Trump’s Desperate Trade War: Protectionism Repeats Britain’s Colonial Mistakes and Weakens America in the 2020s
Tariffs and walls cannot stop rising powers; only smart domestic investment can keep the United States competitive and just.
Introduction
Trade wars sound tough on the campaign trail. In office they age badly. Donald Trump’s tariff crusade against China and other nations has pushed the United States down a path historians know too well. Great powers in decline often lash out, trying to slow others instead of improving themselves. Britain’s punitive taxes on its colonies in the 1700s backfired and sparked the American Revolution. Two and a half centuries later, Washington is replaying that losing script. Prices rise, quality falls, and our rivals grow closer to one another. By 2025 the BRICS countries—Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa—have learned to trade around us, leaving American workers and consumers to pay the bill.
Protectionism: The Historical Dead End
Whenever a dominant country fears competition, it reaches for protective barriers. The Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930 deepened the Great Depression. British mercantilism inflamed colonial anger. Trump’s tariffs repeat the pattern. They add costs at every step of a supply chain: raw materials importers, intermediate manufacturers, final retailers—each passes the surcharge forward. The result is visible on today’s receipts for electronics, machinery, and even basic groceries. Protectionism is not a bold new strategy; it is the oldest sign of strategic exhaustion.
Britain’s Lesson We Forgot
In the 1760s London trusted taxes and trade restrictions to keep its American colonies subservient. Instead, colonists built smuggling networks, boycotted British goods, and finally fought for independence. The moral is clear: suppressing growth elsewhere rarely works and often galvanizes the very challengers you fear. Trump’s “radical right” trade agenda imagines that Chinese, Indian, or Brazilian industries can simply be walled off. Yet global capital, data, and ideas reroute faster than eighteenth-century tea smugglers ever could. When walls rise, workarounds multiply.
How Tariffs Backfire at Home
Tariffs behave like a regressive tax. A billionaire pays the same surcharge on a washer-dryer as a warehouse clerk. Meanwhile U.S. exporters face retaliation abroad—soybeans in Shenzhen, bourbon in Brussels. Domestic producers that rely on imported inputs (think auto makers buying foreign steel) must either raise sticker prices or cut payroll. Neither option “brings jobs back.” The International Monetary Fund estimates that the 2018–2020 tariff waves shaved roughly 0.6 percent off U.S. GDP while failing to narrow the trade deficit. Voters are left with higher costs and no meaningful wage gains.
BRICS: Competitors, Not Enemies
The BRICS bloc threatens the United States only because Washington chooses confrontation over cooperation. Since 2019 those nations have accelerated intra-BRICS investment in infrastructure, digital payments, and energy. Each deal signed without U.S. participation chips away at dollar dominance and shapes new supply webs that bypass American markets. They are not anti-American by design; they are pro-their-own-growth. Trump’s stance—treating every foreign factory expansion as a plot—turns potential partners into permanent skeptics and invites them to hedge with one another.
Invest, Don’t Restrain
A confident nation backs its workers with world-class education, health, and technology. It funds public R&D, modern ports, and green power grids. China’s industrial policy is no secret. Germany trains apprentices for advanced manufacturing. Instead of mirroring those strategies, the Trump playbook spends political capital attacking imports while cutting domestic investment. That tradeoff starves tomorrow’s engineers to subsidize today’s symbolic tariff headlines. Fiscal resources are finite; every tariff dollar collected is one less invested in broadband, batteries, or basic science.
The Moral Cost of Isolation
Trade policy is not only economics; it is a statement of values. Cooperation spreads ideas, medicines, and norms. When the United States chooses fear over openness, it tells the world that zero-sum thinking trumps shared progress. The damage goes beyond prices: scientific collaboration slows, cultural exchange shrinks, and global challenges—from climate to pandemics—grow harder to solve. Humanity loses when leading nations close doors that should stay open.
Conclusion
History judges nations less by their slogans than by their substance. Britain’s empire faltered because it tried to choke colonial initiative instead of reforming itself. Trump’s trade war follows the same reflex: hurt the other guy, hope we stay on top. Yet in 2025 the evidence is plain. Tariffs have raised living costs, strained alliances, and encouraged the BRICS economies to innovate together. None of these outcomes serve American families.
A wiser course begins at home. Use federal purchasing power to seed clean-energy industries. Fund community colleges that retrain workers for advanced logistics and robotics. Reform antitrust rules so small firms can scale without being crushed. Welcome immigrants whose skills replenish an aging workforce. Then engage abroad through fair-trade pacts that set labor and environmental floors, not walls.
Power that relies on coercion erodes. Power that grows from broad-based prosperity endures. If the United States wants to remain a standard-setter, it must stop trying to hold others back and start racing forward itself. The tools are familiar: investment, innovation, inclusion. The question is whether we summon the political will to use them before another generation pays for this burst of protectionist nostalgia.
Takeaways
Tariffs signal decline, not strength. They raise domestic prices while pushing rivals to cooperate without us.
Britain’s colonial errors echo today. Suppress a rising power and you accelerate its determination.
Trade wars hurt working families first. Higher costs and retaliatory export losses cancel any headline “wins.”
BRICS growth is opportunity, not threat. Partnering in their expansion would profit U.S. workers more than blocking it.
Invest at home, engage abroad. Education, infrastructure, and fair multilateral deals beat walls every time.
Source
Michael A. Chiaradio | History Will Not Be Kind to Trump’s “Radical Right” Trade War