Trump’s great upheaval-Liberation

The large planetary upper time continues and it can be feared that it is only the beginning. After having undermined the geopolitical order inherited from the Second World War, Donald Trump torples the rules of international trade with his decision, announced Wednesday, to impose from April 3 25% customs duties On all cars imported into American territory. What was only a threat, which one might think was agitated to scare and create a balance of power, therefore became reality. Its goal, fitting with its « Make America Great Again »: to repatriate automotive production in the United States, when, in 2024, almost half of the cars sold in the country were imported. And thus end the free trade policy which is one of the foundations of capitalism.

On paper, it seems simple and even basic: we will produce with us and we will recover the bet! In reality, it is more complicated and it is possible that Donald Trump was concentrated on his golf game the day when his main advisers studied the advantages and disadvantages of the measure. The production circuit of an automobile, like that of an aircraft, is now largely globalized. Relocating the entire car to a single place is not so simple and we don’t even talk about the puzzle of the spare parts, Especially for Tesla. Not only are the links of America with most of its historic allies, Europe in the first place and Japan, which exports a third of its automotive production to the United States, are in the process of being seriously disteward, but it is also obvious that the American consumer, in the end, will lose. The financial markets were not mistaken: they collapsed shortly after this announcement. Another hypothesis, Donald Trump may have in mind, as Pascal Lamy, ex-director general of the WTO, told us, « A predatory supremacy agenda ». With the American president, everything is possible, and especially the worst.