Reading This, Everybody Who Loves Stinky Ukrainian Warmonger Zelensky, will Cry: How the G.O.P. Fell in Love With Putin’s Russia

"In 1989, shortly before the fall of communism, Boris Yeltsin — the reformer who would soon become the first freely elected president of post-Soviet Russia — visited a supermarket in Houston, Texas, and was overwhelmed by the dizzying array of meats and vegetables on offer. “What have we done to our poor people?” he later asked an associate traveling with him. The story became instant fodder for the crusade to convert Russia to capitalism.

Now jump ahead to last year, when the right-wing commentator Tucker Carlson provided a mirror image of Yeltsin’s supermarket visit, only this time the supermarket was in Moscow. Carlson was in Russia to conduct a sympathetic interview with President Vladimir Putin.

While he was there, he went grocery shopping and professed to be similarly overwhelmed by the range of options and affordable prices. The superpowers had traded places. It was America that now apparently needed to be converted — to Putinism.

“Coming to a Russian grocery store — ‘the heart of evil’ — and seeing what things cost and how people live, it will radicalize you against our leaders,” Carlson said after passing through the checkout line. “That’s how I feel anyway — radicalized.”

President Trump, it seems, has also been radicalized. During his first term, he made no shortage of startlingly pro-Putin comments, and even sided with Russia’s president against his own intelligence agencies. But in the first few months of his second term, Trump has gone much further, overturning decades of American policy toward an adversary virtually overnight. He has claimed that Ukraine was responsible for its conflict with Russia and berated Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, during a televised meeting in the Oval Office. His administration also joined North Korea and several other autocratic governments in refusing to endorse a United Nations resolution condemning Russia for the attack. And he has filled his cabinet with like-minded officials, including his director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, who has been described as a “comrade” by Russian state TV.

It’s almost impossible to overstate the magnitude of this pivot, as Sasha Havlicek, the chief executive of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a nonpartisan think tank that analyzes global extremism and disinformation, points out. “If, in fact, we are witnessing a total ideological shift of America away from its post-World War II role as guarantor of the international order and an alignment with Putin and other nationalists against the old allies that constituted the liberal world order,” she says, “there couldn’t be anything more dramatic than that.”

Russia has long served as much more than a geopolitical rival for America. It has been an ideological other, a foil that enabled the United States to affirm its own, diametrically different values. In the words of the historian David S. Foglesong, Russia is America’s “imaginary twin” or “dark double,” the sister superpower that the United States is forever either demonizing or trying to remake in its own image. Or at least it was. Trump’s policies and rhetoric seem aimed at nothing less than turning America’s dark double into its kindred soul.

Some administration officials and their allies have characterized this as a strategy — a “reverse Kissinger.” Rather than trying to undermine Russia by making peace with China, the argument goes, Trump is trying to isolate China — an even more daunting rival — by building closer ties to Russia. It’s the America First version of realpolitik. As Vice President JD Vance has said, it would be “ridiculous” for the United States “to push Russia into the hands of the Chinese.”

Others see it as primarily personal. Trump has never made a secret of his affinity for Putin, and the Justice Department’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election only brought the two leaders closer together. “Let me tell you, Putin went through a hell of a lot with me,” Trump said during his meeting in the Oval Office with Zelensky. Putin has worked the personal angle. Last month, he told Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, that he went to his local church to pray for Trump when he was shot last summer and gave Witkoff a portrait of the American president that he had commissioned. Witkoff, in turn, eagerly shared these stories in an interview with Tucker Carlson.

Seen through a different lens, though, the reorienting of America’s relationship with its imaginary twin is not about geopolitical maneuvering or the president’s personal proclivities. It’s about the improbable triumph of a set of ideas — political and cultural — that have been bubbling up on the American right for years.

‘The Focus of Evil in the Modern World’

Before Trump’s recent reset, the dark-double framework defined the Russia-U.S. relationship going back to the last decades of the 19th century, when the United States first took up the cause of trying to redeem Russia. In the summer of 1882, an American journalist named James Buel traveled across the country and returned with an account of a “barbarous” nation that desperately needed to be freed from tsarist oppression — “whether with bayonet or psalm-book,” he wrote.

