Trump’s tariff crusade is rooted in an idea about justice
Israel is something of an innocent bystander in the looming global trade war. But even if there are reasons to doubt the administration’s judgment, its ultimate goal is correct.
By Jonathan S. Tobin
JNS
Apr 9, 2025
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may have hoped that his dramatic visit to Washington this week would result in getting the Jewish state exempted from President Donald Trump’s tariff crusade. But it didn’t work. Despite Jerusalem’s cancellation of any Israeli tariffs on American goods and Netanyahu’s vow to eliminate the trade deficit between the countries, Trump didn’t give his ally a break.
In his public meeting with Netanyahu, he didn’t budge an inch on his insistence that his controversial tariff formula would apply across the board to all American trading partners, including the Jewish state. That he also made clear that he was going ahead with negotiations vis-a-vis Iran over its nuclear program with that notorious friend of Qatar—special envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff—in charge of the talks made the trip (the spin from his supporters notwithstanding) a clear disappointment for the prime minister.
In spite of that, friends of Israel need not despair, at least not about the tariff question. The United States may be Israel’s biggest trading partner in terms of exports. But it is likely to survive the blow far more easily than other countries. Despite its First World economy and high-tech “start-up nation” sector, as well as its strategic importance in terms of international security, Israel is something of an innocent bystander in the looming global trade war that may have been ignited by Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff bombshell.
Though Israelis understandably view every controversy as if their nation were at the center of everything—and they are treated that way by the international community and the media when it comes to the conflict with the Palestinians, which has long been wrongly considered to be key to all international disorder—this is not the case here. The Israelis are nothing but a small fry in a battle over tariffs in which China and Europe are the big players.
Indeed, rather than an advantage, Netanyahu’s determination to be the first foreign leader to go to Washington to surrender to Trump’s global trade ultimatum may have been a mistake. There is every indication that the White House might eventually negotiate with America’s trading partners in an effort to achieve reciprocity and eliminate trade deficits. But in his trademark style, the president wants them all to spend time squirming before he decides just how much he will let them concede to American concerns before he is willing to end the dispute. Getting there first earned the Israelis no special dispensation on an issue that is not only not about them, but which is integral to Trump’s worldview.
Globalism produces wealth
Expert opinion about Trump’s tariff policy is like expert opinion about just about anything he has done or said, but only more so. As is the case with most of his outlier decisions on issues like the Middle East, the environment and so much else, the chattering classes are in an uproar about what they consider to be a foolish, self-defeating decision. Most economists, conservatives and libertarians, and, of course, liberals, are in strong if not hysterical disagreement, seeing the administration’s willingness to disrupt the economic order that has reigned for decades as not just the product of faulty math, but senseless stupidity.
They believe that the globalist economics that have prevailed over international trade since the 1990s are not only a positive good for the world in and of themselves. They also assert—and not without reason—that the triumph of free trade, which not coincidentally accompanied the entry of the enormous Chinese market into the world community, has made America as a nation and many Americans as individuals a lot richer. It allowed them access to cheaper goods of all kinds—from flat-screen televisions to computers and smartphones, but also clothing and other ordinary items. The stock market, with occasional corrections, went up along with the value of their 401(k) accounts and other measures of wealth. As the world’s largest economy as well as the most advanced, free trade and globalization are in some ways force multipliers for American influence and power.
What’s more, they warn that what economic historian Niall Ferguson dubbed “tariffmageddon” will increase the price of many commodities, both essentials and luxury items. One of the reasons that Trump won the 2024 election was a justified reaction to the Biden administration’s fueling of inflation with its out-of-control spending and massive manipulation of the markets with “green” policies and expansion of the federal regulatory regime. But a trade war will, albeit for different reasons, also hike prices and cause pain to consumers as well as complicate the supply chain for all sorts of goods.
