By Anthony Henson, July 23, 2025
President Donald Trump has declared yet another “massive” trade agreement — this time with Japan — trumpeting a supposed $550 billion investment and the imposition of a 15% tariff on Japanese imports. Like so many proclamations issued from the pulpit of demagoguery, the deal arrives swathed in vagueness, lacking the substance necessary to assess its true impact beyond its immediate use as a political spectacle.
Trump’s boast — issued via the echo chamber of Truth Social — proclaims a victory not just over trade imbalance but over multilateralism itself. The central fixation, unsurprisingly, remains the automobile industry, the decaying heart of America’s rusted industrial illusion. With cars and car parts comprising nearly 80% of Japan’s trade surplus with the U.S., Trump continues to posture as a populist protector of American workers, though these gestures rarely translate into lasting structural benefit for those he claims to defend.
Behind the headlines and hollow metrics lies a far more troubling reality: a world where economic policy is crafted not through collaboration or strategy but by the raw exercise of power. Tariffs are wielded not as tools of negotiation but as bludgeons of coercion, levied at will, their consequences rippling through labour markets, supply chains, and international alliances alike.
The Japanese government, though clearly reluctant, has “come to the table,” in the words of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. But what they are truly confronting is not a negotiation, but a diktat — one forged in the shadow of threatened 25% tariffs, now reduced to a “compromise” rate of 15%. The terms remain ambiguous, the carve-outs uncertain, and the implications unexamined. As with previous Trump-era trade “deals,” the devil, and the damage, will reside in the undisclosed details.
Meanwhile, Trump’s announcement regarding the Philippines — a 19% tariff on exports — underscores the widening scope of this economic nationalism, draped in the false mantle of sovereignty while serving the interests of elite capital and campaign optics.
This is not diplomacy. It is not policy. It is performance — and like all performances under empire, it demands applause even as it accelerates decline.