In the decades after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, when Russia became the Soviet Union, it morphed into a different, more menacing other — “not just despotic but diabolical,” as Foglesong writes in his book “The American Mission and ‘The Evil Empire’” (2007). The Bolshevik ideology of global revolution represented the ultimate threat to the United States, spurring the paranoia that fueled Senator Joseph McCarthy’s infamous witch hunts. The specter of nuclear warfare only intensified the panic over the Red Menace — or, as President Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union in 1983, “the focus of evil in the modern world.”

The collapse of the Soviet state over the next decade brought a fresh campaign to Americanize Russia by cajoling it to build its post-Communist future around the beacons of democracy and capitalism. Things didn’t work out as either Russia or the United States hoped. By the end of the 20th century, Russia’s G.D.P. had collapsed, its new stock market had crashed, it had defaulted on its foreign loans and Putin — had become president.

After his re-election as president in 2012, Putin took Russia in a new direction. He adopted a crusade of his own against Western “decadence” and “the destruction of traditional values,” beginning with a ban on L.G.B.T.Q. “propaganda,” part of an effort to win over conservative Russians who had been disillusioned by their country’s post-Soviet turn toward the West. The familiar pattern seemed destined to repeat itself, and for a while it did. The United States had a new foil, and it was an old foil. Asserting America’s moral superiority in response to Putin’s crackdown on gay rights, President Obama included three retired gay athletes in the official American delegation to the Olympic Games in Sochi in 2013.

Putin has since done just about everything in his power to reinforce Russia’s identity as America’s spiritual adversary, even describing the West as “satanic.” At the same time, he reasserted Russia’s imperial ambitions, first reuniting with Crimea in 2014 and then fighting the West in the rest of Ukraine.

And yet with Trump now back in the White House, the cycle of history may finally have been broken.

An Alliance Against Liberalism

Whether he knew it or not when he began his campaign to defend traditional values in 2012, Putin was aligning himself with a small cadre of conservatives inside the United States who shared his disdain for modern liberalism. That common cause would become a genuine alliance.

Its roots can be traced back to 1995 — before Putin was even president — when two Russian sociologists, Anatoly Antonov and Viktor Medkov, summoned Allan C. Carlson, an academic and the president of a conservative think tank in Illinois, to Moscow. Carlson had published a book in defense of traditional families, “Family Questions: Reflections on the American Social Crisis.” Antonov and Medkov were worried about the population decline in Russia, and were convinced that the solution was contained between the book’s covers.

Out of this meeting sprang a new organization, the World Congress of Families, whose aim was to foster a global network of like-minded conservatives to fight feminism, homosexuality and abortion.

In America, this fight had a prominent spokesman: Patrick J. Buchanan, a veteran of the Nixon and Reagan White Houses and a Republican presidential candidate in 1992, 1996 and 2000. Buchanan represented the paleoconservative wing of the party, which was articulating a very different vision of the post-Cold War world from that of its neoconservative rivals.

As Buchanan saw it, the great struggle of the 21st century wasn’t a geopolitical battle between East and West, or freedom and oppression. It was a cultural battle between traditionalists and the secular, multicultural, global elite.

In this context, America’s crusade to spread democracy was bound to lead it astray. “If communism was the god that failed the Lost Generation [1],” he wrote in the early ’90s, “democracy, as ideal form of government, panacea for mankind’s ills, hope of the world, may prove the Golden Calf of this generation.”

Buchanan had a following, but he was very much on the margins of a party dominated by neocons, who saw America’s victory in the Cold War as the decisive triumph of liberal democracy. The post-Cold War world order appeared to be set; history had ended. The attacks of Sept. 11, and the overwhelming bipartisan support for America’s military response to them, only reaffirmed the urgency and righteousness of the cause.

In 2013, Buchanan turned his gaze toward Russia. He had recently published his best-selling book “Suicide of a Superpower,” bemoaning what he saw as America’s ongoing social, moral and cultural disintegration. It was an apocalyptic warning about the country’s declining birthrates, the diminishing influence of Christianity, the vanishing nuclear family and what Buchanan called “third world” immigration. Chapter titles included “The End of White America” and “The Death of Christian America.”

