Obama’s fierceness toward inward investors was only ‘soft’ in that it singled foreign companies out for longstanding Democratic Party anti-corporate gripes around the environment, safety and corruption. In this sense, we can say that Obama initiated trade wars under the guise of culture wars against the bad behaviour of foreign firms.
The EU has replied in kind. Brussels might not agree that its measures amount to a trade war, but it has been unrelenting in its pursuit of US companies – especially IT companies. The EU issued anti-monopoly fines against Microsoft ($731million, 2013), Intel ($1.4 billion, 2009) and Google (up to $7.45 billion, 2016), and attacked Apple for not paying enough tax. It now has Google, Apple, Facebook and WhatsApp in its sights over internet privacy.
US IT companies remain, in the eyes of the EU, just a little too big for their boots. They lack the finesse of, say, European companies. In this way the EU’s politically correct protectionism can distract from its failure to build a computer and software industry like the US.
The ‘Trump means trade war’ narrative gets still more shallow when people say that just as Trump will make trade hard, so other authoritarian national leaders – not just Trump, but also Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, India’s Narendra Modi, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping – will promise to do the same. Thus Guardian economics editor Larry Elliott believes that ‘just as in the 1930s, there is a prevailing cult of the strong man’ around the world; so if Trump could ‘bring the globalisation of the past quarter of a century to a juddering halt’, he might be aided and abetted by multiple Trumps abroad.
This is preposterous. Even Thomas Carlyle, the father of the ‘Great Man’ school of history, would blush at such a personalised, almost Freudian account of world trade. By focusing on easily disliked dictatorial figures, this knowing whitewash completely exonerates liberal politicians, on both sides of the Atlantic.
It is all far too convenient. Trump may well like the brutish, tariff-based protectionism of the pre-war era. But he will also continue the modern, righteous protectionism pioneered by Obama and the EU. The forces of world economy and politics are bigger than any one man.
James Woudhuysen is visiting professor of forecasting and innovation at London South Bank University. He is also editor of Big Potatoes: the London Manifesto for Innovation. Read his blog here.
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