World War II made America great. Trump's trade war could finally be its undoing

Apparently if you are a European jam and marmalade maker, up until Trump’s intervention you’d only pay a 4% tariff to sell into the United States; yet if you were a US jam or marmalade maker selling into Europe you’d pay around 60% tariff – etc, etc. As presented by Trump, the eye-watering amount America pays to trade in the world, if true, does make you think.

Surely the talk of a Trump trade war hides the fact that the trade war against the US has been going on for many, many decades. And that this irritated simpleton of a successful politician is simply righting the wrongs of these years of anti-Americanism.  

When World War II ended, the US,  representing about 3% of the world’s population, had 50% of its wealth. Its economy had expanded 300% between 1939 and 1945. Going to war and helping Russia to save us from Nazi domination was good for business.

Prosperity even reached into the deep pockets of poverty so graphically expressed in a photograph of Elvis Presley’s ‘Hungry 30s’-reared parents. Haggard and broken looking, poorly dressed before the war, their shining and glowing child Elvis seeming to personify the incredible prosperity that came out of that war.

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America seemed reborn through its role of getting rid of dictators in Japan and in Europe, and the pay-off was the enormous wealth that seemed to trickle down to every level of society, including the southern poor like Elvis’s parents.  

Stupendous wealth, unbelievable lifestyles for even the labourers of America, was the post-war benefit of venturing out of America politically and militarily and sucking up the grief created by Europe and the Far East. And turning that into a kind of spur to US productivity. Jobs galore blossomed, it seemed, in every town and city; and superhighways soon spread to cater for this motorised Shangri-La.  

But it was not all cakes and ale, especially for Black people; for while former poor boy Elvis sang, the Civil Rights movement tried to move America away from its birth as a former slaving nation where racism remained deeply entrenched. America seemed to look forward and backwards at the same time, with poverty still existing below the surfaces of post-war prosperity.  

But overall America was the king of the planet, though often let down by its neurosis-led leaders who did not want to lose out to the Soviet Union, the other great power that grew out of defeating Germany. Alas the post-war bubble would not last more than a few decades. War was fought in Vietnam to apparently defeat anti-Americanism.

It didn’t work. The glitter was tarnished and though the future president Trump safely managed to avoid conscription during the Vietnam war, there were many losses to US prestige. An economy that had grown fighting fascism seemed to have lost its role as the supreme policeman of the globe.  

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Now the emphasis on profits over community and people got into full swing. It was as if, if America could not win militarily then it would win economically. It would flood the world with its consumer capitalism. It would modernise the world to look and behave like America. The US high street with its surfeit of burger bars and chicken and pizza shops would obliterate whatever was regional. US business became the world’s business. And European and Far Eastern economies adopted the US methodology of making everything about profit and shareholders. Stock markets flourished and became a constant of all capitalisms.  

Billionaires were built largely in America; they then moved into the digital economy, making the world dependent on this new computer-dominated reality. The trade war intensified, backed up increasingly by military hardware to expand influence. And in the background the passion for profits over all things drew the US to export its jobs eastward, helping to build a rival power which is not too far from becoming the new top dog. America needs China for much of what not so long ago they manufactured themselves. 

The balance of payment crisis is the backdrop to Trump’s belligerency. A belligerency that is encouraged by millions of Americans who lost out to the growth of new wealth and the loss of their local economy and its jobs.  

Whereas WWII made America, this trade war may well undo it. So short-term clever were the shareholders of US corporations and their demand for closing down American jobs that now they face the storm that Trumpism represents. That gutting of communities is upsetting the big financial interests who want globalisation to continue. For it brings them profits of an untold level globally. And the fact that local prosperity sinks is of little interest to them.  

Of course, because we are all sucking from the great teat of international capital, with our gadgets and such made overseas, we will find that there’s less available for government to spend. So Trump’s trade war will turn the screws on many of the poorest in the UK as well as vast areas of the world where this war will echo. Not to mention that the US will be militarily reluctant to guarantee our security as it has done for 80 years. Not to mention that our freedoms to do what we have done in the past, needing someone with a big stick patrolling the perimeter so to speak, may be a thing of the past.

It seems enough Americans, through the lens of their bizarre new leader, are pissed off with the world – which includes us.  

Back to the drawing board seems the order of the day.

John Bird is the founder and editor-in-chief of the Big Issue. Read more of his words here.

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