Let us take US President Donald Trump's words literally. April 2, 2025, he had announced, would be America's Liberation Day. He stuck to his promise on that date by announcing tariffs that would replace free trade with "fair" trade. The duties would liberate America from a global trading system in which other nations were allegedly scrounging off its wealth, so that America could become rich again. To that end, he announced a tariff of 10 per cent on all goods coming into the US from anywhere else in the world, and also imposed substantial "reciprocal" tariffs on at least 60 trading partners, which, he argued, slapped excessively high levies on American products.

Bangladesh is facing a 37 per cent reciprocal tariff, compared to the previous average duty of 15.62 per cent under which Bangladeshi goods entered the US market.

According to Trump, "April 2, 2025, will forever be remembered as the day American industry was reborn, the day America's destiny was reclaimed and the day that we began to make America wealthy again. Foreign nations will finally be asked to pay for the privilege of access to our market, the biggest market in the world."

We shall see. China, on which the US has slapped 34 per cent tariffs, has paid for its precious privilege of access to the gilded American market by hitting back with an extra 34 per cent tax on US goods. The tit-for-tat game of the race to the bottom is on. How it will end is what we shall see when we see it.

Meanwhile, the Trump Administration's dramatic overhaul of its international trade policy marks the greatest assault carried out yet on the post-World War II trading order in the capitalist world. Intriguingly, that order was instituted by the United States itself to consolidate its hegemonic position in the capitalist sphere, which faced an existential ideological challenge from the communist Soviet sphere. The capitulation of the Soviet sphere in 1989-1991 and the end of the Cold War acknowledged America's role as the praetorian guardian of the capitalist reach, which was now almost coterminous with the physical boundaries of the known world.

All that changed on the second day of this month, which will go down as a horrible marker in contemporary history. America shrugged off its burden of victory in the Cold War because it was proving too heavy to carry. It gave up the economic triumphalism and political evangelism that had followed its victory over the Soviet Union in 1991. The American Francis Fukuyama had boasted that history had ended with the end of the Cold War and that liberal democracy had emerged as the final stage in the dialectical progress of history. No one quite believed him - at least no one who had read any Hegel or Marx whatsoever - but millions of people went along with his arrogant fiction because it did not hurt them to do so.

Now America itself has given up the fiction. It has turned in its self-awarded copyright on the self-proclaimed end of history. Instead, America is retracing the economic steps it took since the end of the Cold War.

Tariffed

There is a historical analogy with the infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, which imposed 20 per cent tariffs on most imports into the United States. It contributed to the Great Depression which in turn led to World War II. Trump's American Liberation Day tariffs go higher up than Smoot-Hawley's on the Richter scale of an economics in historical retreat. Markets are in turmoil. There is talk of global inflation and stagflation becoming the immediate norm. Even in their absence, a trade war is on.

What began in the first Trump Administration - the attempt to decouple America's economy from China's - has now become an attempt to decouple America's economy from that of almost every other nation on earth as well. Global supply chains are going to be disrupted sharply and even broken in the process. The world's economic architecture is now at the mercy of bilateral tariff deals that may nor may not be struck between the United States and other countries. If peace and security rest on economic foundations, the WTO is not going to be what it used to be. That acronym stands for the World Trade Organisation. It stands also for the World Toilet Organisation.

Take a leak before it is too late.

All this does not mean automatically that the world is on the brink of World III. The crucial difference between the 1930s and the 2020s - although they are just nine decades apart, an era that is but a blink in the historical eye - is that the main players in today's world are armed with nuclear weapons that are sufficient in number and potency to destroy all human life on the planet many times over. Of course, like the Russia-Ukraine conflict, which involves nuclear Russia, there conceivably could be a world war without a nuclear exchange. However, since in any war the losing side finally uses the most lethal weapon in its arsenal, World War III - which would be fought ultimately between nuclear powers - probably would witness the use of nuclear weapons. Attack would be followed by counter-attack. Then, there would be no tariffs because there would be no trade, and there would be no liberation days because they would have turned into the unending night of annihilation.

Even in the absence of that apocalyptic scenario, the world changed for ever on April 2, 2025. America has vacated its place in the world by abandoning the world. By treating strategic friends and foes alike in an economic war of its own making, it has sinned against the fundamental laws of national security, which demand that the needs of military capability supersede the lure of economic profit if ever there is a choice between the two. Make America Great Again? Yes, but how?

By making everyone else smaller?

It does not work that way.

The writer is Principal Research Fellow of the Cosmos Foundation. He may be reached at epaaropaar@gmail.com