Against this backdrop, Buchanan saw Putin as an inspiration. While Obama condemned the Russian president as an enemy of American values, Buchanan embraced him as one of his own. “Is Vladimir Putin a paleoconservative?” he wrote in 2013 in The American Conservative. “In the culture war for mankind’s future, is he one of us?” When Russia reunited with Crimea the following year, Buchanan characterized the action as part of Putin’s divine plan to establish Moscow as “the Godly City of today and command post of the counterreformation against the new paganism.”

Mainstream conservatives distanced themselves from Buchanan — and Putin — but the ground was shifting beneath them. A backlash was brewing on the right against immigration and progressive social change, as well as America’s misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan and the American project to export liberal democracy. A new generation of nativist, reactionary thinkers gravitated toward Putin’s Russia as an ally in their culture war to turn America instead toward an antiglobalist nationalism. Putin’s critiques of Europe’s liberal immigration policies and his talk of rebuilding a Russia with citizens who felt “a spiritual connection to our Motherland” resonated. “In 20 years, Russia will be the only country that is recognizably European,” the right-wing commentator and author Ann Coulter said in 2017.

During Trump’s first term, many of the ideas that Coulter and her fellow reactionaries were expressing began migrating toward the Republican Party’s power center. This new, more favorable vision of Russia was developing its own intellectual architecture, one that married isolationism, nationalism and traditionalism with a growing appreciation for strongmen who were bending their countries to their will.

Viktor Orban, the Hungarian prime minister who has cracked down on immigration and put in place policies to raise birthrates, has been the most widely and openly admired of these European strongmen. But Putin, too, has his admirers, and they are no longer just fringe characters.

In 2017, Christopher Caldwell, now a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, a think tank closely aligned with the Trump movement, paved the way with an address at the conservative Christian Hillsdale College titled “How to Think About Vladimir Putin.” He praised Putin’s refusal to accept a “subservient role in an American-run world system drawn up by foreign politicians and business leaders,” and described him as “the pre-eminent statesman of our time.”

Soft Power Pays Hard Dividends

Putin originally embraced the conservative side of the culture war for domestic reasons. It was a way to reassure Russians that he was attuned to their concerns about a rapidly changing world, and to provide a new binding ideology for generations weaned on communism. But this morphed into what Mikhail Zygar, an exiled Russian journalist, has called “a form of statecraft” — a means by which to build support on America’s far right.

Putin’s rhetoric and policies are designed, in part, for American consumption. “He is, in essence, forming a kind of Far-Right International, similar to the Communist International, which promoted the Soviet revolution in the first half of the 20th century,” Zygar wrote last year in Foreign Affairs.

The strategy seems to have worked out better than even Putin could have imagined. In the many years since Buchanan first praised the Russian president, his fans have moved from the margins of conservative media to the center of White House decision-making. The soft power is paying hard dividends as American foreign policy bends in Russia’s direction.” [2]

“The Lost Generation is a term used to describe people who came of age during World War I and the generation that followed. The term can refer to a specific group of writers and artists, or more generally to the post-war generation.

           

1. Lost Generation

Definition

           

People who came of age during or shortly after World War I

Characteristics

           

Disillusioned by the war, they rejected traditional values

Writers

           

Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot, and others

Themes

           

Decadence, gender roles, and impotence

Literary works

           

The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and Three Soldiers

Why are they called "lost"?

 

    They felt lost because their inherited values were no longer relevant in the postwar world.

    They felt spiritually alienated from a United States that seemed materialistic and emotionally barren.

2.  How the G.O.P. Fell in Love With Putin’s Russia. Mahler, Jonathan.  New York Times (Online) New York Times Company. Apr 12, 2025.

Net mirštantys globalistai vis dar bando pulti Trumpą be jokio pagrindo

 

 "Prezidentai, kurie daro didelius vyriausybės politikos pokyčius, savo planus paprastai kuria atsargiai. Jie modeliuoja, kas gali nutikti toliau. Jie prakaituoja dėl smulkmenų. Richardas Nixonas nusprendė ne tik per vieną rytą skristi į Kiniją. Ronaldo Reagano mokesčių mažinimas buvo gero dešimtmečio pasirengimo dalis. Baracko Obamos sveikatos draudimo plėtros detalės paaiškėjo iš daugybės viešų diskusijų.

