President Trump’s “Liberation Day” of increased tariffs naturally produced a widely varied and often agitated response. Any evaluation of his tariff policy must be made in the context of the belated post-Cold War adjustment of American leadership. 

This is the transformation of a defensive alliance by placation and incentivization into an alliance of mainly democratic countries strengthened by success in the Cold War and maintaining and enhancing their position by a new method of everybody pulling their weight and paying their way. This had been foretold by some individuals and was bound to happen eventually. 

There is no logical reason why the United States should have a large trade deficit. Mr. Trump’s customary negotiating technique is a shock and awe opening designed to shake the interlocutor into a disposition to de-escalate matters by concessions. This technique has often worked for Mr. Trump before, in politics as in commerce and if it doesn’t he can always take the initiative in de-escalating himself without embarrassment. 

The fact that most of the countries affected have responded cautiously indicates that they appreciate the truthfulness of the president’s professed willingness to negotiate. The exception is Communist China which responded with 34 percent across-the-board tariffs. The Wall Street Journal proclaimed this a triumph for President Xi, but Mr. Trump himself described Mr. Xi’s action as a terrible mistake based on panic. 

Fifty countries have already declared their wish to negotiate with America, tentatively confirming the tactical success of Mr. Trump’s initiative: Any successful negotiation will benefit America compared to the status quo ante, and will deescalate the nervosity of the financial markets, the least courageous of all of society’s principal components.

It must also be remembered that Trump is never averse to trading apples for oranges: levering trade concessions against contributions to NATO or policy changes in crisis areas such as Ukraine and the Middle East. This is a three-dimensional method of negotiation in which trade-offs can be made in apparently completely unconnected fields. 

Underlying it all is the president’s determination to boost employment, especially sophisticated manufacturing employment, and to repatriate a substantial amount of manufacturing to America while encouraging job-creating investment from abroad in the United States and using market access as an incentive. He has already announced more than $1 trillion of new foreign investment. 

These are all legitimate objectives and they are made in the full knowledge that artificial intelligence, robotization, and other dramatic scientific progress is going to reduce the labor intensity of many activities. Seen from this perspective, Mr. Trump is trying to position America in the vanguard of technological progress while maximizing the most technologically invulnerable job creation preemptively and getting rid of an annoying and anachronistic trade imbalance.

He also clearly believes that tariffs can generate a good deal of federal government revenue at a time when he is extending tax cuts and hoping to add new tax cuts while increasing some defense expenditures to reinforce national security especially in hypersonic missiles and missile defense. He has pledged a good many tax reductions and it is reasonable to expect that these tariffs could produce significant revenue. 

American imports are now $4 trillion. If they are reduced to $3 trillion, a ten percent tariff would yield an additional $300 billion in federal revenue. Added to what he expects the DOGE spending reductions to achieve, and what enhanced economic activity might generate in increased revenue, this could make tariffs a significant element in an early reduction of more than half of the $2 trillion annual federal government deficit. None of these goals and premises is unreasonable.

As long as Mr. Trump moves reasonably quickly on the negotiating front and makes the case that he is, as he claims, seeking a fair trade, then hysteria will subside quickly and be confined to the impotent legions of foreign and domestic Trump-haters. This administration, through a very rough campaign and now ten weeks in office of intense activity, has maintained a clear and unified message. 

Fault lines have appeared on this issue, mainly because of Peter Navarro clinging to the fraud that tariffs on Canada were being imposed because of Canada’s failure to prevent undesirable people from entering America. On the northern border as on the southern, it is the border of America and it is up to Washington to put whatever security arrangements it wants on its border. Canada is a profoundly democratic country; it is not East Germany building barriers to prevent people from leaving. 

The comments about the 51st state were doubtless designed to stir up a hornets’ nest partly as a negotiating tactic and partly because with Trump, le roi s’amuse — he’s having fun. Mr. Navarro and Elon Musk should not be having a public debate about tariff policy. That is for the president to determine and to impose the administration line on his colleagues. 

Yet if Mr. Navarro is correct and what is being sought is not the elimination of unfairness in trading but a comprehensive lifting of the drawbridge and a return to Mussolini’s autarky with a democratic and much larger and richer country, and the president is not serious about negotiating in trade matters at all, then this policy will not be successful.

The president’s explanation of his goals is, as always, a great deal more believable than the differing interpretations of those who serve at his pleasure, much less the imputations of motive to him by his pathological enemies.