Trump mission: Making the US the hub of exports rather than imports it is today
 Long-time meccas for tourists, San Francisco, Chicago and New York are now awash with homeless drug addicts lounging and lurching about in the open air, occasionally lunging at passersby.
In the face of this, and many other signs of urban decay, US President Donald Trump decided to fix what was wrong. That is restore US manufacturing, once the envy of the world.
His plan is to apply tariffs to induce factory owners worldwide to establish operations on US soil and enjoy tax breaks galore, or suffer high tariffs as importers.
Over the decades, North American and European consumers have outsourced their garments and electronics in Asia because of bolshie unions at home and grateful Asians abroad.
As offshoring took over, plants across America and Europe shut down, and men who were the chief victims became addicted to video games and fentanyl.
Curiously, the fate of deep distress that befell America, also afflicted Europe in the "Dirty Thirties" of the Great Depression. And co-incidentally, two heads of state took the reins of power in the same year, 1933.
The two, Adolf Hitler and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, escaped their unenviable economic plight in much the same way, through deficit infrastructure and military spending.
But such deficit spending is not open to President Trump - pledged as he is to cut government expense. He must accomplish what Hitler and Roosevelt did without increasing the astronomical national debt of US$37 trillion.
Nor could he risk burdening taxpayers with new taxes if he had any hope of keeping control of the two houses of Congress after the mid-term elections in November 2026.
The US has also announced that a major shipbuilding programme and one would not be surprised if that would not see the Jones Act rigorously applied, seeing that anyone to do with newbuilds would be wholly American.
It is hoped that the funds to meet shipbuilding costs would come out of the Department of Government Efficiency's (DOGE) discovery of fraud and waste. DOGE chief Elon Musk figures he can winkle out US$1.67 trillion from the federal government's annual budget $6.67 trillion, and at least that much from the state and municipal governments after DOGE runs its course.
While all is going as well as can be expected in the US, the situation is less hopeful in the UK and EU. While there is a widespread upbeat movement in the US to Make America Great Again, there is a downbeat All-is-Lost mood in the EU that finds shame in the existing order and wishes to have it be something else.
This mood is actively encouraged, and even legally enforced, stifling democratic expression that seeks fundamental reform, reversing engine if not the demolition of the left-liberal establishment.
That establishment is enamoured of bureaucratic fads such as DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) and ESG (environment, social, governance) and the quixotic quest for net-zero CO2 emissions. Another bureaucratic cause is transgenderism in which boys can declare themselves to be girls and vice versa, and to make it illegal to say otherwise.
If President Trump's plan comes to fruition, and the Republicans win the House and the Senate, and the DOGE purge continues a pace, then Trump will likely be succeeded by his vice president JD Vance. Again, if all goes well, and there is enough reshored manufacturing to achieve high levels of employment, and the upbeat mood draws in new investment, and cost-savings are generated by government efficiency, then all should go according to the Trump plan.
But Europe is at an earlier stage of metamorphosis. In the US, the democratic will to reform was given teeth with the 2024 presidential election, which has transformed our figurative caterpillar into a butterfly. However, Europe is at the larva stage thwarted from transforming into a caterpillar by an entrenched civil service and judiciary, having declared a populist reform-minded election result in Romania null and void and jailing reformer Marine Le Pen and preventing her from running in the next election.
The UK's Labour government has jailed Tommy Robinson, a campaigner demanding, without success, a full public inquiring into the Muslim rape and grooming gangs in the north of England. He was jailed for breaking a court order not to show a documentary he made on the grooming gangs.
How will all this impact of world shipping. The transpacific trade will become a shadow of its former self if the Trump scheme works. One sees far fewer transits through the Panama Canal because there will be fewer ships from Asia accessing US east coast ports. One can see a coastal trade thriving from north eastern ports to Gulf ports as sea carriage is still cheaper than rail or road transport.
One suspects Trump's counterintuitive support for Mark Carney, the Canadian Liberal prime minister, support that is quite at odds with the views of his MAGA fellow travellers, has more to do with moving his pension management giant, Brookfield Wealth Solutions, from Toronto to New York. Or could it be that Mr Carney's woke-minded policies are supported by Trump because they are just the slow/no growth plans will drive Canada to wrack and ruin and induce its citizens to become the 51st state?
Europe's shipping to/from Asia is likely to be the most robust trade and is as likely to be as strong as the transpacific will be weak. The way Europe is structured today is rather like it was in 1815 at the time of the German Confederation of 39 states.
What Europe has in common with America is a massive influx of migrants from impoverished non-OECD states, most of them young men of military age. The US in recent weeks has begun to expel them, a daunting task as 11 million illegals are said to be removed in the country.
Europe and the UK faces a similar problem, but have a hard time acknowledging that it is a problem, so overcome are they with emotional woke-ish sentiment. What's more they cannot cope with popular expressions of concern other than suppressing such concerns through hate speech laws.
If the Trump regime endures, its message will be transmitted with greater volume and amplify the corrective force of traditional values.
If woke forces triumph, the Asia-Europe trade is likely to shrink as Europe will be less able to buy the goods Asia has to sell. |