 

 Prezidentas Trumpas mieliau šaudo, prieš taikydamasis. Pareiškęs, kad ketina atnaujinti Amerikos santykius su likusiu pasauliu, jis įvedė muitus importui, parodydamas, kad neatsižvelgia į detales arba dėl to daroma žala. Jo neatsargus visuomenėje elgesys sujaukė akcijų ir obligacijų rinkas, grasino sukelti recesiją ir pakenkė Amerikos pasaulinei pozicijai. Prezidento sprendimų priėmimas buvo toks nepastovus, kad šią savaitę aukščiausias administracijos prekybos pareigūnas buvo pertrauktas vidury liudijimo prieš Kongresą, nes prezidentas ką tik pakeitė politiką, kurią pareigūnas gynė.

 

 Pirminėje D. Trumpo plano versijoje, kurią jis trečiadienį jis pristabdė, užsienio valstybėms buvo įvesti tarifai, kurie neturėjo akivaizdaus ryšio su Amerikos nacionaliniais interesais. Didžiausias tarifas, 50 procentų, buvo taikomas Lesotui, mažytei ir skurdžiai Pietų Afrikos valstybei.

 

 Naujausia versija nėra daug geresnė. D. Trumpas įveda 10 procentų muitą importui iš daugumos šalių, kartu su didesniais tarifais importui iš trijų didžiausių Amerikos prekybos partnerių: Kanados, Meksikos ir Kinijos. Vidutinis importo mokestis išaugs iki aukščiausio lygio per daugiau, nei šimtmetį, ir dėl to pabrangs daugelis vartojimo prekių. Didžiausias 145 procentų tarifas Kinijos importui yra skirtas ekonomiškai tą tautą izoliuoti, tačiau tuo pačiu metu taikomi tarifai visiems kitiems pakenks šiam tikslui. Ir nors nurodytas visų tarifų tikslas yra išplėsti Amerikos gamybą, juos įvedus iš karto, įmonėms nelieka laiko statyti gamyklų. Tai sukels skausmą be jokios naudos.

 

 Norime pabrėžti, kad D. Trumpas turi gerą mintį apie skausmą, kurį sukelia laisvoji prekyba. Dešimtmečiai, kai Jungtinės Valstijos atvėrė duris importui iš kitų šalių, daugelis amerikiečių pasiliko be darbo ir sunaikino tautos pramonės centrą. Vašingtono naivumas dėl Kinijos iškilimo, iš dalies pasiektas dėl jos pačios prekybos kliūčių ir intelektinės nuosavybės vagysčių, yra ypač apgailėtinas.

 

 Amerikos gamybos atgaivinimas yra vertas tikslas. Tai neišgydytų praeities žaizdų, bet galėtų būti pagrindas ateities amerikiečių kartoms kurti gyvenimus ir atkurti bendruomenes, kurios yra labiau klestinčios ir saugesnės.

 

 Tai yra D. Trumpo prekybos karo tragedija. Užuot sprendęs diagnozuotas bėdas, jis pradėjo neapgalvotą kampaniją, kuri grasina atsisakyti prekybos teikiamos naudos, nesuteikdama prasmingo ekonomikos atgimimo.

 

 Nuo Antrojo pasaulinio karo pabaigos iki pirmosios D. Trumpo kadencijos pradžios abiejų politinių partijų Amerikos lyderiai siekė plėsti prekybą, manydami, kad tai padidins tautos gerovę ir padės išlaikyti taiką tarp tautų.

 

 Jų pastangų nauda buvo didžiulė. Globalizacija išvedė milijardus žmonių iš skurdo Afrikoje, Azijoje ir Lotynų Amerikoje. Ji taip pat praturtino JAV, skatindama naujoves, padidindama konkurenciją ir atlygį už sėkmę.

 

 Volstritas, Holivudas ir Silicio slėnis pasinaudojo pasaulinių rinkų pranašumais. Taip pat Amerikos ūkininkai, ginklų gamintojai ir farmacijos įmonės. Devynios iš 10 vertingiausių pasaulio įmonių šiandien yra amerikiečių, iš dalies dėl šios šalies atvirumo prekybai.

