The Spark

the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist

“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx

Trump’s New Trade War

Feb 3, 2025

It took only a couple of weeks back in office for President Donald J. Trump to threaten to set off a great big new trade war. Trump announced big new tariffs on the U.S.’s biggest trading partners, Mexico, Canada and China. Trump also made clear that he was not stopping there, that he would soon take aim at the U.S.’s other big trading partners, starting in Europe.

When Trump first announced his planned tariffs, Wall Street and the stock market basically ignored him, treating this as Trump’s usual ridiculous bluster. But that changed on Friday, January 31, after White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, insisted that Trump was putting in place sweeping 25% tariffs on goods coming from Canada and Mexico (with only a couple of exceptions named so far), and a 10% tariff on goods coming from China, which are added on top of the tariffs that the U.S. government had already put in place under Trump, and subsequently, by Biden. And she said that the tariffs would begin on 12AM Tuesday.

At that point, in late trading, the stock markets plunged. For these tariffs could be like an economic earthquake, setting off widespread price increases in the U.S. on everything from cars to food, as well as begin to disrupt trade, industrial production, consumption … and most probably corporate profits.

That is because over the last decades, the three big economies of North America have become increasingly integrated, especially auto production, as well as manufacturing in general and much of agriculture. Today, for example, most of the 30,000 parts and pieces that go into making a car cross the borders of the three countries at least eight times in the course of production.

According to Trump, the reason for these tariffs is to stop Mexico and Canada from allowing both fentanyl and migrants from coming into the U.S. This is an outrageous lie, just like all the lies about “weapons of mass destruction” that the politicians and news media told, in order to justify the disastrous and barbaric U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. That war was really about oil and greater domination of the Middle East by U.S. imperialism

It’s anyone’s guess how this U.S. trade war against Mexico and Canada will play out. Certainly, in a short time, Trump could quickly negotiate a new trade deal, declare victory and falsely claim to save U.S. jobs. Or else, Trump’s new tariffs on Canada and Mexico could get tied up in the courts, since they violate a supposedly binding trade treaty, the USMCA (formerly NAFTA), that had been ratified by Congress ... under the Trump administration and the Republicans, in 2020!

But whatever happens, this new trade war aggravates a worsening global economic and political crisis that has gone on for decades and decades, a crisis which has ramped up competition between gigantic capitalist groups for power, profits and wealth, capitalist interests that are defended by their respective governments and state apparatuses. And no matter how reckless and destructive Trump’s new trade war is, it is still the dominant U.S. superpower which is calling the shots and imposing itself on rivals and friends, alike.

Certainly, in carrying out this trade war, Trump will appeal for support from workers and ordinary people, who forever have been told by the capitalists and all their lackeys (including the officialdom of the big trade unions) that it is foreign workers who have been costing them jobs, that the reason for rising joblessness in this country is that all the jobs are going overseas. These lies are used to try to tie the workers to their own bosses and politicians, who are really the workers’ worst enemies. It is the biggest companies that have been slashing jobs and pay in their drive to increase their own profits and wealth.

The workers in this country have nothing in common with these politicians and bosses, and everything in common with the workers in Mexico and Canada, who are confronting the very same capitalists.