longer.blue

I can't belive so many U.S and European officials and "experts" are touting Trump's "U-turn" on Russia as a major game changer, under the assumption that America is so essential to the world's survival that everybody will do whatever it takes to escape such punitive tariffs. Hello? Have these people been living under a rock this past year? China was already slapped with 145% tariffs, and we all saw how that played out. They'd have even less incentive to cut off Russia over tariffs because, as China sees it, the Americans are effectively asking China to help them defeat China's closest ally so the Americans can turn their full might and attention on China next. India might seem more amenable, but that too is misguided. It's true that India-China relations hit rock bottom after the deadly 2020 border clash, which prompted Modi to push for closer ties to the West. Yet, the odds of India ceasing trade with Russia are close to zero, for several reasons. 1: India has had close ties to Russia for a long time, share a a history of opposing western imperialism together, a significant portion of India's military equipment is still Russian even if India is pushing hard to reduce that dependence, and Indian elites have little trust in America, doubly so post Trump. 2: In fact, Trump's hostility and unpredictability has already spurred India to hedge its bets and mend ties with China, which are much warmer now than 5 years ago. They even started conducting joint patrols as a confidence building measure. 3: India buys A LOT of oil from Russia. Even if it wanted to, it simply has no cost-effective alternative to all that energy, if at all. 4: India is fearful of the ever closer ties China and Russia are building, because India's nightmare scenario is a Russia that supports China, or worse, even fights alongside it, in the event of an extremely unlikely but technically not impossible new Sino-Indian war. The country is still haunted by its defeat in 1962. India's bet is that nurturing its ties with Russia will at least convince it to stay neutral in such a war. It's very easy to see how helping efforts to collapse Russia's economy is, to put it mildly, harmful to that effort. Of the big countries still trading with Russia, Brazil might be the most vulnerable and likely to fall in line, but even that would be a hard sell because, like India, Brazil imports stuff from Russia that it just can't replace, most of all fertilizers. However, Trump's 50% tariffs make the whole thing moot. If it kicks in, it matters little if the rate is 50% or 100%, it's a lot of damage either way. Now that the 50% threat was already made and the country rallied around defending its sovereignty, the government has even less incentive to fold over threats of bigger tariffs. All of that means only small countries that trade tiny volumes with Russia will fall in line, which means the impact on Russia will be negligible. And even these countries might not universally fall in line, depending on how much damage whatever tariff Trump decides for them does. Consider: it's one thing to be suddenly threatened with, in effect, losing access to the U.S market overnight. It's quite another if your country is already facing hypothetical 40% tariffs that already collapsed 60% of your U.S exports. So much for "game-changer".