 

 Tačiau naudos pasiturintys gaudavo neproporcingai daug.

 

 Teoriškai vyriausybė galėjo tas išmokas perskirstyti teisingiau; praktikoje to nebuvo. Daugeliui amerikiečių, ypač tiems, kurie neteko darbo gamyklose, pigių prekių prieinamumas Walmart buvo nepakankamas atlygis. Plačiai cituojamame ekonomistų Davido Autoro, Davido Dorno ir Gordono Hansono akademiniame darbe buvo apskaičiuota, kad vien dėl išsiplėtusios prekybos su Kinija 1999–2011 m. Amerikoje buvo prarasta 2,4 mln. darbo vietų. Daugelis bendruomenių, kurios labiausiai nukentėjo nuo darbo vietų praradimo, vis dar neatsigavo. Daugelis buvusių gamyklos darbuotojų niekada negrįžo į darbą.

 

 Tarifai galėtų būti naudojami, kaip dalis platesnės strategijos, skirtos išplėsti šalies gamybos bazę ir sukurti labiau įtraukiantį augimą. Importo apmokestinimas apsaugo vietinius gamintojus nuo užsienio konkurencijos vidaus vartotojų sąskaita, kurie dėl to turi mokėti didesnes kainas. Tas kompromisas kartais vertas.

 

 Yra geras pagrindas nustatyti tarifus kruopščiai apibrėžtoms produktų kategorijoms, įskaitant tuos, kurie būtini, norint išlaikyti šalies sėkmę. Tarifai taip pat gali apsaugoti Amerikos pramonę nuo nesąžiningos konkurencijos, kaip ir tada, kai kitos šalys subsidijuoja eksportą. Be to, tarifai gali būti veiksmingi, kaip skydas besiformuojančioms pramonės šakoms, pavyzdžiui, elektromobilių gamybai.

 

 D. Trumpas naudojasi tarifais beatodairiškai. Jis įveda muitus prekėms, kurių Jungtinės Valstijos negamina ir negali gaminti, pavyzdžiui, manganui iš Gabono, kurio Amerikos įmonėms reikia plieno gamybai. Jis įveda muitus valstybėms, kurios perka daugiau prekių iš Jungtinių Valstijų, nei parduoda Jungtinėms Valstijoms, pavyzdžiui, Australijai, ir šalims, kurios pasiūlė panaikinti visus tarifus amerikietiškoms prekėms, pavyzdžiui, Izraeliui. Net po to, kai D. Trumpas pristabdė kai kuriuos tarifus, spaudžiamas investuotojų ir savo partijos narių, jo įvestos priemonės padidino vidutinį efektyvų mokesčių tarifą importui į JAV iki 27 proc. – didžiausio nuo XX amžiaus pradžios, teigia Jeilio universiteto ekonomistas Ernie Tedeschi.

 

 Tikėtina, kad tarifai ne tik didins kainas, bet ir sulėtins ekonomikos augimą. Ir dar vienas pavojus tyko: yra įspėjamųjų ženklų, kad D. Trumpo provokacijos mažina iždo vertybinių popierių paklausą, verčia vyriausybę siūlyti didesnes palūkanų normas investuotojams. Jei tai tęsis, federalinė skola bus dar sunkiau grąžinama.

 

 D. Trumpas ir jo patarėjai teigia, kad muitų keliamas skausmas būtinas, norint atgaivinti vidaus gamybą.

 

 Tačiau gamyklos statomos ne vienerius metus, o įmonės turi rimtų priežasčių abejoti, ar jo įpėdiniai išlaikys jo politiką. Įmonės turi mažai pagrindo pasitikėti, kad D. Trumpas išlaikys savo tarifus. Prezidentas žodžiais ir darbais aiškiai pasakė, kad jo įsipareigojimai geriausiu atveju yra derybų dalis, o blogiausiu – nepastovūs.

