Round up: Has Hegseth gone native? Tariff Man strikes again. Trump sucks at politics.

Analysis of the week's events

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Pete Hegseth goes to Asia

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth went to Japan this week, and one thing that struck me about his remarks while there was that they were fairly, well… normal. And by being normal, they seemed quite at odds with what the rest of the administration is doing and saying.

To listen to Hegseth tell it, one of the main goals of Trump’s foreign policy is the military containment of China. Hegseth said a lot about restoring the “warrior ethos” - Military MAGA speak for ending DEI and renaming bases after Confederate generals - but he also said a lot about how the U.S. was going to spend a bunch of money and expend a lot of energy in Asia trying to combat the rise of China.

While in Japan, he even talked up America’s international alliances. He called Japan an “indispensable” partner which the U.S. is going to transform into a “war-fighting headquarters”. He pledges to step up military cooperation with the nation and upgraded America’s headquarters there to a higher status.

Meanwhile, what is the rest of the Trump administration doing? Oh yes, it just imposed 24% tariffs on all imports from this “indispensable partner”, Japan.

What about those other international partners that the U.S. might need to contain the rise of China? There’s South Korea, just hit with a 26% tariff rate. And then there’s Taiwan, a country that desperately needs to raise defense spending to deter China. It needs a strong economy to do that. But oh yes, it just got hit with a 32% tariff rate.

What I find fascinating about how out of step Hegseth is with the rest of the administration is that compared to Trump, nowadays he’s sounding like he’s reading from a script written by “the deep state”.

On the one hand, this betrays a contradiction in Trumpism. The president is obsessed with demonstrating strength, and part of that is military strength. He wants the U.S. to appear strong and to deter conflicts from happening. On the other hand, he wants to pull America back from its global role and dramatically weaken its international alliances - both of which are likely to generate more conflicts, not deter them.

But I also wonder if something else is going on. Is Hegseth just completely out of his depth? This is someone who is essentially a culture warrior, and who has no real experience of national security affairs at this level. Perhaps he’s just reading from a more or less standard Pentagon script because that is what is being handed to him, and he lacks the independence and knowledge to forge a script of his own.

And if that’s the case, I wonder how long it will be until it brings him into conflict with the rest of the administration.

Tariff Man strikes again

Shortly after I wrote my post on Trump’s new global trade apocalypse, it became apparent that the story was even dumber than it first appeared. It seems that the administration calculated its estimate of other nation’ tariff rates in a completely nonsensical manner, dividing their trade surplus with the U.S. by the value of their exports to it.

There are many reasons that this is insane, but one stands out. The only way for the affected countries to “fix” this situation is to start importing more than they export from the U.S. It implies that the U.S. would have to again become the global manufacturing colossus it was in the early postwar period, when the rest of the world was devastated by the aftermath of World War II. It’s not going to happen and, if it did, it would make the whole world dramatically poorer.

(I wrote more about this, as well as examining the three leading theories for why Trump has launched this global trade war, in a piece for the Foreign Policy Centre yesterday).

The trillion dollar question now is whether Trump is going to let these tariffs go into effect in a few days as planned. Currently, the 10% flat tariff rate is due to take effect on April 5, and the extra “reciprocal” (but not really reciprocal) tariffs on April 9. Staggering them like this could be a way of building pressure on countries to declare a bunch of concessions between April 5 and 9. Perhaps then Trump will, in some cases at least, simply declare victory and revoke the tariffs, even if the underlying grievance he claims to care about has not been addressed.

On the other hand, let’s not count on it. Israel unilaterally ended all tariffs on U.S. imports in the days before Trump’s announcement and still got hit with a levy of 32%. And given the strange way they have calculated their tariff rates, it’s not clear what the Trump administration actually wants.

And it’s not clear that there’s any “normal” to go back to anymore. The U.S. president has proven himself to be completely irresponsible with the American and global economies. Building back trust will take a long, long time.

Trump is really bad at politics

I want to step back for a moment and look at the big picture.

One of my enduring beliefs is that Donald Trump is really bad at politics, but also very lucky. He won in 2016 against a weak opponent, and then led his party to defeat in every presidential and midterm election until 2024. In 2024, he benefited from a global anti-incumbent wave and a historic burst of inflation, yet still managed to only narrowly beat Kamala Harris.

What followed was a lot of talk about a massive MAGA mandate. But really, Trump’s victory in 2024 was pretty small - a third of the size of Joe Biden’s popular vote victory in 2024. And it seems to have been premised mostly on a public desire to see lower inflation, plus some cultural stuff. This combination allowed Trump to perform somewhat better with a lot of demographics that Republicans don’t usually do well with, such as younger people and voters of color.

Now, just a few months into his new administration, Trump is completely blowing it.