In 1971, President Nixon ended the gold standard with a televised announcement on a quiet Sunday night. He didn’t call it what it was – a default. He said it was temporary. Necessary. A “response to unfair trade practices.” Sound familiar?
Fifty years later, we’re still using trade as a smokescreen for deeper structural problems. And tariffs, once an obscure tool of economic policy, have become a political rallying cry.
But behind the slogans and podiums lies something more troubling: contradiction masquerading as strategy.
Last week, on The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart, former British politician Rory Stewart laid out four ways Trump’s tariff narrative doesn’t just fall apart – it collapses under its own weight. And it’s worth exploring these, because they reveal not only the weaknesses of modern trade policy, but the brittleness of the global economic system itself.
Contradiction 1: Tariffs Will Generate Massive Revenue
The first promise is that tariffs will fund the U.S. government. As Trump has said repeatedly, “We’re bringing in billions and billions from China.” But that’s not how tariffs work. They’re paid by importers – American businesses – and passed on to consumers. So what looks like revenue is actually a tax on the U.S. public, not a payment from a foreign adversary.
In fact, if you want tariffs to raise money, you need to keep importing. Which brings us to the second contradiction.
Contradiction 2: Tariffs Will Bring Jobs Back
If tariffs are designed to reduce imports and bring manufacturing back home, then they can’t also be raising money through those same imports. You can’t both cut off the supply and profit from it. It’s economic sleight of hand. Jobs might return, but not without cost – and certainly not without disruption.
And besides, reshoring is easier said than done. China has spent decades building the infrastructure, talent, and supply chains needed to dominate manufacturing. The U.S. can’t recreate that overnight. Toolmakers don’t grow on trees. You don’t reindustrialise a country through press releases.
Contradiction 3: Tariffs Are Just Leverage
Sometimes we’re told that tariffs aren’t really about trade at all – they’re about negotiation. Get tough on fentanyl. Pressure Canada. Force China to blink. But if tariffs are a temporary threat, wielded to gain political concessions, then we’re not really interested in the jobs or the revenue. We’re using the economy as a hostage in a game of diplomatic poker.
That’s not a strategy. That’s a bluff.
Contradiction 4: Tariffs Are Meant to Hurt China
Finally, the message shifts again: tariffs are meant to damage China’s economy more than ours. It’s not about jobs, revenue, or leverage. It’s about economic warfare. We’ll take some pain, sure – but they’ll take more.
This one might be true. But it also carries the greatest risk. Because once you frame global trade as a zero-sum game, you abandon any hope of mutual gain. You invite retaliation. You harden the walls. And you reduce every negotiation to a test of pain tolerance.
Trump may think he’s got the stomach for that. But does the American consumer?
The Real Cost: Control Is Not a Strategy
You can believe tariffs are good or bad. That’s not the point. The point is this: you can’t base a policy on four contradictory premises and expect the system to stay stable. Yet that’s exactly what’s happening – not just in the U.S., but around the world.
The headlines may fade, but the shockwaves persist. Supply chains are being redrawn. Alliances are being tested. Confidence is fragile. And beneath it all is a desperate attempt by governments to regain control over a system they no longer understand.
They clamp down. They sanction. They tariff. They threaten.
But control is not a strategy. It’s a reaction.
And it’s this overreach – this illusion of command – that exposes just how fragile the system has become.
What If Tariffs Aren’t the Fix —
But the Trigger To Buy More Gold?
Trust Is the First Casualty
Trade used to be based on comparative advantage. Today, it’s based on coercion. And as Rory Stewart pointed out, the real question is no longer who’s right, but who breaks first. Trump or Xi? The U.S. middle class or the Chinese worker?
But perhaps that’s the wrong question altogether. Because when trust is eroded, it doesn’t matter who wins. The system loses.
We’re watching the breakdown of the very assumptions that underpinned decades of globalisation: that trade was good, that rules mattered, that institutions were impartial. Now we see a world where every transaction is a test of strength, and every nation a fortress.
It’s not just supply chains that are shifting. It’s the psychological framework of global order.
The Answer Isn’t Control. It’s Contingency.
In this age of uncertainty, gold doesn’t promise control. It offers something more honest: contingency.
It doesn’t rely on trade flows, or political trust, or the value of a promise made by a central bank. It sits outside the system because it was never built on its illusions to begin with.
If the contradictions continue to pile up (which they will) then the answer is not to solve them. It’s to sidestep them.
Because while the global system tries to patch over its fractures with tariffs and tough talk, those who hold real value in their hands won’t be watching for the next contradiction.
They’ll be ready for the fallout.
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