after "Liberation Day" to 10% for 90 days. Observers shake their heads at yet another round of madness. Consumers have little to celebrate. As of this writing, the average effective tariff rate in the U.S. is still nearly 18%. There may be glimmers of sanity in the apparent chaos. The administration's own language in press releases and executive orders reflects that the general interest was renegotiating trade relations all along. Did we really think a superficial ideological agenda would outweigh the stability of the economy? In this economy?

Lest we be caught in any illusions that Trump answers to his petit-bourgeois MAGA "base," for whom the tariffs may appear rational, even romantic, we must remember that Trumpism and far-right revanchism in general express the interests of particular factions of capital attempting to reassert control over a waning global order, dissolving and recrystallizing into new regional territorial production complexes. For any administration, the actual rollout of policies expresses these conflicting interests of actual capital and capitalists, imperial and "subimperial" alike. If they appear especially incoherent today it is only because Trump and his kind represent just such a discordant harmony of cross-class and interclass alliances, presented as a popular hegemony. The apparent paradox disappears if we reject the assumption that there is a singular "base" at all: today's hegemony is the expression of real disunity and fragmentation. Phil Neel calls this the "empire of chaos," following Samir Amin — a situation in which "hegemony is eroded in its very deployment, generating a complex confluence of chaotic competing interests as power is delegated to the peripheries." This decay is organic to capitalist hegemony itself. We might think of it as the madness of capitalist civilization, nakedly displayed as the system lurches from one crisis to another. It may thus behoove us to understand prescriptive remedies like tariffs not as some aberration brought on by the horrible orange man, essentially exogenous to the system of free trade and in direct contradiction with the interests of his constituency or even his own businesses, but endogenous to a system in which the social metabolism of the species exists only in partial fragments, as many competing capitals, currencies, and national accounts.

As communists, how do we negotiate these spasmodic disturbances in the planetary factory? We asked our contributors to consider the following lines of inquiry:

1. What has been the understanding of and response to Trump administration policies in the place where you live? How are governments responding? Workers' organizations? Political parties?

2. Are we witnessing American economic nationalism? Why and/or why not?

3. What key sectors and industries are affected in your area? How are workers in key sectors and industries affected?

4. The tariff gamble appears to be a part of a larger, underdetermined set of strategies of the Trump administration. Will the hold? Why or why not? Are these strategies as coherent or incoherent? Are they self-defeating?

5. To the extent that they persist, how might we expect the new tariff regime to reorder global production and trade relations? What sort of restructuring seems possible or likely under the current blight of global investment?

6. How do local and regional conditions influence and shape the response to this geoeconomic shift? What openings, if any, does the current turbulence present for communist partisans? What local and regional factors must communists take into consideration?

7. The unfolding chaotic markets and administrative gambles betray underlying problems of overproduction, weak profitability, and sluggish growth. How do we see the present situation in the short and longer terms?