AT MIDNIGHT on Thursday the US tariff war on the rest of the world erupted as Donald Trump’s ‘reciprocal’ levies on imports from foreign countries came into force.
The tariffs charged on each country vary wildly with countries like Syria, split apart by warring factions following the imperialist-orchestrated coup to remove president Assad, having 41% imposed.
Brazil faced a 10% tariff originally but this was increased dramatically to 50% by Trump in retaliation for the Brazilian government bringing charges against one of his ‘buddies’, the right wing former president Jan Bolsonario for his alleged role in a plot to overturn the 2022 Brazilian election.
Brazil is also a target for being one of the founders of the BRICS group of nations that include Russia and China. BRICS, which now comprises ten countries including India, South Africa and the United Arab Emirates, was set up to by-pass the US dollar in global transactions. This represents a massive threat to the dollar supremacy.
The status of the dollar as the major world currency is the sole reason that America can run up a massive national debt of around $37 trillion, on which it is paying over $1 trillion a year in interest.
US capitalism is only kept going through debt and this debt depends on Trump maintaining the increasingly obvious fiction that the US is a powerhouse that cannot be challenged.
In an attempt to impose his mastery on the world India has now been hit with the threat that the 25% tariff imposed will be increased to 50% unless the country stops buying oil from Russia, a tactic that Trump has threatened to use on any other country that supplies Russia.
In attempting to reassert US imperialism’s domination over the world he has shattered the post war consensus amongst the capitalist nations of free and peaceful trading between countries.
This consensus was seen as the only way to prevent a repeat of the 1930s, when a global recession accelerated by a doomed attempt to bail the US out of economic collapse, by adopting the infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act as a protectionist response to the financial crash of Wall Street in 1929.
Tariffs on the world in 1930 accelerated recession across the world, leading directly to World War II.
Today, Trump’s tariff wars are deepening the recession in the US, and American workers are starting to suffer the consequences.
Mark Zandi, chief analyst at the giant investment company Moody’s Analytics, described the US as ‘on the precipice’ of a recession saying: ‘Manufacturing is in recession. Retail is holding on by its thumbs. It’s very close,’ adding that he believes a third of the US economy is already in recession.
US manufacturers have shed 33,000 jobs in 2025 as the effects of Trump’s tariff war start to emerge, giving a lie to his boast that tariffs would boost American jobs. The warning signs that the US was already in an economic recession became public last Friday when the US Bureau of Labour Statistics (BLS) revised down its employment estimates for May and June by 258,000 jobs.
Trump reacted with fury at these figures proving that US workers will bear all the pain of his tariffs with unemployment and rocketing inflation by sacking the head of BLS and denouncing these figures as ‘fake’.
It is not Trump’s policies that have caused capitalism internationally to dive headlong into recession. His tariff war is a desperate attempt to survive by a US capitalist system drowning in debt and determined to make the working class in America and throughout the world pay the price by dumping recession on their backs.
But this is not the 1930s and capitalism faces a powerful and undefeated working class which will never accept being driven into starvation to keep capitalism from crashing into bankruptcy.
The working class internationally has the power to resolve the crisis by smashing capitalism through the organisation of mass general strikes that go forward to seizing power and establishing a world socialist planned economy.
The decisive issue today is building sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International in every country to organise the victory of the world socialist revolution.
