Trump's Broken And Flawed Trade War Algorithm

2025-05-06 03:13:28

(MENAFN- Asia Times) There was a time when US diplomacy was conducted across mahogany tables , national security debates were articulated in full sentences and presidential decisions filtered through knowledgeable institutions.

But that era is over with the second coming of Donald J Trump, who governs not as a head of state but as a market-reactive mechanism . The US presidency has thus morphed into a volatile, screen-driven experiment in governance by impulse.

It is not policymaking; it is platform trading, with the global economy as collateral.

The algorithm is Trump -and the algorithm that is Trump is broken. For what it is worth, algorithms are supposed to be clear sets of rules designed to reach consistent outcomes. Trump, however, has internalized the form but exploded the function.

His presidency too frequently behaves like a misfiring trading bot -sensitive to fluctuations in the Dow, Nasdaq, VIX and Treasury yields but lacking the stability or logic of an AI model.

When the Nasdaq dives, his threatened tariffs vanish . When bond yields soar, trade war threats are dialed back. A spike in the CBOE Volatility Index (VIX) becomes a signal not of market instability but of foreign policy adjustment. This is not governance; it is a stochastic presidency-a jittery, jumpy reflex machine.

This new reality was starkly illustrated in the abrupt 90-day tariff reprieve Trump announced for certain Chinese tech imports. The decision wasn't born of any high-level dialogue with Beijing or recalibrated multilateralism.

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