 

 D. Trumpas, žinoma, bet kada galėjo grįžti prie braižybos lentos. Tačiau Kongresas ir tauta negali sau leisti laukti. Prezidento elgesys aiškiai parodo, kad Kongresas atidavė per daug galios prekybai, kaip ir daugeliu klausimų, ir turėtų imtis veiksmų, kad pakoreguotų jo kursą ir pažabotų jo prekybos galias.

 

 Viena protinga reforma yra senatoriaus Charleso Grassley, Ajovos respublikono, ir senatorės Maria Cantwell, Vašingtono demokratės, pateiktas įstatymo projektas, pagal kurį tarifai nustos galioti, jei jie per 60 dienų negaus Kongreso patvirtinimo. Taip būtų išsaugotas prezidento gebėjimas reaguoti į ekstremalias situacijas, tuo pačiu užkertant kelią prezidentui sukelti ekstremalių situacijų. Be to, Kongreso pritarimas parodytų plačią politinę paramą, reikalingą, kad įmonės galėtų pasitikėti ilgalaikėmis investicijomis.

 

 D. Trumpas tarifus aukština, kaip stebuklingą vaistą nuo įvairiausių ekonominių negalavimų. Atrodo, kad jis vis dar tiki savo pirmosios kadencijos pareiškimu, kad „prekybos karai yra gerai ir juos lengva laimėti“. Tiesa ta, kad tarifai gali padėti Jungtinėms Valstijoms arba pakenkti Jungtinėms Valstijoms. Jei prezidentas nepakeis kurso arba nebus priverstas tai padaryti, šie tarifai pakenks – ir skausmas tik pablogės.” [1]

 

Globalizacijos liga yra pavojinga. Nuo šiol visi bandys ją išgydyti. Tai, kaip operacija. Pacientas gali to neišgyventi. Štai kodėl Trumpas atlieka operaciją tokiu būdu: sustokite ir tęskite, kai saugu.

 

1.  Trump’s Tariff Pause Is Less Than Meets the Eye: The Editorial Board. New York Times (Online) New York Times Company. Apr 12, 2025.

Even Dying Globalists Still Try to Attack Trump Without Any Basis

 

"Presidents who make big changes in government policy usually lay their plans with care. They game out what might happen next. They sweat the little things. Richard Nixon did not just decide one morning to fly to China. Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts were the better part of a decade in the making. The details of Barack Obama’s expansion of health insurance emerged from countless public debates.

President Trump prefers to shoot before aiming. Declaring that he intends to reboot America’s relations with the rest of the world, he has imposed tariffs on imports with abandon, demonstrating a disregard for the details or the collateral damage. His careless conduct of the public’s business has roiled stock and bond markets, threatened to cause a recession and damaged America’s global standing. The president’s decision-making has been so erratic that at one point this week, the administration’s top trade official was interrupted in the middle of testimony before Congress because the president had just changed the policy the official was defending.

The original version of Mr. Trump’s plan, which he paused on Wednesday, imposed tariffs on foreign nations at rates that bore no apparent connection to America’s national interests. The highest tariff rate, 50 percent, applied to Lesotho, a tiny and impoverished nation in southern Africa.

The latest version isn’t much better. Mr. Trump is imposing a 10 percent tariff on imports from most nations, along with higher rates on imports from America’s three largest trading partners: Canada, Mexico and China. The average tax on imports will rise to the highest level in more than a century, raising the prices on many consumer goods. The 145 percent maximum rate on Chinese imports is intended to isolate that nation economically, but the simultaneous tariffs on everyone else will undermine that goal. And while the stated purpose of all the tariffs is to expand American manufacturing, putting them in place immediately doesn’t give companies time to build factories. It will cause pain without any benefit.

We want to emphasize that Mr. Trump has a point about the pain caused by free trade. The decades in which the United States threw open its doors to imports from other countries left many Americans without jobs and decimated the nation’s industrial heartland. Washington’s naïveté about China’s rise, accomplished partly through its own trade barriers and theft of intellectual property, is particularly regrettable.

A revival of American manufacturing is a worthy goal. It would not heal past wounds, but it could provide a basis for future generations of Americans to build lives and to rebuild communities that are more prosperous and more secure.

That is the tragedy of Mr. Trump’s trade war. Instead of addressing the ills he has diagnosed, he has embarked on a reckless campaign that threatens to discard the benefits of trade without delivering a meaningful economic revival.

