Donald Trump’s Tariffs and the Price of Calm
I happened to be in northern Europe—Finland and Estonia—during the days of President Donald Trump’s operatic tariff gambit, from his opening announcement that the days when other nations “raped” and “looted” America were over, thanks to his semi-random assignment of duties to economies around the world, right through to his humiliating climbdown on Wednesday and the attendant relief on Wall Street. Obviously, the drama will continue; drama—as well as cruelty—is the point. But from this nearly Arctic vantage point the whole game looked especially, and painfully, bizarre. That’s because these are places that, unlike the United States, have truly felt the pain of upheaval in living memory. They are places that make you ask: Why would anyone bring this on themselves if they didn’t have to?
Everywhere you go in Finland, you meet people whose fathers or grandfathers died in the Winter War or the Continuation War or the Lapland War—the gruesome three-sided fights against and alongside the Nazis, the Soviets, and the Allies during the larger global conflagration. They ended with the Finns losing their second-largest city to the Russians, paying a vast “war debt” to Moscow, and enduring decades of “Finlandization,” a kind of low-key subservience to the Kremlin. Now, of course, they share a long border with Vladimir Putin. They are masters, at this point, of defusing—of figuring out how to calm the waters. And, in the process, they’ve built a prosperous and decent nation, with what surveys insist is the happiest population on earth. Though not, I would say, ebulliently happy—quietly happy.
Estonians had it even worse, since they were simply overrun by the Soviets. In Tallinn, you can climb the two hundred and thirty-two steps to the steeple of St. Olaf’s Church (which may have been the tallest building in the world in the sixteenth century). It was used by the K.G.B. as a watchtower and a radio antenna during the long occupation, which ended only with the fall of the Iron Curtain, in 1991. A few blocks away, cells that the K.G.B. used for interrogation and torture are carefully preserved, with displays of random testimonies from prisoners. From Guido Kutser, imprisoned there in the early years of the Soviet occupation: “They started torturing me with various items—a truncheon, a whip—and they beat me with their fists. I lost all sense of time. They had an impressive arsenal of items.” But two generations later Tallinn is prosperous and calm. I came out of a coffee shop off the main square of the Old Town to find the country’s President and his visiting counterpart from Poland reviewing (extremely cold) troops. The two men had been meeting to discuss coöperation on defense and the economy. The local newspaper account quoted the Prime Minister of Estonia’s statement to reporters: “A strong Poland means a protected and strong Estonia. . . . Poland is a crucial ally for Estonia, one we can count on.”
The United States, of course, played a role in enabling this calm, by helping win the Second World War and then by fighting the Cold War. Our mistakes in that war—Vietnam above all—are well and shamefully known, but it’s worth remembering the victories, too, which included the peace that allowed Finland to develop and the Baltics to eventually free themselves from the Soviets. The Finnish design museum is a glorious place, full of Moomin figurines and blueprints for Alvar Aalto’s sweeping modernist buildings, but there was a poignant backdrop in one exhibit: a Sports Illustrated cover showing J.F.K. on a boat with Jackie, who wears a Marimekko sleeveless dress. As for Estonia, Kaja Kallas, the country’s former Prime Minister who is now the European Union’s foreign-policy chief, expressed her sadness last week at the Trump Administration freezing the funding for Radio Free Europe. It “has been a beacon of democracy, and very valuable,” Kallas said in Brussels. “Now the question for us is, Can we come in with our funding to fill the void that U.S. is leaving?”
But my point is not nostalgia, and it’s not even really about these noble nations. It’s about our own country, which has been blessed with many decades of relative calm since the end of the war, a calm that allowed it to develop into the richest nation on earth. That calm, more or less, lasted through January: even Trump couldn’t come up with a much stronger epithet than “sleepy” for his predecessor. Obviously it’s been more prosperous for some than others, and obviously there have been upheavals—Watergate, 9/11, COVID—but nothing that permanently interrupted our historically enviable tranquility. That tranquillity, among other things, made America the economic safe haven in every crisis, our Treasury notes the rough equivalent of money under the mattress for a less lucky rest of the world.
That’s gone now, or so it seems. Trump, driven by his own bizarre demons, decided that America had somehow been unjustly treated and that it should use the power it had acquired to bully everyone else into submission—into paying tribute to, well, him. (Other nations were “bending the knee,” Karoline Leavitt, his press secretary, insisted.) It didn’t work as well as he’d anticipated: plenty of other nations decided not to back down, and around the world people seemed to be fleeing the dollar amid the chaos, a new phenomenon that finally seems to have rattled even the President and forced an ignominious retreat. But it seems unlikely that we will simply repair to the status quo ante; Liberation Day may actually have ushered in a certain kind of new and largely unwelcome freedom for the rest of the world, no longer able to trust the American umbrella for protection from global weather.
Viewed one way, all the ugliness since Inauguration Day seems like a bizarre effort to uproot and destroy America’s calm. The President has declared one emergency after another—a timber emergency, an immigration emergency, a trade emergency. Elon Musk—the richest man in the world, but also maybe the most easily bored—seems to be bent on almost random destruction, lighting on one agency after another and leaving it in a shambles. All the institutions of the postwar order and prosperity—our great universities, our public-health system, our scientific-research establishment—have been damaged, perhaps beyond repair. Not because they were costing huge sums, but because of, at best, a series of resentments that arise when people have too much prosperity and ease. The conservative commentator Matthew Schmitz, for instance, told the Times on Monday that Trump had had no choice but to bring down the United States Agency for International Development, with its globe-spanning work on public health, because our Embassies had had the temerity to fly the rainbow flag during Pride Month beginning in 2011, even though “45 percent of the country opposed gay marriage at the time.” Destroying American soft power in response to that kind of mild perceived affront is a petulance only afforded the very, very secure—a category to which we may no longer belong.
And we no longer really belong to the world community, either, at least as anything other than trouble. We may not be maintaining torture cells (though our decision to deport detainees to a notorious prison in El Salvador has a K.G.B. vibe) but the U.S. certainly opted out of the one true global project—to somehow deal with climate change—immediately upon Trump’s ascension to his would-be throne. On Tuesday, his Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick, explained that the U.S. will pull four million dollars from Princeton’s gold-standard climate research because its findings—that the earth is overheating—were “contributing to a phenomenon known as ‘climate anxiety’ which has increased significantly among America’s youth.” It’s kind of the Administration to be worried about their uneasiness, but I don’t think they’ve figured out its more immediate sources. ♦
