Is Trump’s tariff war on Brazil and India as stupid as it appears?

Joe Biden’s foreign policy of simultaneous containment through establishment of military bases at their perimeter and through economic warfare against Russia and China pushed them into one another’s arms, to the point where they have a de facto military alliance even if the corresponding treaty has never been written. Looking at who made these policies, Jake Sullivan and Antony Blinken, it is a safe guess that Biden’s foreign policy was simply stupid from the moment of its conception. The authors were trapped in the rigidities and ignorance of Cold War thinking which they shared with their boss. During the Biden presidency, I remarked repeatedly that it suffered from intellectual bankruptcy.

Now we find that Trump’s tariff war on India, Brazil and China is pushing these countries into one another’s arms, and, seemingly perversely, greatly strengthening BRICS at a moment when Trump says he wants to crush all those countries resisting dollar hegemony. In a matter of weeks, Trump has reversed the policy of cultivating relations with New Delhi of the last quarter century for the purpose of building an anti-Chinese bloc of countries in the Indo-Pacific region. After all, India was an anchor in the ‘Quadrilateral Security Dialogue,’ as today’s Financial Times reminds us in an editorial highly critical of Trump’s latest moves. Is this the result of Biden-like blindness and stupidity, as appears to be the case at first glance?

Before offering a conclusion, I invoke a bit of wisdom that I picked up over time: that if something appears incomprehensible, irrational, then stop and try to look at the issue from a different, unhabitual angle. In the case of Trump, I suggest inverting entirely what he is saying to understand what he is doing. Double-talk is Trump’s method of dealing with the enormous opposition on Capitol Hill and in the broader American political establishment to his move away from Idealist, Wilsonian principles of foreign policy promoting values of democracy and freedom through force of arms, leadership of military blocs and never-ending wars abroad to a Realist foreign policy based on the concept of national interest pursued amidst a constellation of competing world powers in a multipolar world through diplomacy; that is to say, acting in a world that resembles the long ago pre-WWI world, where ideological considerations had scarcely any weight in international relations.

To those unfamiliar with his thinking, allow me to state that the latter concept was conceived and articulated by Henry Kissinger in the 1990s and in the new millennium through books which deserve to be re-read and reconsidered today (Diplomacy, 1994 and World Order, 2014).

To those who have forgotten the evolution of policy in Donald Trump’s first term in office, I strongly recommend reading two of my essays that were included in collections of my writings: “Book Review: Henry Kissinger’s World Order, 2014” in Does the United States Have a Future? 2017 pp. 37-50 and “Kissinger’s Fingerprints on the Trump Security Doctrine, 2017” in A Belgian Perspective on International Affairs, 2019, pp.43-54. For readers possessing the skills to mine website archives, the original web publication of these articles can be found on my WordPress platform.

My point is that Henry Kissinger had a great influence on Trump’s approach to foreign policy dating from his tutorials to Trump during the 2016 electoral campaign and into the first year of his first term in office. The opening sentence to the Kissinger Fingerprint article sounds like it was taken from running commentary on Trump and his foreign policy adventures today:

“Those who believe that Donald Trump is witless, a ‘moron’ to quote Rex Tillerson [then Secretary of State], were proven wrong on December 18 when the President released his National Security Strategy (NSS).”

In what followed, I examined the contradictory ideas set down in that NSS, attributing some to the Deep State hangers-on who set down the pre-existing values driven ideas with the notion of “adversaries’ and others to the new Trump-appointees who set down Realist principles of ‘competing states.’ The Trump appointees were all headed in the direction of balance of power and concert of powers in the Kissinger tradition.

I had and have today no doubt that Trump has a fixed concept of what he wants to achieve in office and that is to blow up, to sweep away the structures that support democracy promotion and never-ending wars. Put aside the particulars of his peace-making between India and Pakistan, between Russia and Ukraine, and elsewhere since taking office. His Nobel Prize for Peace, if ever awarded, should be based on his possible destruction of NATO, which is a particularly tough case because it requires a majority vote in the Senate, and what we are now witnessing, his destruction of the Indo-Pacific containment alliances against China.

Finally, I insist that Kissinger was the last of the Olympians in the Realist school. He has no peers today in that category. And he saw Realism as the path to peace, not as a predictor of armed conflict as some like its present-day doyen in the University of Chicago say to the rapt attention of neophytes.

I say this as one who has noted the ‘voice of the people’ review of Kissinger’s books in the Comments section of amazon.com- ‘that he writes very well for a war criminal.’ Yes, but as many have observed, Kissinger spent the second half of his life making up for the crimes of the first half.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2025