TOM EATON | Are Trump’s tariffs a long-term plan or just a ‘Vara’ bad idea?

If the name Ron Vara means nothing to you, I don’t blame you: the middle of October 2019, when he first made headlines, was a noisy moment.

Donald Trump was in the process of being impeached for trying to get a foreign power to influence a US election by threatening to withhold military aide to Ukraine if it didn’t back his allegations of corruption against the Biden family. Brexit negotiations were dragging on, and, much more importantly, the Springboks were about to play a world cup quarterfinal.

A few weeks later even those headlines were gone, swept away by reports of a new coronavirus.

Still, the Ron Vara story happened, and this is it.

In 2006, economist Peter Navarro published a book named The Coming China Wars. In 2011 he followed up with Death By China: Confronting the Dragon, before settling down to write 2015’s Crouching Tiger: What China’s Militarism Means For the World.

If you’re sensing a theme here, you’re not alone: a certain presidential candidate had also joined the dots, and, finding that they mirrored the dots in his own worldview, Trump duly appointed Navarro to head his newly formed White House National Trade Council.

Unlike Trump, Navarro’s qualifications were unimpeachable: he might never have been published in a mainstream journal, but he worried about the same things Trump worried about, and, more importantly, he’d consulted experts on trade and tariffs who echoed Trump’s views.

One of these experts, cited six times by Navarro, was Ron Vara, an economist who was also a strong proponent of hawkish trade policies and tariffs.

The only problem with Vara, however, was that he didn’t exist: “Ron Vara” was an anagram of “Navarro”, who had had invented Vara to bolster his claims as part of what he later claimed was a “private joke”.

Now, you obviously can’t do this in a meritocracy where basic ethical standards apply, and Navarro was duly punished, as his sort invariably are, by being reappointed at a higher salary as Trump’s current tariff expert.

Unsurprisingly, that story is now being dusted off by some US journalists as they sift through the economic rubble of the last week and wonder if, just maybe, this is the sort of thing that happens when men who cite imaginary versions of themselves have the ear of the reality stars who now rule by decree.

Still, there’s a part of me hoping that it is as corrupt as hell, because at least it would allow South Africa to catch a break and get a foot in the door. After all, this country excels at two things — rugby and corruption — and if we can’t impress the US with the former, we could at least buy ourselves into the room with the latter, with the ANC finally finding a use for the thing it’s best at.

Of course, as the losses pass $5-trillion, some conservative economists are still insisting that this is all part of a long-term plan to bring manufacturing jobs back to the US, and perhaps they’re right. After all, just because the US has almost full employment, who’s to say many Americans won’t want to leave their offices and pivot into shift work at factories?

On the weekend Trump said that “sometimes you have to take medicine”, and fair enough: sometimes you have to inject bleach into yourself to combat Covid, and sometimes you need to operate the machine that produces the world’s most expensive Nikes.

Those who believe that Trump’s tariffs are an astonishing act of self-sabotage, however, are still groping for coherent explanations.

Some are accusing him and his team of ignorance, saying that his claims on Wednesday, that the US has been “looted, pillaged, raped and plundered by ... both friend and foe alike” revealed astonishing illiteracy about the basics of trade. (Not being an economist, I can’t pronounce on looting, pillage or plunder, but I would remind Trump’s critics that he definitely knows what he’s talking about when it comes to sexual abuse.)

Certainly, as evidence mounts that the tariffs were calculated by AI, and that no experts seem to have been involved in the process (well, except for Ron Vara, obviously), resulting in tariffs on penguins and the islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique being tariffed at different rates to France, of which they’re part, it seems a heady blend of arrogance and cluelessness lies at the heart of the current crisis.

There is, however, another warning being sounded, not least by the likes of former Tory MP Rory Stewart, that the tariff fiasco, while not necessarily done for nefarious reasons, does present an almost unlimited opportunity for corruption as a procession of foreign heads of state, finance ministers, CEOs and middlemen shuffle towards Mar-A-Lago to ask Trump for special dispensations.

Again, this is simply a theory, and it is entirely possible that these negotiations (the White House says there are already 50 countries wanting to chat) will be entirely above board, with teams of experts driving hard but fair bargains, and nobody suggesting that the process might go much more smoothly if someone were to make a small donation, perhaps an anonymous purchase of the official Donald Trump meme coin that has, according to the FT, made its creators at least $350m while early investors have lost 90% of their money.

Still, there’s a part of me hoping that it is as corrupt as hell, because at least it would allow South Africa to catch a break and get a foot in the door. After all, this country excels at two things — rugby and corruption — and if we can’t impress the US with the former, we could at least buy ourselves into the room with the latter, with the ANC finally finding a use for the thing it’s best at.

And if all else fails, Cyril can always introduce himself as Ron Vara.