News arrives with the subtlety of a sledgehammer: Donald Trump, in his infinite wisdom, has threatened a 100% tariff on European goods. For the United Kingdom, still wobbling on its post-Brexit legs, this is a blow of almost farcical proportions. Some £50bn in exports hang in the balance, and our response has been the usual fluff of diplomatic language.
Let us not mince words: this is an act of economic sabre-rattling from a man who sees trade as a zero-sum game, a relic of the 19th century’s worst impulses. The irony is rich. America, the nation that preached free markets and globalisation, now retreats behind tariff walls that would make a Victorian protectionist blush.
One can almost hear the ghost of Adam Smith weeping. For Britain, the choice is stark: grovel before Washington’s tantrum or pivot towards a more sensible, if fragmented, global order. The former might save a few quarterly reports but at the cost of national dignity.
The latter, championed by those of us who remember that empires rise and fall on their ability to adapt, requires a radical rethinking of our place in the world. History, as always, offers no solace. The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 deepened the Great Depression; Trump’s antics could precipitate a similar spiral.
And yet, our political class seems paralysed, trapped between Atlanticist nostalgia and a fear of China. They miss the point entirely. This crisis is not about Trump, nor about Brexit.
It is about the failure of the post-war consensus, the arrogance of assuming that liberal internationalism would never face a reckoning. Britain, perchance the most global of nations, must now decide if it will be a vassal or a free agent. The answer, for anyone with a sense of history, is clear.
But I suspect our leaders will choose the path of least resistance, muttering platitudes while the export haemorrhage begins. God save the pensions. God save the bankers.
God save the union, if it can be saved at all.
