The Art of the Tariff: Trump’s Economic War Games

Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat. Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Picture a battlefield. Smoke, chaos, the distant roar of artillery. In the center of it all, there’s a Soldier, unshaven, uniform in disarray, sprinting wildly, clutching a grenade with the pin half-pulled. He’s not taking orders, not following a battle plan. He just knows he has a weapon and, by God, he’s going to use it. That’s Donald Trump with tariffs, a man who found an economic Javelin and decided to start firing, regardless of collateral damage or whether he was even aiming at the right enemy.

Trump’s justification for tariffs—China, Mexico, Canada, you name it—rests on a shaky invocation of “national security.” Much like certain wars have been launched under dubious pretexts, his latest escalation follows the same pattern. His 50% tariff on Canadian steel and aluminum, is a direct response to Ontario’s newly imposed 25% tariff on electricity exports to the U.S. This, in turn, was a retaliation against Trump’s broader trade war, proving once again that his tariffs create predictable counterattacks that he then treats as unjustified aggression.

The Bush administration had WMDs. LBJ had the Gulf of Tonkin. Trump? He has Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, which lets him slap tariffs on imports deemed a security threat. But just as Iraq’s stockpiles turned out to be a mirage, so too is Trump’s claim that Canadian steel and Mexican avocados are threats to the homeland. His stated justification for these tariffs is to pressure Canada and Mexico into better policing of fentanyl trafficking. While there is some argument for this on the southern border, applying the same logic to Canada stretches credibility to its limits.

Trump’s tariffs are not precision weapons, though he often pretends they are. He imagines himself operating at the strategic level, reshaping global trade with brute force. In reality, he’s stuck at the tactical level, lobbing economic grenades with no thought for the larger campaign.

Instead of shaping the battlefield, they explode like a miscalibrated mortar barrage, hitting allies, domestic industries, and American consumers just as often as foreign competitors. In theory, they protect domestic industries. In practice, they raise consumer prices, anger allies, and provoke retaliatory strikes. Trump, ever the battlefield improviser, doesn’t seem to grasp that tariffs, like nuclear weapons, invite mutual destruction. His 25 percent tariffs on Chinese goods? They boomeranged, hammering American farmers and manufacturers who suddenly found themselves cut off from supply chains they’d spent decades building. During his last administration, his steel and aluminum tariffs on Canada? They were met with precise retaliatory tariffs targeting politically sensitive industries, like Harley-Davidsons in Paul Ryan’s district. In 2025, retaliatory tariffs have been placed on bourbon from Mitch McConnell’s Kentucky, and even been discussions of a 100 percent tariff on Teslas. Unlike Trump’s wild mortar fire, Canada’s economic counterstrikes were more akin to a well-executed strategic bombing campaign—precise, devastating, and designed to inflict maximum political and economic pressure. And this wasn’t the first time. In his first term, Trump's washing machine tariffs backfired spectacularly, raising prices on both washing machines and dryers. While the tariffs created 1,800 U.S. jobs, the cost to consumers was staggering—$820,000 per job.

The WTO, the supposed rules-based umpire of trade disputes, ruled against Trump’s tariffs more than once. But much like a rogue commander ignoring the Geneva Conventions, Trump’s response was essentially: Who’s going to stop me?

"War is merely the continuation of politics by other means" - Carl von Clausewitz, On War

During the Vietnam War, nightly news broadcasts