Is Trump a War President?
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Is it time to think of President Trump as a wartime leader? We ask not because he’s just sent the carrier USS Ronald Reagan into the South China Sea. It’s not just because Russia is maneuvering against us in the Arctic. Nor that the Iranians are fomenting war in the various gulfs. Nor that fighting could erupt over, say, Venezuela. In all those cases, Mr. Trump appears to be itching to avoid open conflict.
What moves us to ask the question is the cataract of headlines in respect of the burgeoning “trade war” — or what the Democratic papers call “Trump’s trade war.” (Is that like “FDR’s war against Japan” or “Lincoln’s war against the Confederacy”?) Los Angeles Times suggests Mr. Trump is “ramping up” the trade war and “playing with fire.” The New York Times calls it “fruitless.”
It’s enough to make us wonder whether Clausewitz’s definition of war — as “the continuation of politics by other means” — applies not only to military conflict but also to trade. If so, it’s starting to look like Mr. Trump is one of the most astonishing wartime presidents America has ever had, deploying into the fray tariff actions affecting trade flows of hundreds of billions more than a carrier group or expeditionary force.
It’s not our purpose here to parley over whether protectionism is a good thing or bad. We tend to be free traders of the ilk of, say, Donald Boudreaux of Cafe Hayek. Yet we also peer at the planet through the prism of our Constitution. Of all the powers it enumerates and grants to the federal government, the first is the power to “lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises.”
In other words, our government gets the power to declare a trade war even before it gets the power to resort to cordite. It’s hard to imagine that the Founding Fathers granted that power to Congress in the expectation that it would never be used. The aforementioned fathers, after all, financed our early governments through the imposition of duties. They used duties for both revenues and protection.
And at times, in Mr. Trump’s case, for geopolitical reasons. The Founders knew that such levies end up hurting — being borne by — their own countrymen. In that sense, duties are no different than taxes. Name your poison. What strikes us is the zest with which Mr. Trump enters into the fray. He ran for a mandate on this head, and whatever else one can say about him, he seems born to the fight.
One minute he’s jawboning companies to move their operations back to America. Another minute he’s warning about competitive currency devaluations. The next he’s hurling tariffs covering hundreds of billions in trade. One minute he’s plumping for a weak dollar and threatening to fire the chairman of the Federal Reserve. The next minute he’s formally accusing the Chinese communist regime of manipulating its currency.
It’s not clear to us whether all this is a prelude to a military war or whether we have entered an age of quasi wars centered on trade. It is clear to us that all this turmoil — and many other woes — is the consequence not of Mr. Trump but of the age of fiat money that began with America’s default on its obligations under the Bretton Woods gold exchange standard.
That was in August 1971, when President Nixon closed the gold window. We’d pledged to redeem dollars at a 35th of an ounce of gold. After the Nixon shock, we tried devaluation of the dollar to a 38th of an ounce. That is, we abandoned Bretton Woods over a 7% collapse. So far on Mr. Trump’s watch, the dollar has shed a staggering 20% of its value. Yesterday it fell briefly below a 1,500th of an ounce.
It would be foolish to make too much of short term gyrations in the dollar. It would not be foolish to suppose that the drama follows from the fact that our currency is no longer defined in any law. Under the circumstances, it would be surprising were there not this kind of turmoil. That is why the Sun favors declaring a system of honest money, defined in gold by law, as one of the Trump era’s war aims.
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Image: President Trump at Ypsilanti, Michigan, in 2017. White House photo by Shealah Craighead, via Wikipedia.