On top of that, the tariffs scared the stuffing out of the markets, leading to a massive price correction that lowered the value of the portfolios of the rich and the not-so-rich alike.
Trump and the working class
Yet the explanation for this is not that hard to understand. Contrary to the fulminations of Trump’s left-wing critics that he is a ruthless and doctrinaire capitalist exploiter, the trade war he’s been longing to launch since before he entered politics is not aimed at making the United States wealthier as its sole goal. It is, instead, about something very different. Its goal is a more abstract one of fairness for an America that has often been exploited and robbed blind by allies and enemies alike, not just in trade deals but in terms of the possession of strategic industries.
Equally important, it is an attempt to achieve greater fairness for the large sector of Americans left out of the globalization gold rush of the past decades. That is something that most of those who comment on economics and national policy from both the right and the left are either not interested in or don’t understand.
It’s true that many observers were vaguely aware that Trump’s 2024 victory was the result of a startling political realignment. The Democrats went from being the so-called party of the working class to what is now very much the party of the credentialed elites. The Trump-led GOP—as opposed to the party led by its former establishment embodied by the Bush family and The Wall Street Journal editorial board—went from being the party of big business to one that champions the interests and values of working-class voters of all races.
A lot of the pundit class on both sides of the aisle thought Trump’s support from blue-collar voters was the result of his cynical ploy to win their affection and/or condescendingly viewed it as evidence of the lack of intelligence on the part of the slice of the electorate that didn’t have college degrees that backed him so enthusiastically. They were completely wrong about both of those assumptions.
What few of those commenting on the tariffs appear willing to admit is that one of the prime motivations for his policy is Trump’s oft-stated conviction that globalist economics was a disaster for American workers and communities. For all of his personal wealth and crass comments, Trump was entirely sincere in his interest in the welfare of those whose interests the globalists had discarded as unworthy of their solicitude.
Two cheers for capitalism
The off-shoring of jobs and the moving of manufacturing plants from areas in the United States to various parts of the globe, where, among other advantages, cheaper wages could be paid, was a great thing for Wall Street and those people who worked in fields that required higher education rather than working with their hands. In that way, it operated much like the open borders policies of the D.C. uniparty that let in a flood of illegal immigrants that depressed working-class wages and increased housing prices, as well as undermining the rule of law. It made life easier and less expensive for educated upper-income people who wanted cheap labor to mow their lawns, clean their houses, watch their children and lower the prices of a lot of stuff they wanted to buy.
But it also robbed a vast sector of American society of their jobs and devastated communities from which the factories that sustained them were taken. The globalist order that made this inevitable resulted in a massive increase in economic inequality as those who were part of the knowledge industry and associated jobs got wealthier, and others got poorer. While the welfare state that the neo-liberal regime championed offered them a social safety net, working-class Americans believe in the dignity of hard work and don’t want charity. They understood that this government-induced redistribution of income also created a crisis that led to an epidemic of deaths of despair and opioid addiction.
It’s true that much of the educated classes, whose grandparents may have had blue-collar jobs, no longer understand why anyone would want to toil in manufacturing or the oil and gas industry that the environmentally obsessed elites want to destroy. But the Americans that Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden basically told to forget about their jobs making things or extracting oil or gas from the ground, and instead “learn to code,” resented this high-handed and insensitive advice. They also begrudged the way people who called themselves “conservatives” were uninterested in conserving their jobs and communities while others profited from their misery.
Some on the traditional right term any concern for these people and their way of life as nothing more than warmed-over socialism. Yet some of the best conservative minds of the past always understood that preserving liberty was not merely a matter of unfettered laissez-faire capitalism. Seminal 18th-century conservative thinker Edmund Burke wrote of the importance of community and tradition in mapping out how a free society should operate. Three hundred years later, 20th-century neo-conservative philosophers like Irving Kristol, who was only willing to give Two Cheers for Capitalism, understood that a quest to advance the common good must accompany the cause of economic and political freedom. Today, so-called “national conservatives,” of whom Vice President JD Vance is an articulate example, have taken up that cause.
