It is possible. Washington has threatened Germany with sanctions if Germany participates in Russia's North Stream 2 gas pipeline project bringing energy to Europe. Washington's preference is that Europe close down from lack of energy rather than to be dependent on Russia, as this dependency reduces Washington's power over Europe.
Germany's Merkel, long Washington's whore, has changed her spots. She announced that the US is no longer a reliable political partner and that Germany "needs to take its fate into its own hands." The latest poll shows that 82 percent of Germans agree with her that Washington is an "unreliable partner."
Washington, wallowing in its fabled incompetence, is now worsening all of its empire relationships by threatening its own allies with trade wars. There is no one of sufficient competence in the Trump regime to be able to understand that America's "trade problem" is entirely of its own making and is not due to Mexico, Canada, China, and Europe.
America's extremely serious trade problem is due to globalism, neoliberal economics, and to the New York investment banks.
The US trade deficit with China has its origin in the offshoring of American jobs. Products, such as Levis, Nike shoes, Apple computers, once produced in America by American workers are now produced abroad where wages and various compliance costs are much lower. When these products produced abroad for American markets by US corporations come back to the US to be sold, they arrive as imports. Thus, the offshored production of US corporations is the most direct cause of American trade deficits.
However, this basic, indisputable fact is never reported by the presstitute media, or by the neoliberal economists or US government statistical agencies. The pretense is that it is all China's, or Mexico's, or Canada's fault. You would never know that it was the direct result of the profit-seeking activity of US corporations.
What has happened is that with the Soviet dissolution, the governments of socialist India and communist China made a decision that capitalism was the wave of the future, and they opened their labor markets to foreign capital.
The American firms that did not want to desert their home towns and work forces by offshoring their production were forced to do so by threats from the New York investment banks. Domestic producers were told to move operations to China where lower labor costs would boost profits or face a takeover of the corporation that would raise profits by moving operations abroad.
The reason high productivity high value-added jobs have exited America is because of Wall Street and the greed of corporate executives and shareholders. As always happens, the ruling interest groups and their Washington puppets blame foreigners, thus protecting themselves.
However, now they have started what is mischaracterized as a "trade war." In effect, the Trump regime is not at war with China and other countries. The Trump regime is at war with the US corporations who moved their production for US markets offshore and with the New York banks that forced this move. The tariffs will fall not on Chinese exports but on the offshored production of US corporations. The tariffs will raise the price that Americans pay for the products that US corporations make in China.
Trump's tariffs on steel and aluminum raise the cost of inputs used in US production functions. Raising the price of these inputs means that the products of US industry made from steel and aluminum also rise in price, thus hurting US competitiveness. This is the opposite of how protectionism is supposed to work. Protectionism works by minimizing the costs of inputs and by protecting outputs with tariffs on competing foreign products. In other words, the prices of domestically produced goods are lowered, and the prices of competing imports are raised.
The neoliberal economists lied when they gave assurances that the US manufacturing and professional skill jobs moved offshore would be replaced with better jobs for Americans. As the official payroll data makes clear, the replacement jobs are worse, consisting as they do of lowly paid domestic service jobs that characterize employment in third world countries.
Jobs offshoring has been disastrous for America. The resulting trade deficit is the least of it. The loss of well-paying jobs has hurt consumer purchasing power. To maintain living standards, consumers have substituted debt for the missing income. The result is that 41 percent of Americans cannot raise $400 should they be faced with an emergency.
The budgets of states that were once manufacturing powerhouses have also been hurt, calling into question their ability to meet pension obligations. The benefits of jobs offshoring were concentrated on a small group of corporate executives and shareholders and are dwarfed by the massive external costs of jobs offshoring on the US economy and workforce.
Robotics will make the situation far worse. The smart people so happily working on replacement of humans in the workforce are in fact stupid. They are destroying the social system. Tariffs cannot protect jobs lost to robots. Moreover, robots don't buy houses, furniture, cars, clothes, entertainment, food, drink, smartphones, computers. All the money saved by replacing people with robots is not available to purchase the products made by robots. Consumer demand collapses. The only solution is the socialization of production that makes all members of society owners of the output. Even this is only a partial solution as it leaves unanswered the question of what people do with their time and what happens to people who do not have to work and to develop their capabilities.
Capitalism, despite the claim that it efficiently allocates resources over time, has a short-run time horizon -- the next quarter's profits. Everything about the system is short-term. We have reached the point at which executives destroy the company by indebting it in order to buy back the company's shares, thus driving up the stock price and maximizing their "performance bonuses."
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