The Illusion of Strategy: Tariffs, Decline, and the Empire That Can’t Admit It’s Falling

While Trump rages and Bessent scrambles, global markets, working families, and America's last illusions are all quietly slipping away.

The United States is not leading a trade war, instead it's staging a cover-up. Behind the bluster of tariffs, the performative raids, and the carefully constructed language of economic nationalism lies the deeper truth that Professor Richard Wolff has been warning us about: this is what imperial decline looks like when it’s camouflaged as strength. The economic tools being used, tariffs, interest rate hikes, labor market deregulation, child labor rollbacks aren’t signs of innovation or resilience. They are symptoms of panic, designed not to win anything, but to delay the reckoning that everyone in power knows is coming.

Trump's economic pitch, now laced with fantastical claims like replacing all income taxes with import tariffs, is not a strategy. It’s a mirage meant to distract from the one fact that no administration, Republican or Democrat, has the courage to say aloud: the American empire is no longer sustainable. Manufacturing is not coming back, no matter how many tax cuts or punitive tariffs are promised. Investors know it. Japan knows it. China knows it. And the global south, long treated as a labor reservoir for U.S. corporations, is quietly decoupling from the dollar. The U.S. working class, meanwhile, is being sacrificed again, to finance the illusion of stability. And this time, even the tariffs aren’t real. They’re taxes dressed up as foreign punishment, passed directly to American consumers through rising prices and shrinking wages.

Wolff's diagnosis cuts through the noise: tariffs are not about reviving American industry. They’re about reassuring the financial class that Washington will do something, anything, to slow the bleeding. In this case, that “something” is a shell game that avoids taxing the rich or corporations and instead taxes everyone else, especially those least able to afford it. This is what he calls "the other side" of austerity, tariffs as ideological camouflage for a fiscal policy that won’t admit its dependence on debt, foreign creditors, and constant war.