Trump's Tariff Policy Sets the U.S. on a Collision Course With The World

by Dennis Small (EIRNS) — Jul. 30, 2025 EST - European Union flag. Trump's tariff against the European Union is just one of many tariff's being implemented by the Trump Administration. Credit: cc/Håkan Dahlström

On July 27, the United States imposed a broad trade deal with the European Union which included the imposition of 15% tariffs on all EU exports to the United States—a “deal” which will further devastate the once-strong physical economies of Germany, France, Italy, and other nations. Although the numbers change from day to day, the U.S. now has either tariffs or threatened tariffs in place of: 15% on the EU; 25% on India; 50% on China; 50% on Brazil; 19% on Indonesia; 30% on South Africa; 25-30% on Mexican and Canadian goods not covered by the USMCA; and, of course, the total sanctions on Russia—among others.

A good starting point to understand what’s really behind the tariff warfare against the world, is to note that the purported architect of that trade policy, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, is also one of the prime movers of the cryptocurrency and stablecoin frenzy sweeping Washington and the world. Lutnick’s Wall Street investment bank, Cantor Fitzgerald, is the investment manager for Tether, the largest stablecoin on the market. And “Lutnick appears to have ‘sold’ candidate Donald Trump in 2024 on the argument that cryptocurrencies will ‘drive the demand for Treasuries worldwide’ and ‘ensure dollar dominance indefinitely,’” EIR’s Paul Gallagher has reported.

So what we are looking at is far worse than simple, beggar-thy-neighbor bullying. Rather, the Trump tariffs are a key element of the City of London and Wall Street global looting policy to—yet again—try to prop up their unpayable $2 quadrillion speculative financial bubble with booty from around the world, combined with a vast new flood of funny-money under the rubric of crypto-currency and stablecoins.

Will all of this work? Highly unlikely. Consider the response of Brazilian President Lula da Silva to the threatened 50% tariffs, scheduled to take effect this Friday, Aug. 1. He told the New York Times July 30 that “Brazil will negotiate as a sovereign country.… If the United States doesn’t want to buy something of ours, we are going to look for someone who will. We have an extraordinary trade relationship with China.… I have no preference. I have an interest in selling to whoever wants to buy from me—to whoever pays more.”

Other nations that, like Brazil, are part of the BRICS, are getting the same treatment from Washington and London. And, with fits and starts, they have all begun to shift their global trade patterns away from the United States and towards fellow nations of the Global Majority. India, for example, purchased less than 1% of its oil imports from Russia before the Ukraine war; in June of 2025, it surpassed 43%. India is highly dependent on crude oil imports to meet its domestic needs, getting some 87% from imports.

If Wall Street is able to lock in this collision course with the world as policy in Washington, then we can expect further wars and further genocide to maintain the bankrupt old system. If that lock can be broken, and new alliances among nations—including the United States—are built on behalf of a new security and development architecture, then Mankind may yet demonstrate the moral fitness to survive.

Casting the darkest of dark shadows over all of these developments, is the unfolding horror in Gaza, where the intentional genocide through starvation of an entire people continues. “We are witnessing the moral catastrophe of all of humanity,” Helga Zepp-LaRouche told viewers of her July 30 weekly webcast. “It is the mirror of the moral condition of the world” that Mankind has tolerated this atrocity for the last two years, while most of its political leaders have engaged in the “disgusting hypocrisy” of lame hand-wringing while refusing to act to stop the Netanyahu government—and its British and American controllers.

Continuing political mobilization around the world is urgently needed, Zepp-LaRouche urged, to strengthen the growing chorus of voices around the world demanding an end to the genocide—and to the system which produced it.