Advertisement
Inside Out & Outside In
OpinionComment
David Dodwell
David Dodwell

In a Trumpian world where the US is the No 1 trade victim, no country is safe

  • The narrative of US goods trade deficits has been feeding Donald Trump’s sense of victimhood
  • The US has picked fights with many of its trading partners, and is now targeting Vietnam for daring to improve its manufacturing and export economy

Reading Time:4 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
Commuters walk past a China Luxshare Precision Industry Company factory in Vietnam’s Bac Giang province. The US is opening an investigation into whether Vietnam has been undervaluing its currency and harming US commerce. Photo: Bloomberg
David Dodwell
If there is a single issue on which Donald Trump and his administration have been consistent, it is their obsession with trade, and their allergy to bilateral trade deficits.
Advertisement
And by trade, the US president means trade in manufactured goods, not services. Trump has never bothered much about services trade, despite the colossal importance of services exports to the US economy.

I have never known why he seems only to get excited about goods trade – what one US trade official friend calls “stuff you can drop on your foot”. Perhaps it just makes a complicated world feel comfortingly simple.

Above all, the narrative of US goods-trade deficits has for years fed in Trump a deep and improbable sense of victimhood: “We’ve been ripped off by everybody,” he said from a podium in the White House back in 2018. “Our country has been abused and taken advantage of by virtually every country that it does business with.”

And, of course, he alleges that no country has done more ripping off than China. “China has taken out of this country US$500 billion and more – a year. … And I’ve changed that around.” he said at that same White House briefing.

Herein are the Manichaean roots of Trump’s evangelical mission to root out the existential, evil challenge from China. But this delusional obsession with victimhood has also provided the justification for picking fights with virtually all the US’ trading partners – whether the Koreans, Japanese or Europeans for steel, aluminium and cars, Canada for its dairy products, Mexico for disproportionate advantages from the North American Free Trade Agreement, or India for its export subsidies.
Advertisement