Opinion: Trump's trade wars portend great power conflict

Donald Trump, in attempts to pander to his base(or supporters), is not only in the midst of demolishing the rules based world order but also undermining the world trading system.

While this system is not perfect but, generally and, in the main, it has been rather beneficial for the peoples of the world, including Americans. Millions have been lifted out of poverty and, broadly speaking, the gains from free(r) trade, despite their skewed distributional consequences (which,among other things, account for the angst in the United States),have ushered in a rather unprecedented era of development and prosperity, globally.

But, Trump and his cohort hold and deem that free(r) trade and the pedestal upon which it rests, the post war trading system, is detrimental to America and its assorted interests. In a reversion to mercantilist protectionism, Trump has singled out China and the European Union, not to speak of the country’s natural trading partners, Canada and Mexico. While the American president couches these actions in the name of “Making America Great”, but the reality, shorn of rhetorical artifices, it is, to repeat, an attempt to pander to his supporters, or the base.

The net result is that the world is on the cusp, or even in the midst of a trade war. There are definitive and obvious economic costs of this trade war, in terms of its negative impact on the global economy, world output and general welfare but another insidious cost and price is political.

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A digression might be made here. The third wave of globalisation, which can be traced to the early seventies of the nineteenth century and the end of the Cold War, created a condition what Joseph Nye of Harvard University and his colleague, Robert Keohane, called “Complex Interdependence”. Roughly, the complex interdependence paradigm meant the enmeshing of states in crisscrossing webs of trade and commerce. Nye and Keohane held that complex interdependence, by its very nature, would ameliorate and moderate states’ inclinations to go to war given that, among other things, trade and commercial themes would also constitute state interests. War, in this schemata, would throw , a spanner into the works , so to speak, and could become unthinkable.

While there was and is merit to the complex interdependence paradigm, it also constituted a contrapuntal to the broad theory and practice of realism which held the state to be the basic and elemental constituent of international and interstate relations and deemed the attendant relations between states as zero sum where war always loomed on the horizon, especially in the absence of balances of power.

Empirically, it may be observed that the prognostications of complex interdependence held and could have even become stronger with “thick flows” as globalisation strode apace and intensified. (The Second Gulf War, a “War of Choice” might be held to be an aberration given that it emanated from unipolarity induced arrogance on part of a certain ideological stratum of the United States).

But, with Trump picking fights and upending trade and the trading system thereof, and retaliatory measures in the offing, the complex interdependence paradigm is under the threat of dissipating or even unraveling. The consequences, in the form , of mercantilist protectionism, among other things, are more likely, in the nature of the return of the state and its concomitant, security competition. Without the moderating and tempering influence of trade and commerce induced complex interdependence, states will retreat into themselves, view and define their interests in very narrow and parochial terms.

Against the backdrop of the system polarity that appears to obtain contemporarily, a vague and loose sort of bipolarity, with the United States and China as the major contenders,the absence of trade linkages connections patters and thereby complex interdependence might pan out and denoue in the shape of a vigorous security competition between the two.

If this scenario does actually become real, then other states will either take recourse to balancing or bandwagoning with either. In theoretical and practical terms, it would mean the return of Realism and its concomitant, real politik, with a vengeance. One significant corollary of Realism is that security competition induced bythe verynature of the state can, in a given system polarity, lead to war, roughly speaking.

Trump’s trade wars, his ad hoc foreign policies, where he and his team give short shrift to linkages, policy, political and economic, running roughshod of the rules based world order including regimes that have generally been salubrious and held peace, all point out to a world where complex interdependence is dissipating and the mercantilist, protectionist state is ascendant. Cumulatively, this would, in all likelihood, lead to intense competition between China and the United States, which might even lead to war, at some unspecified datum in the 21st century.

The nature and form of this war would be different from the past it would neither be “total war” nor “ limited war”. This potential catastrophe would correspond to the typology of “hybrid war” where assorted techniques, conventional, unconventional and new, would be employed to wear down and defeat the enemy. In the case, the dyadic set of enemies would be China and the United States. However, the price will be paid by the world, at large. Unless and until, there are countervailing forces to check and contain Trump’s instincts, great power conflict and war is the abiding legacy that the American president will leave for America, China and the world, at large.

(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed above are the personal views of the author and do not reflect the views of ZMCL)