"If your strategy is cautious and deep, it's a lot you've won with your own foresight, so you can be victorious even before you start fighting. If your strategic mindset is shallow and short-sighted, there’s little you can gain with your own foresight, so you’ll be a loser even before you start the fight. That is why it is said that warriors who are victorious, win and then go to war; and warriors who must be defeated, first go to war, then presumably they will be victorious."

Translations into translation, it will be about two thousand five hundred years since this was written, in Chinese, as a corollary in the first section of the infamous Art of War that we attribute to the hypothetical Sun Tzu. I would like to praise the importance of strategic foresight. It does not seem to be responsible for the launching of the tariff war, at least economic, which is war (?) that the Americans were in a mood to read it. Or, if they have read it, that they have understood it.

A lot of jokes have been made about the fact that the penguin has also imposed tariffs on an island with no other inhabitants. On the contrary, the experts and the barefoot observers have become very angry with the clumsy treachery in the form of an "equation" with which the decision has been made. But so far, few have mentioned the source of all this and, from Sun Tzu’s point of view, what would be the most serious flaw of the initiative: the lack of a prudent and thorough strategy.

When he imposed tariffs on China during his first term, Trump’s goal was officially to eliminate the U.S. trade deficit with that country, but in practice, I would say it was to make him sit at the negotiating table and reach an advantageous agreement. In the opinion of most experts, these tariffs did more harm than good to the United States. On January 15, 2020, the agreement between the two countries was signed, and Trump presented it as a victory.

The pandemic that was already beginning left the consensus in abeyance, and in subsequent years the trade imbalance between the two major world powers has continued in the same way as before. Now that we're finding out, they say they're something of an anathema to Trump.

Anatema or not anatema, he wanted to make tariff quarrels the central key of his second term. Expanding to the whole world. But if the strategy was a bit obscure in the first period, in this second it takes a passionate imagination to detect signs of something like this. Is it the equalization of trade with each country? Making one-on-one deals with each of them? Do you really think that this way you can reindustrialize the United States and get enough for anything? Is it easier to solve the problem with China (or anyone else)... spread all over the world?

In short: is it a strategy to sow chaos? We won't ask if it's discreet and profound.