National security implications
Trump’s tariffs are also a response to a crisis that has become increasingly apparent since the COVID pandemic, the outbreak of wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, and the rising threat of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
One of the consequences of globalism was the collapse of American manufacturing. The educated and investor classes may think of this as a rather unimportant detail that means widgets are made less expensively elsewhere instead of by overpaid American workers. But this massive shift has real-life foreign- and defense-policy implications.
In the last few decades, the United States has no longer manufactured many of the essential goods needed to ensure its security or that of its allies like Israel. What’s more, by reducing that sector of the economy, it has made it difficult, if not impossible, for Washington to attempt a rearming of the country to meet multiple foreign threats. There simply aren’t enough factories and skilled workers to make them.
That is something that Trump rightly takes as a serious threat to American national security. It is this factor, among others, that explains why the president views the tariff increases as more than a negotiating tactic to gain better terms with trading partners, whether geopolitical rivals like China or a small ally like Israel. It is a key part of an effort to re-industrialize the nation, which is a prerequisite to any effort to maintain American defense and global influence.
Will it work?
Reliable economic analysts with a sure grasp of history, like Ferguson, tell us it can’t. He says the American economy of the past is gone forever and likens using tariffs as a tool to jigger reindustrialization to the use of a magic hammer in the Minecraft video game. Such magical thinking, he says, is no way to run a global economy and a sure path to running it into the ground. Even less pessimistic observers admit that it will take a lot longer than the two years that Trump talks about to effect an appreciable increase in American manufacturing that will both empower the working class and strengthen national security.
But as the brilliant historian Victor Davis Hanson argues, the panic on Wall Street will subside once investors see how the new economic order operates. He also rightly points out that comparisons of Trump’s tariffs to the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, which didn’t go into effect until two years after the onset of the Great Depression and which clearly impaired the country’s ability to recover, are completely off the mark.
More to the point, as Hanson notes, other countries that have tariffs and run up trade deficits with the United States because they think they are in their interests. Why then shouldn’t the United States view these transactions from its own interests? And why are so many economists underestimating American economic power and overestimating those nations that the tariffs are targeting, most specifically China?
Yet at the core of this argument is not only economic theory but also class warfare. Hanson correctly argues that globalist economics is as rooted in contempt for the working class and their interests as it is in enriching others. Those whom Democratic Party elites have called clingers to guns and Bibles, deplorables, irredeemables, dregs, chumps and garbage deserve better from their nation’s leaders. Whatever you might think of Trump as a person or a leader, he is someone who thinks seriously about this issue.
A matter of social justice
Seen from that perspective, the argument for tariffs is not so much a matter of controversial math as a quest for social justice.
That idea is something that Jewish liberals, in particular, claim to care most about. Indeed, it is the main focus of their religious beliefs to the extent that they care about faith, and more importantly, their political advocacy. But in their rush to demonize Trump, they are ignoring the fact that this cause, which is undoubtedly the dearest of all political issues to the president, is one in which he is, for better or worse, motivated by a desire to work for social justice, and they are on the side of those who profit from the immiseration of blue-collar workers. The credentialed elites to which they belong are willing to devastate working-class communities and import millions of low-wage earning illegal immigrants to work as serfs to maintain their standard of living.
Hard as it is for them to admit, Trump’s tariffs are based on an idea about justice that those who purport to care about the less advantaged, whether as a principle of religious faith or as deriving from the civic obligations of a free republic to all of its citizens, ought to support. It’s far from certain that his scheme and the negotiations about trade barriers that have already begun will work out as he hopes they will. And this policy will create, at the very least, the sort of short-term economic pain that could derail his second administration.
Still, his goal of re-industrialization and a return to jobs and dignity for working-class Americans that the globalists regard with contempt is an entirely laudable cause.
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