Donald Trump’s Tariffs: Protectionism Without Production Is a Road to Recession – The second Trump administration is not wasting time. In a matter of weeks, it has rolled out a sweeping set of new tariffs on imports from China and other major trading partners. Everything from electric vehicles to microchips to consumer electronics is now subject to steep new levies. Some products are being hit with tariffs north of 60 percent. This is not a symbolic gesture. It’s a sharp break from the neoliberal consensus of the past thirty years—and it’s being framed as a turning point in American economic strategy.
The political appeal is obvious. Tariffs are easy to understand and easier to sell. They sound strong, nationalistic, and punitive. They suggest control in a world that feels increasingly unstable. But the deeper reality is more troubling. These tariffs, on their own, are unlikely to achieve the results the administration hopes for. Worse, they are already generating serious costs. If this approach isn’t coupled with a massive, sustained effort to rebuild real productive capacity at home, the country may be headed straight for a recession of its own making.
Markets saw it coming. Within hours of the announcement, stocks tumbled. The major indices posted their worst one-day drop since the early days of the pandemic. The dollar wobbled. Investors ran for cover. The warning signs weren’t subtle. This was more than a reaction to temporary volatility. What we are witnessing is the market pricing in the possibility that the world’s largest economy is about to tax itself into contraction. The costs are already being passed on. Importers are raising prices. Distributors are adjusting contracts. And middle-class consumers—the people these policies claim to help—are going to feel it in higher prices across the board.
The data points are ugly. Projected inflation, which had been moderating, is now creeping back up. Core goods are more expensive. Grocery prices are being squeezed by tariffs on Mexican and Canadian agricultural imports. Energy costs are spiking in the Midwest thanks to new duties on Canadian crude. And manufacturing sectors that rely on global inputs—automotive, aerospace, electronics—are facing sharp increases in component costs with no short-term way to substitute them. A policy meant to protect domestic industry may end up crushing it under a pile of inflated expenses.
None of this should come as a surprise. America doesn’t produce enough. That’s the core problem. Tariffs don’t address it—they expose it. If you try to wall off your market from foreign goods without rebuilding your own capacity to produce, you don’t get revival. You get scarcity and inflation. You get layoffs. You get political backlash. And you get a public that quickly turns against the very policy it was told would restore national strength.
Some will argue that the pain is worth it. That short-term economic dislocation is necessary to break dependency on China. That we need to harden the economy now, even if it hurts. And in principle, they’re not wrong. But what’s missing here is the preparation. You can’t shock the economy into resilience. You have to build it. That means factories. It means infrastructure. It means logistics, energy, skilled labor, and capital investment. You can’t just raise tariffs and assume the rest will take care of itself. You have to plan for the transition, and so far, there’s no evidence that’s happening at the scale required.
Meanwhile, American exporters are about to find themselves on the receiving end of retaliation. China, the EU, and other major partners are preparing countermeasures. That means fewer markets for American goods. It means pain for farmers, aerospace manufacturers, and machinery exporters—many of them operating in the very states that delivered Trump’s return to office. This is how trade wars spiral. And once you’re in one, it’s hard to get out.
There’s also the strategic dimension to consider. A weakened U.S. economy—squeezed by inflation and slowed by trade disruption—is not better positioned to compete with China. It’s more vulnerable. It’s less agile. It has fewer resources to allocate to defense, fewer options in diplomacy, and less credibility in the eyes of allies. Economic strength is national strength. Undermining it with an unbalanced tariff policy is not going to make America more secure. It’s going to do the opposite.
None of this is an argument for going back to the status quo ante. The free trade orthodoxy of the past thirty years failed. It hollowed out critical industries, enriched adversaries, and left America dependent on fragile global supply chains. That model needed to be abandoned—and to his credit, Trump was the first national political figure in a generation to say so without apology. But rejecting the old model doesn’t mean embracing a new one that is equally unbalanced. Tariffs are a tool, not a strategy. They can support a national industrial policy, but they cannot substitute for one.
If the Trump administration wants to succeed in its stated goal of economic reindustrialization, it needs to put just as much political muscle behind building as it does behind punishing. That means aggressive action on permitting reform. It means expanding domestic mining and refining. It means rethinking vocational education and reshaping defense procurement. It means acknowledging that you can’t just make imports expensive—you have to make domestic production viable.
This is also where a strategy of restraint matters. If we want to reduce exposure abroad, we need to increase capacity at home. That applies to military posture and industrial policy alike. You cannot pursue a restrained, regionally focused foreign policy without the means to support it. That means ships, weapons, logistics, energy, and infrastructure. None of it materializes overnight. And none of it survives a stagflationary shock caused by tariff-induced price spirals and retaliatory export restrictions.
Time is short. The world is moving fast. China is expanding its industrial footprint while we argue about how much to tax their exports. Our allies are watching, wondering whether the United States can remain a stable economic partner. And at home, families are about to discover that economic nationalism, done poorly, hits their grocery bills and gas pumps long before it revives their communities.
There’s still time to recalibrate. But that window is closing. Tariffs can play a role in strategic competition, but only if they are used to buy time for genuine domestic renewal. That means real investment, real reform, and real political courage.
If all we get is protectionism without production, the tariffs won’t save us. They’ll break us.
About the Author: Andrew Latham
Andrew Latham is a non-resident fellow at Defense Priorities and a professor of international relations and political theory at Macalester College in Saint Paul, MN. Andrew is now a Contributing Editor to 19FortyFive, where he writes a daily column. You can follow him on X: @aakatham.
