The Politics of Trade Wars

One inconvenient feature of the global trading system is that efforts to protect the jobs of voting workers in one country risk affecting jobs, and perhaps votes, in another. Thus President Donald Trump’s proposed tariffs on imported aluminum and steel, offered with the rationale that American metalworkers had been losing jobs to foreign competition, alarmed Europe—the continent has its own metalworkers to worry about, whose jobs to some extent depend on access to markets like America’s.

So the ironic effect of a nationalist trade gesture was to demonstrate how much politics can be global, namely when Europe threatened retaliatory