Outside In | Does Trump’s tariff-happy team realise China is playing weiqi, not chess?

What was initially described as the “amusing distraction” of Donald Trump is perhaps better called chaff – blizzards of metal, glass or plastic that fighter pilots spray out to confuse and deflect enemy pursuit. For the better part of a decade, Trump’s tactic of distraction has been pivotal, his stream of rapid-fire tweets and campaign-trail comments keeping him in the news and throwing adversaries off balance.

The explosion of chaff since his election victory has been both typical and effective in keeping world leaders and media, whether US or international, off balance and irresistibly focused on his agenda priorities.

Nowhere has this been clearer than in Trump’s tariff threats. First it was 60 per cent for imports from China, and 10-20 per cent for everyone else. Then it was 25 per cent for Mexico and Canada unless they reined in migration across the US border and cartel drug-smuggling – with an additional 10 per cent for China if it failed to staunch fentanyl exports. Then it was 100 per cent on Brics economies if they so much as thought about displacing the US dollar as the world’s primary trading currency.

Whether or how such tariffs will be imposed is impossible to predict. Even Trump probably has no clear idea. He has nominated so many tariff advocates to his inner circle that tariffs are highly likely to be central to his trade policy – but that is not the point.

Trump has succeeded in dominating the media narrative months before his arrival in the Oval Office, and triggered a frenzy among the world’s leading trade economists into earnestly – probably pointlessly – calculating the impact of such tariffs.

Alongside his mischievous tariff narrative, Trump’s blizzard of chaff includes vowing to end Russia’s war on Ukraine in a day, threatening to leave Europe in the lurch with Nato, inviting Chinese President Xi Jinping to his January 20 inauguration and promising that “China and the United States can together solve all of the problems of the world”.