Crossed Wires: How Trump channelled his inner 17th-century French aristocrat to fight the Chinese

Remember the armchair epidemiologists of the Covid era? Everyone and their aunt suddenly became experts and flooded social media with their theories, their facts, fictions, nonsense, prognostications and conspiracies, with well- or ill-informed opinions about the disease – its cause, its treatment, its spread, its politics.

Well, here we go again with the rise of the citizen global trade expert (including columnists). People who had never read an article including the word “tariff” in their lives have suddenly started expounding with absolute authority on the extraordinary actions of Donald Trump over the past few weeks, ranging from expressions of horror to praise and predicting everything from global economic collapse to the return of American exceptionalism.

Given the seriousness of the matter, it is funny, not funny.

Even for the most well informed the entire affair is a moving target while the Trump administration careens like the Keystone Cops from this to that – threats, global tariff announcements, incomprehensible levy calculations, retractions, pullbacks, boasts, lies and yet more threats. As markets spasm uncontrollably with each new report or rumour, anyone trying to make sense of it all will surely suffer from whiplash. I’ve started writing multiple articles on tariffs over the past week, only to find the ground has shifted before the ink has dried.

Still, one must continue trudging through the forest to get to a clearing. There are two possible ways of trying to reach some understanding of what may turn out to be one of the most important geopolitical events of the past 70 years. The first views Trump’s actions through the lens of trade history. The second tells a bigger story – of America’s desperate attempt to stop the ascendance of China, on track to overtake the US in most important industries over the next few years, as I have written here.

The prospect of delving into tariff history is dispiriting for anyone outside the field. (Those who have seen the film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off will remember an amusing scene in which the teacher is attempting to relate the story of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 to a fantastically bored class of dozing, drooling teenagers.) Serendipitously, a LinkedIn article came to my rescue last week. It was written by Johannesburg-based economist Claude de Baissac, CEO of Eunomix. It is not so much a history of tariffs as a history of how they are imposed and governed.

In his article, De Baissac traces tariff governance all the way back to Jean-Baptiste Colbert, first minister of state under Louis XIV in the 17th century. Colbert viewed trade as a zero-sum contest where national wealth depended on hoarding precious metals (bullionism) and maintaining favourable trade balances. His policies included extensive tariffs on foreign goods, subsidies for domestic industries and rigid protectionism. Trump’s tariff strategy echoes this pre-Enlightenment approach, commonly referred to as “mercantilism”.

De Baissac draws strong parallels between Colbert’s system and Trump’s – both focus on national self-sufficiency and promote state intervention in production and trade. Like Colbert’s provincial tariffs and monopolistic charter companies, Trump’s tariffs are coupled with reshoring incentives, export cartels and restrictions on foreign providers – all of them intended to revive domestic capacity, often at the expense of economic efficiency.

De Baissac then lays out the more important philosophical matter – that Trump has ignored more than a millennium of governance in which these critical matters were decided by collaborative bodies like Congress. Trump is not interested in congressional debate or any other deliberative process. He simply invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) of 1977 to bypass Congress and levy tariffs without opposition.

The IEEPA was written to give the president emergency economic powers during times of crisis such as war. Was the US in a state of national emergency before its invocation? It seems doubtful, and the lawsuits are piling up. Nevertheless, the horse has bolted. It bears repeating: the US constitution gives Congress sole authority to impose tariffs. Trump dragged out a seldom-used emergency law designed for crises of national security and then unilaterally imposed the levies, which has resulted in trillions of dollars evaporating across multiple markets and jurisdictions. This could take years to unwind, even if it were retracted today. 

De Baissac’s article digs deep here, suggesting that Trump’s trade and foreign policies are part of a broader pattern of personalistic rule, where loyalty to the sovereign supplants institutional expertise and multilateral cooperation.

Ultimately, De Baissac characterises the 2025 tariffs not just as policy missteps but as expressions of a deeper ideological pivot away from Enlightenment values of reason, institutional governance and multilateralism towards what he calls the “Digital Dark Ages” in which modern tools are used to resurrect an archaic form of rule. Trump’s tariffs are less an economic strategy than an imperial assertion of feudal sovereignty dressed in 21st-century garb, which De Baissac describes as “part economic policy, part neo-absolutist power grab... a deliberate regression to pre-Enlightenment governance, where trade serves as a tool of personalistic authority rather than collective prosperity”. Harsh words indeed.

De Baissac’s article was written before the retraction of new tariffs for everyone but China, but that hardly matters, given the dominance of China’s trade profile with the US. The tit-for-tat levies are now playing out in real time, but other agendas also seem to be in play here.

Read more: Play, pause and punishment — Trump’s tariff doctrine and South Africa’s hedged bets

Unsurprisingly, Trump wants Chinese competition hobbled by whatever means necessary. Yes, there has been a long history of intellectual property theft, currency manipulation, dumping and unfair trade practices, which the US and the rest of the world have swallowed for decades and might have continued to swallow except that China got so damn good at making stuff. Not just good. Better. Much better than the US in some cases, particularly products built on complex leading-edge technologies.

There is, of course, a harsh reality that has to be faced in the tariff standoff with China, succinctly expressed by New York Times columnist Yi Luan: “Among Chinese, a consensus among both Beijing’s critics and its supporters is that the endgame may come down to which leader will be able to make his people endure misery in the name of the national interest.” Given what we know about history, China will win, hands down. 

Maybe the China trade war will be over by the time this column is published (unlikely – China is now pissed off, its bear having been poked). The damage is done, and Trump’s international reputation is gone, in the eyes of both his adversaries and his allies. No trading partners will ever trust him again.

Which leaves all of us newly minted tariff experts to make predictions just as likely to turn out right as those of the next person. DM

Steven Boykey Sidley is a professor of practice at JBS at the University of Johannesburg, columnist-at-large for Daily Maverick, and partner at Bridge Capital. His new book, It’s Mine: How the Crypto Industry Is Redefining Ownership, is published by Maverick451 in South Africa and the Legend Times Group in Europe/UK.