There’s a Method to Trump’s Tariff Madness

President Trump’s imposition of high tariffs on friend and foe alike has stunned the world and stumped economists. There is no economic rationale, experts say, for believing these tariffs will usher in a new era of American prosperity.

But there is order amid the chaos, or at least a strategy behind it. Mr. Trump’s tariffs aren’t really about tariffs. They are the opening gambit in a more ambitious plan to smash the world’s economic and geopolitical order and replace it with something intended to better serve American interests.

This plan is often referred to as the Mar-a-Lago Accord. Apparently devised by Mr. Trump and two of his top economic advisers, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Stephen Miran, the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, it seeks to improve the United States’ global trading position by using tariffs and other strong-arm tactics to force the world to take a radical step: weakening the dollar via currency agreements. This devaluation, the theory goes, would make U.S. exports more competitive, put economic pressure on China and increase manufacturing in the United States.

There is genuine economic, social and political discontent driving this plan. Given the demise of U.S. manufacturing and the post-Cold War development of a technologically interconnected world shaped by new geopolitical rivalries, some sort of reset of the economic order probably makes sense for the United States.

But the slash-and-burn approach of the Mar-a-Lago Accord isn’t the answer. For one thing, it is hard to find an economist outside of Mr. Trump’s inner circle who thinks it is a good idea. But even if, despite all the chaos it will unleash, the United States eventually prospers as a result, we will have traded away the core economic and political values that make America truly great.

This is not the first time that concerns about an overly strong U.S. dollar have prompted a major policy response. In more than just its name, the Mar-a-Lago Accord echoes the Plaza Accord of 1985, an agreement among the G5 nations, signed at the Plaza Hotel in New York City, to devalue the dollar through a series of coordinated moves.