i'm going to say this again.

i'm not ideologically opposed to tariffs. not rigidly, at least. although, if i was an american, i wouldn't want to put tariffs on europe - i would want to trade with europe. i would want to put tariffs on countries like china and mexico that have lower wage standards. this could in theory be used to protect american capital.

if america is putting steel tariffs on europe, it is neither to increase production in america nor to create jobs in the united states but to decrease labour benefits in europe. this is using tariffs for the reasons that free trade is usually used: as an attack on workers.

if you're an american capitalist, and you're not smart enough to be a fordist (which is the case for essentially all capitalists nowadays), your aim is always to reduce the amount paid to workers because this is seen as a reduction in profit. you would reduce workers to slaves, if you only could - because you're too short-sighted to care about the sustainability of the system and are blinded by immediate profit.

it would follow that you would want "free trade" with mexico because it would decline the labour standards in your own country, and you would also want tariffs with europe because it would decline the labour standards on that continent - which you're no doubt just as invested in.

today, capital is not multinational but transnational. it accepts no national boundaries. it has no allegiance to any value system, nor does it have any attachment to the workers in any specific country.

and, if you're a really savvy capitalist, and you've got a good stooge in office that the uneducated workers think is on their side, you can get away with this - by telling them that the tariffs are there to protect their jobs, when they're actually there to hurt the people they should be in solidarity with: workers across the ocean.

so, we have two problems with this. the first is that these tariffs will not help american workers, and are not intended to; they're designed to help european capital. this is the layer of governance where nato really exists: transnational capital flowing across the atlantic.

the other problem is that tariffs are hard. in this particular circumstance, you should expect european capital to attack it's workers rather than retaliate. people in europe are going to lose hard-fought for benefits. this is the collusion that is happening, and american shareholders will be the biggest winners in the end. but, in a different situation, where the tariffs are real, you need an economic general to co-ordinate the process, and trump is not the person - nor does he have these people around him.

the saddest part is that american steelworkers will support this, because they really are that ignorant, and because capital won the fundamental battle with nafta: it taught workers to see each other as competitors across national boundaries, rather than as comrades that need to stand in international solidarity with a common cause.

trump is not undoing nafta, he's spearheading the next attack in the class war.