I began writing this article when the Trump tariffs on Chinese imports were yet to clear the 100% mark. As I complete it, the news banner reads, “Tariffs now total 145%".
As you read this, they may be elsewhere. Much higher likely. Depending on the extent of Beijing’s retaliation, or an extra “fentanyl” premium for good measure. Not even the fallout that followed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 and its impact in prolonging the Great Depression (1929-1939) may compare to what might await us.
SA was not spared from that crisis. Global recession awaits us now, say the hedge-fund “set”. Ray Dalio says the US economy needs to get on the diet and detox. And fast. The queue of the dispatched negotiators outside the Oval Office gets longer. Come duze.
In the early 1930s, national poet laureate Samuel Edward Krune Mqhayi, writing to herald the New Year at the end of 1931, spoke of how, as they entered 1932, they did so as “hunger blanketed the nations of the world”. As they entered the New Year in “war and amid rumours of war”, there was very little to celebrate. War, rather than the rainbow at the end of “stormy” economic crisis, awaited. It seems we are there now. Or it felt like it last week.
Long after Lesotho learnt on the other side of a 50% reciprocal tariff that “special and differentiated treatment” under the rules of the global trading system had been replaced with come duze. As Maseru scrambles to send envoys, they might bump into our own at the hotel breakfast buffet. We are all in.
It was an interesting lesson in the “first wave” of this New-Age diplomacy. It is “public”, “transactional”, “situational” and concerningly bilateral. A come duze, kom hierso and kiss the ring strategy. You want to deal with the Venezuelans. Come duze. You want to flirt with “nil compensation”? Kom hierso.
This was best captured in President Donald Trump’s first response to the press at the end of the televised cabinet session last Thursday.
“Well, we’ll see what happens with China, we would love to be able to work a deal. They’ve really taken advantage of our country for a long period of time; they’ve ripped us off beyond anybody and nobody,” said Trump.
Earlier, the US treasury chief Scott Bessent described what we probably had all imagined after we saw the Volodymyr Zelensky “dressing down” live on camera.
“As we go through the queue and settle with these countries who are going to bring us their best offers, we will end up in a place of great certainty over the next 90 days on tariffs,” said Bessent.
The queue? Yes.
A few days earlier, the Singaporean prime minister lamented the “weak bargaining position” of small, open market economies in such a global order. Where basically, anyone who uses their sovereign policy tools for any kind of ascendancy or advance in product markets (within and outside the “disciplines” of the World Trade Organisation) or has benefited from the erstwhile “benevolence” of the US, “joins the queue”.
We’re correct not to retaliate. To pursue dialogue on the “substantive issues” that the other side observes as warranting such unilateral action. While not ceding any hard-won sovereign space to respond in our national interest. As we have rationally defined it in our constitutional order.
Further, to the extent where we can bring others similarly harmed by such measures along to identify collective “shock absorbers” (too soon, I know), we must do so. We have to try. To talk, and to respond where appropriate. We have no choice to look away.
Welcome to the new order. Come duze.
• Cawe is chief commissioner at the International Trade Administration Commission. He writes in his personal capacity.
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