Trump's trade war goes global: U.S. president blows up postwar order

After spending a few weeks pounding on Canada and Mexico, Donald Trump turned his attention Wednesday to a whole new target: the rest of Planet Earth.

The U.S. president broadened his trade war by imposing the widest set of tariffs in generations, effectively resetting the postwar trading system.

The only good news for Canada, such as it is, is that when Trump came swinging fast and furiously with new tariffs, it took no new lumps.

The good news ends there. 

The bad news is that previously announced tariffs will remain in place: potentially devastating auto tariffs that kick in Thursday, steel and aluminum tariffs of 25 per cent, 10 per cent on energy and potash, and 25 per cent on certain other goods.

For Trump, this was a personal Kodak moment. 

Standing on the White House lawn, he referred to this as the culmination of an old dream, given his decades as a dyed-in-the-wool protectionist.

"I've been talking about it for 40 years," Trump said.

"If you look at my old speeches when I was young, very handsome, in my old speeches… I'd be talking about how we were being ripped off by these countries." 

He added: "It's such an honour to be finally able to do this."

And by "this" he meant imposing tariffs ranging from 10 per cent to an eye-watering 50 per cent on some countries — shocking not only markets, but potentially realigning the planet's geopolitical map, with the U.S. retrenching to this hemisphere.

We'll see which countries, if any, negotiate a better deal. But the initial pattern is clear: Trump has flipped the tables on Asia.

There, where the U.S. had been cultivating allies against China, trading partners now face tariffs of 46 per cent (Vietnam), 49 per cent (Cambodia), 24 per cent (Japan), 32 per cent (Taiwan), 26 per cent (India) and 37 per cent (Bangladesh). China also got a 34-per-cent tariff.

Anyone selling clothing or electronics into the U.S. now has some incentive to shift production to Latin America, where tariffs are mostly 10 per cent.