From the 1970s to the 2000s, the US ruling class gleefully outsourced millions of American jobs. There seemed to be very little downside from their point of view—they simply exploited cheaper foreign labor and watched their profits grow ever higher.

In their arrogance and short-sightedness, they failed to consider that this state of affairs might ever be called into question.

Now, the American bourgeoisie has realized more clearly than ever that it deindustrialized the US, and that China has arisen as a major rival imperialist power.

Faced with this reality, both bourgeois parties have turned towards protectionist measures in an effort to safeguard the domination of US companies and export their social problems abroad. The relative decline of US imperialism has forced them down a path they never anticipated.

Bipartisan support for protectionism

Since Trump’s reelection, the liberal media has renewed its campaign to blame all of the capitalist system’s problems on Trump as an individual. Trump’s “reckless” actions are singlehandedly unraveling the US-led world order, they say. But behind these theatrics, the liberals largely agree with the general direction set by Trump with respect to world trade.

As The New York Times acknowledged last August, “Both Democrats and Republicans are expressing support for tariffs to protect American industry, reversing decades of trade thinking in Washington.”

Both major wings of the US bourgeoisie presided over the previous decades of “free trade.” However, faced with rival powers abroad, and unemployment, deindustrialization, and growing social discontent at home, both parties of the US ruling class have turned toward protectionism

As early as 2002, America’s economic domination over the world was starting to fray. That year, George W. Bush implemented temporary tariffs on steel imports, in an attempt to allow the domestic industry to “adapt to the large influx of foreign steel.”

Later that decade, Obama tested the waters of a possible trade war with China. He placed a 35% tariff on Chinese tires between 2009 and 2012—later bragging that it saved a whopping 1,200 American jobs. He also included a “Buy American” provision in his 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which mandated the use of US-made iron, steel, and manufactured goods in all public projects funded by the stimulus package.

Trump intensified this process with his 2018 tariffs on Chinese steel, aluminum, washing machines, solar panels, and other goods, prompting retaliation from the Chinese ruling class.

On the campaign trail in 2020, Biden pledged to remove Trump’s tariffs upon getting to office. But having won the presidency, he proceeded to leave almost all of them in place, later adding a series of new tariffs on Chinese imports.

Between May and September 2024, Biden implemented tariffs on Chinese-made clothing, solar panels, electric vehicles, syringes, steel, semiconductors, advanced batteries, and more. This included quadrupling the tariffs on Chinese-made electric vehicles, from 25% to 100%.

Not only that. In September last year, the Biden administration also released a report on the impact of Trump’s first-term tariffs on China. The New York Times summarized its findings:

The report, which runs to 187 pages, concluded that the Trump tariffs had been effective in reducing US exposure to harmful trade practices from China, and that they should be maintained … As part of the review, the Biden administration said it was adding or increasing tariffs on additional products from China, including electric vehicles, battery parts, medical gloves, graphite, semiconductors and other goods. Those levies will go into effect on September 27. The Biden administration put forward some of these additional tariffs in May, but this week’s report finalized those measures, as well as proposed additional levies on tungsten and solar products.

While they rail against Trump’s tariffs, the liberal media prefers to mention these facts as little as possible.

Oversaturated market

Many people are asking themselves, “Why is this happening?” In their own way, the capitalists have given us a very straightforward answer. As Biden’s Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen, said in May 2024:

During my trip to Beijing last month, I raised our concerns on Chinese industrial overcapacity to economic policymakers at the highest levels of the PRC government. President Biden and I have seen firsthand the impacts of surges of certain artificially cheap Chinese imports on American communities in the past, and we will not tolerate that again.

Essentially, the problem is that the world has too much wealth and technology for capitalism to contain. Mankind’s productive forces are coming up against the limits of private property and the nation-state. China is “too good” at efficiently producing consumer goods. And due to the absurd logic of capitalism, this “must be stopped”—rather than harnessed rationally to the benefit of all.

The capitalists are walking a tightrope. They hope that tariffs will strengthen US manufacturing and “reshore” key industries, perhaps leading to more social stability if some jobs come back. But those “cheap Chinese goods” that bourgeois politicians whine about have become integral to sustaining American living standards in the 21st century, and the inflation caused by tariffs can seriously come back to bite. There are no good options under a declining system.

The bourgeois cringe at Trump’s approach to tariffs for the same reason they distrust him in general: he’s a wildcard—an unreliable element at the helm of their system who doesn’t think things through. But at the end of the day, the Democrats are likewise forced by the logic of their system to pursue a trade war against Chinese capitalism, as well as their European “allies.” As a recent New York Times headline put it, “Democrats Widely Blast Trump’s Tariffs, but Not Necessarily Tariffs.”

In 2020, Obama lamented to The Atlantic that the 2008 financial crisis hamstrung him from more seriously considering starting a trade war with China:

I actually think that it is entirely legitimate to push China much harder on trade issues … If we hadn’t been going through a financial crisis, my posture toward China would have been more explicitly contentious around trade issues. But I couldn’t have a trade war in 2009 or 2010.

The working class has no interest in this absurd game, which threatens to drive down the living standards of millions across the world. We fight for the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of a rational planned economy, run in collaboration with the workers of China and all other countries.

As the global crisis of overproduction deepens, the US bourgeoisie will continue to come under these pressures. Either keep the status quo in place—which has meant economic decline and political instability—or continue pursuing protectionist measures that threaten to tip the economy into recession and even greater chaos. Neither free trade nor protectionism can cure the dying capitalist system. Only the socialist revolution offers a way forward.