The tariffs are going to backfire on the US very badly because you have to understand that the US was economically very powerful until the early 1980s. The same was the time in the 70s and early 80s. If America sneezes, Asia catches the cold because all the exports went to America. But this is no longer the case nowadays. Take steel. 2% of US steel imports are from China and only 1.5% of Chinese production of steel is exported to the US.
Even if the US would not buy any steel at all from China, it would not matter to the Chinese. At the time of Davos in February, a Chinese owner of the world’s largest bus company was interviewed and they asked him about US tariffs and chances of trade war with US. He said we really do not care. We export our buses to 150 different countries in the world, what do we care about the American market and that is true for many companies. The American market is no longer that relevant. China exports more to commodity producers than to the US and the same applies to the South Korea.
What has changed in the last 30-40 years is that whereas Asia and the world was American-centric before, the world has become much more China-centric in Asia and it is a much more multi-dimensional global economy where the US has lost a lot of its importance, relatively speaking. It has also lost a lot of prestige because of their failed interventions in Iraq, in Syria, in Libya, in Afghanistan, everything they touched, they messed up.
via economictimes