TWO MOVES made by US President Donald Trump in the last few days will increase pressure on the world economy. They seem designed to boost the US economy before the mid-term elections, but are unlikely to do so.

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US bombs Iran, killing civilians

•First, he resumed bombing Iran. (Everyone seems to call them “air strikes” now, but whether you are dropping a bomb or firing a missile, the result is the same.) Trump has previously said that Iran’s military capabilities have been annihilated – but Iran is still firing missiles and drones at other Gulf states (which they term “US bases”). Amazing what you can do with an annihilated military capability.

Trump is a man who doesn’t learn from past mistakes. He bombed Iran and claimed he had defeated it. He couldn’t negotiate a peace settlement, so he claimed that a flimsy, minimal Memorandum of Understanding was a ceasefire. And then he bombed bits of Iran, in a “start-fire”. Iran said Israel agreed not to attach Hezbollah in Lebanon as part of the Memorandum, and then Israel bombed Lebanon again.

All along, Trump had to decide whether to go for a negotiated settlement or to escalate military action. He was strongly advised to negotiate. He went along with that and agreed a Memorandum that was never going to work – and reverted to escalation as soon as he could claim that the collapse of he Memorandum proved hat negotiation hadn’t worked.

Now Trump is locked into bombing Iran every night: civilian and commercial infrastructure in the main. His language is getting more and more violent. Iran hasn’t capitulated yet.

The USA is actually running out of missiles. Trump and the war are both losing popularity in domestic opinion polls – as the mid-term elections get ever closer. The only solution Trump has come up with is to warn that the elections will not be reliable, because China will hack them. Sure.  And I’m the Sugar Plum Fairy.

The US renewed military action has led death, injury and hardship for the Iranian people. It has also led to oil prices increasing, which will put great pressure on the world economy. 
 

 
Trump announcing a second round of tarrifs

•Second, the US economy is not in great shape either, partly because the USA is having to pay the cost of the military hardware raining down on Iran. More importantly, the tariff theory hasn’t worked. The original idea was that if you tax imports, consumers won’t buy products made overseas and entrepreneurial capitalists will leap in to manufacture those products in the USA. That was never going to work: overseas wages are so low, the USA could never make products more cheaply; and building manufacturing capacity takes years. In the meantime, prices go up as producers recover the cost of tariffs from consumers,

In the same way as Trump has decided to repeat military actions that don’t work, he has now decided to repeat economic actions that haven’t worked. He has announced that he has imposed new tariffs on 60 countries, because these countries, he alleges, have failed to tackle “forced labour”. This is implausible, as the new tariffs are the same as the old ones, which were not about forced labour but were intended to address trade deficits.

Initial reactions around the world have been softer than the outrage shown to the first round of tariffs – probably because other countries are now used to Trump changing his mind so often, the tariffs could be off again next week. However, many countries rely on exports to the USA, and the tariffs are going to hurt the world economy.

Keir Starmer tried to deal with Trump’s vicissitudes by trying to be his friend – much the same as Tony Blair did with George W. Bush. Neither of them was successful. Ed Miliband MP has adopted a more robust assessment of Trump during his first term in office, calling him a “racist, misogynistic self-confessed groper” who had “lowered the bar for idiocy”.  Now that Miliband is Foreign Secretary, let’s hope he continues with refusing to be charmed by the Emperor who has no clothes – and leads an international campaign to stop this man before he does even more harm.

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