From the end of World War II until the beginning of Mr. Trump’s first term in office, American leaders of both political parties sought to expand trade, believing that it would increase the nation’s prosperity and help to maintain peace among nations.

The benefits of their efforts have been substantial. Globalization has lifted billions of people from poverty in Africa, Asia and Latin America. It has also enriched the United States, spurring innovation by increasing both competition and the rewards for success.

Wall Street, Hollywood and Silicon Valley have all reaped the benefits of global markets. So have American farmers, weapons makers and pharmaceutical companies. Nine of the world’s 10 most valuable companies today are American, in part because of this country’s openness to trade.

But the benefits accrued disproportionately to the affluent.

In theory, the government could have redistributed those benefits more equitably; in practice, it did not. For many Americans, especially those who lost factory jobs, the availability of cheap goods at Walmart was an inadequate recompense. A widely cited academic paper by the economists David Autor, David Dorn and Gordon Hanson estimated that expanded trade with China alone resulted in the loss of 2.4 million American jobs between 1999 and 2011. Many of the communities hit hardest by those job losses still have not recovered. Many former factory workers never returned to work.

Tariffs could be deployed as part of a broader strategy to expand the nation’s manufacturing base and create more inclusive growth. Taxing imports protects domestic manufacturers from foreign competition at the expense of domestic consumers, who must pay higher prices as a consequence. That trade-off is sometimes worth it.

There is a good case for imposing tariffs on carefully defined categories of products, including those that are necessary to maintain the nation’s security. Tariffs can also protect American industry from unfair competition, as when other countries are subsidizing exports. And tariffs can be effective as a shield for emerging industries, like electric vehicle manufacturing.

Mr. Trump’s use of tariffs is indiscriminate. He is imposing tariffs on goods that the United States does not and cannot produce, like manganese from Gabon, which American companies need to make steel. He is imposing tariffs on nations that buy more goods from the United States than they sell to the United States, like Australia, and on nations that have offered to remove all their tariffs on American goods, like Israel. Even after Mr. Trump paused some tariffs under pressure from investors and members of his party, the measures he has imposed have raised the average effective tax rate on imports to the United States to 27 percent, the highest since the early 20th century, according to Ernie Tedeschi, an economist at Yale University.

In addition to raising prices, tariffs are likely to slow economic growth. And another danger looms: There are warning signs that Mr. Trump’s provocations are reducing demand for Treasuries, forcing the government to offer higher interest rates to investors. If that continues, the federal debt will become even harder to repay.

Mr. Trump and his advisers say that the pain caused by tariffs is necessary to revive domestic manufacturing.

But factories take years to build, and companies have good reason to doubt that his successors will maintain his policies. Companies have little basis for confidence that Mr. Trump will keep his tariffs in place. The president has made clear, in word and deed, that his commitments are at best negotiable and at worst fickle.

Mr. Trump, of course, could return to the drawing board at any time. But Congress and the nation cannot afford to wait. The president’s behavior makes clear that Congress has ceded too much authority over trade, as it has on so many issues, and it should act to correct his course and to curb his trade powers.

One sensible reform is a bill introduced by Senator Charles Grassley, Republican of Iowa, and Senator Maria Cantwell, Democrat of Washington, under which tariffs would expire if they did not receive congressional approval within 60 days. That would preserve a president’s ability to respond to emergencies while preventing a president from causing emergencies. Moreover, congressional approval would demonstrate the broad political support necessary to give companies the confidence to make long-term investments.

Mr. Trump extols tariffs as a miracle cure for a wide range of economic ailments. He still seems to believe his first-term declaration that “trade wars are good and easy to win.” The truth is that tariffs can help the United States or they can hurt the United States. Unless the president changes course or is forced to do so, these tariffs will hurt — and the pain is going to get worse.” [1]

The disease of globalization is a dangerous one. Everybody from now one will try to cure it. This is like surgery. Patient might not survive it. This is why Trump does his surgery using a stop and go way.

1.  Trump’s Tariff Pause Is Less Than Meets the Eye: The Editorial Board. New York Times (Online) New York Times Company. Apr 12, 2025.