Trump’s Tariff Terrorism Exposes Total Failure of Global Economic Thinking

A Three Sages Special

Trump’s Tariff Terrorism

The terrorism to which we are all too accustomed involves wanton violence by one party against another, usually directed against civilians, often without warning, and with no evident purpose but to destroy or gain ascendancy and control through fear and intimidation.

Of course terrorism can include economic or political acts as well as kinetic or military. Examples of all kinds are easy to find and identify. After all, we have all learned that such things as the “War on Terror” are actually “Wars OF Terror.” Lies told to the UN about Iraq’s non-existent “weapons of mass destruction” was a terrorist act. So was/is the COVID-19 “jab.”

Thus the use by US President Donald Trump of huge escalations of tariffs as a weapon of foreign policy might well be classified as a kind of terrorism. Their purpose is to destroy the economy of nations by shutting them out of sales to US markets in order to enforce foreign policy objectives or simply to assert ascendancy and power on the global stage.

This is far different from the purpose of tariffs as practiced earlier in US history when they were used modestly or even reluctantly to protect domestic manufactures from foreign competition. President Trump has cited the use of tariffs during the 19^th century William McKinley administration as an example.

Such tariffs were largely abandoned during the 20^th century as British-style free trade policies gained ground in bestowing trade advantages on countries where cheap or underpaid labor allowed predatory trade practices to predominate. This was the famous “race to the bottom” that became showcased during the years when the US willingly allowed itself to become deindustrialized by shifting factories from this country to overseas. The US then expected those countries to reciprocate by using their US dollars to purchase US government Treasury bonds and float our debt.

Today, President Trump wants it both ways. He is imposing tariffs to protect and encourage US domestic manufacturing while expecting, at the same time, foreign nations to continue trading in US dollars, purchasing US debt, and financing our worldwide military machine.

Trump is now weaponizing tariffs further by threatening Russia and Russia’s own trading partners with ruinous tariffs to force Russia’s surrender in the proxy war being carried out by the US and NATO against it in Ukraine. This is tariff terrorism raised to an exponential decree and is as much an act of war as direct military assault.

As documented in my book Our Country, Then and Now, it was President Joe Biden who started the Ukraine war. But it is now Trump who has delivered an ultimatum to Russian President Vladimir Putin to surrender to the West via a “cease-fire” within 10 days from July 29, or else Trump will impose what Senator Lindsey Graham called a “bone-crushing” sanction of 100 percent tariffs on all Russian trading partners.

So why have tariffs and trade balances assumed such potency in international relations? The reason is the total failure of the global economic system to function as it should were rational economic and financial policies in place to be utilized for their mutual benefit by the nations of the world.

As with so much else that is wrong with the world, it goes back to the bankers and he entrenched system of usury that runs the global economy. It is bank lending at usury that goes to fill the chronic gap between a nation’s national production—GDP—and its available purchasing power—national income. But bank lending is never enough, because their loans to businesses and individuals are constantly liquidated, requiring payment of both principal and interest, with the shortage in purchasing power then having to be made up by more lending, inflation, or a positive trade balance, compensated when necessary by the kind of tariffs President Trump is imposing.

C.H. Douglas

I began to study these poorly-understood facets of economics while working for the Jimmy Carter White House in 1979-80. After I retired from the federal government in 2007, I began to publish articles on economics on Global Research in collaboration with Prof. Michel Chossudovsky. My association with Global Research continues to this day.

The earliest and most prominent researcher in the field was C.H. Douglas. Following is a link to my first article on Douglas which you may read here: C.H. Douglas: Pioneer of Monetary Reform. This will be dense material—even unknown—to many readers, so take your time.

Elon Musk

Interestingly, one of the only Westerners today who is aware of Douglas and his heritage is Elon Musk, whose grandfather was part of a movement dedicated to implementation of Douglas’s ideas in Alberta, Canada, in the 1930s. Recently, my Three Sages colleague, Dr. Lewis Coleman and I, published an article on our Substack entitled Does Elon Musk Hold the Key to Economic Prosperity?

As with the previous article, I suggest you take your time in absorbing what is really revolutionary material at your leisure.

Alex Krainer

Many readers of Three Sages will immediately recognize the name of Alex Krainer, hailing from Croatia, as one of the most alert and perspicacious commentators on economic affairs writing today. Mr. Krainer is particularly notable for being “on the case” of Great Britain and the City of London as a principal instigator of chaos in today’s world.

See, for instance, my recent Global Research article on the disclosures by Tulsi Gabbard of how former President Barack Obama falsified US government intelligence to launch years of “lawfare” against President Donald Trump by claiming Russian interference in the 2016 election. I pointed out that the only commentator who sought to identify who was standing over Obama giving him marching orders was Alex Krainer. Here is the article: “Obamagate”: The American Commentariat Doesn’t Get It but Alex Krainer Does.

Three weeks earlier, Krainer had published an article entitled Why governments can't balance their books - EVER! I found this article “jaw-dropping,” because after decades of reading material by Nobel-prize-winning geniuses like Paul Krugman without ever finding an original idea or even baby steps outside officially-approved narratives, here was a prominent commentator without academic “credentials”—Krainer—who had figured it all out!

Read Krainer’s article—it is pure C.H. Douglas, though Douglas’s name is never mentioned. So I don’t know if Krainer figured it out on his own, has been reading my own analyses, or what. But there it is. Again, read it all carefully.

Conclusion

So there we are—the answer to Trump’s tariff terrorism staring us in the face. Unfortunately, the big shots in the Kremlin don’t seem to have ever read C.H. Douglas either. Following is the best they could do in response to Trump’s latest threats: Kremlin responds to Trump’s Ukraine deadline change Moscow has taken the US president’s threats into account, spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said, adding that Russia remains committed to peace.

Of course there is no hope that Trump himself, being literacy-challenged, will read any of the material being presented here. But maybe Steve Bannon or Stephen Miller will stumble across it. Or maybe Elon Musk will actually start a new “America Party” and make C.H. Douglas’s monetary reform ideas a centerpiece.

Richard C. Cook is a retired U.S. federal analyst with extensive experience across various government agencies, including the U.S. Civil Service Commission, FDA, the Carter White House, NASA, and the U.S. Treasury. He is a graduate of the College of William and Mary. As a whistleblower at the time of the Challenger disaster, he exposed the flawed O-ring joints that destroyed the Space Shuttle, documenting his story in the book “Challenger Revealed.” After serving at Treasury, he became a vocal critic of the private finance-controlled monetary system, detailing his concerns in “We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform.” He served as an adviser to the American Monetary Institute and worked with Congressman Dennis Kucinich to advocate for replacing the Federal Reserve with a genuine national currency. See his new book, Our Country, Then and Now, Clarity Press, 2023. He has recently been named a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). He is a member of the League of St. Jude.

Books Available from the Three Sages:

Richard C. Cook, Our Country, Then and Now. ORDER HERE

Fadi Lama, Why the West Can’t Win: From Bretton Woods to a Multipolar World. ORDER HERE

Dr. Lewis Coleman: 50 Years Lost in Medical Advance: The discovery of Hans Selye's stress mechanism. ORDER HERE