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NEW YORK — Henry Farrell, 54, a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, said in an interview with The Yomiuri Shimbun that U.S. President Donald Trump seems to have become more “tariff-pilled,” and Asian countries should start to build many more ties in a world where the “sponsor is becoming less predictable.”
The following excerpts from the interview have been edited for flow and clarity.
The Yomiuri Shimbun: What is your view of the Trump administration’s tariff measures?
Henry Farrell: Obviously, he [Trump] is much more willing to use tariffs on a much grander scale than he was back in the first administration; the sheer scale of what has happened is … basically historically unprecedented. I think that he has become more convinced that tariffs obviously have much broader application than just trying to get the United States a better deal on trade. There’s interest in using them for all sorts of other policy measures as well … some of which are traditional national security.
He appears to have gotten further “tariff-pilled” than he was before, in [the] belief that traditional financial sanctions are a bad idea for the U.S. dollar.
Yomiuri: What do you think about the effects of these tariffs on the international order and how they will affect the United States?
Farrell: I think that the effects are pretty substantial. I think that a lot of this has to do with not just … the size of the tariffs, but the ways that the tariffs are being deployed.
There are negotiations that are happening, but it’s not clear whether those negotiations are going to get anywhere … because there are some people in the administration, including sometimes Trump himself, who seem to think that tariffs are fundamentally a good thing. That is that they’re not something that can be removed or added on. And furthermore, when people do talk about what the tariffs are there for, they often have wildly different reasons, and those reasons differ from day to day.
I think that from the point of view of U.S. international partners and indeed adversaries, thinking about the international system, what this says to them is that there isn’t any coherent U.S. picture of what that international system ought to be anymore, except for some kind of a system in which everybody defers to Donald Trump, everybody defers to the United States.
We’re in a situation where in some ways it is even worse, perhaps, than just sheer naked self-interest, because it’s naked self-interest combined with a degree of whimsicality, which means that even if something looks to be in U.S. government interest, you have no idea of whether or not the U.S. government is going to shoot off its own foot. And this means that, in a sense, it becomes even more problematic, even more difficult to predict what your relations with this party are going to be like.
Yomiuri: Why was Japan the first country to negotiate directly with the United States following Trump’s 90-day suspension of reciprocal tariffs?
Farrell: It appears to be more linked to his [Trump’s] particular preferences and to any broader theory of how it might be strategically advantageous to negotiate with this partner ahead of that partner that doesn’t.
There usually is a lot of discussion internally … Like every country, they’re trying to maximize their negotiating leverage. So it might help to work with one country before another. This does not seem to be an administration like that.
If you’re looking at this from the perspective of Vietnam, for example … Vietnam has, in some ways, tried to move closer to the United States over the last number of years than you might have expected, given both its history and its proximity to China. And clearly, from Vietnam’s perspective, there is a certain amount of hedging going on, given the part of the world that it is in.
But Vietnam is faced with the question: if you are on the one hand … dealing with an extremely erratic country that doesn’t seem to have your interests at heart. And if you’re dealing on the other hand with a rather predictable country that also doesn’t seem to have your interests at heart, sometimes it can make better sense to go with the more predictable country, because you have less chaos associated with it.
And especially given the really quite extraordinary amount of tariffs that were imposed upon Vietnam.
I think that the local questions that Japan has is whether some of the traditionally difficult relations it has had with neighbors, such as South Korea, may be less important in a world in which the two have a significant degree of common interest. If you’re thinking about this from the point of view of exporting powers which have a significant reliance upon high technology of one sort or another, there’s actually quite a lot in common in interest between Japan and South Korea and indeed, to that matter, Taiwan.
I do wonder whether, if you’re in a world where your sponsor is becoming less predictable, you want to start building up a lot more informal ties very quickly, and figuring out what are the common areas that you can work together on, where you cannot necessarily rely upon the U.S. as much as you used to anymore, it is much more of an unknown quantity.
I think that Japan has … if you see an increased move by countries which are still, to some extent, committed to something like the previous trade regime, here you can think about the European Union. You can also think about Canada, perhaps Australia. If there are moves by these countries, as there appear to be, to try to build up a deeper set of ties among themselves, should Japan become more integrated into them, and … how might that negatively affect its relationship with the United States under the current administration.
Equally, it’s not impossible that we’re going to see a real economic substantial downturn happening in the United States as a result of what’s happening.
And that could also really change the strategic situation for Japan quite quickly as well.
I really think we are in extremely chaotic times. It is extremely hard to predict what is going to happen in the world in three months, six months, nine months [or] a year. And it could be that Japan finds itself suddenly in a quite different position … although ambition suggests that there’s a goal.
— This interview was conducted by Yomiuri Shimbun Staff Writers Yasuhiro Kobayashi and William Corcoran.
Henry Farrell
Farrell is a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Born in Ireland, Farrell is an expert in the international political economy. The co-author of “Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy,” Farrell has also contributed to U.S. and European media outlets such as The New York Times.
