The Trade Wars: You Are Not Prepared

by James Corbett
corbettreport.com
March 9, 2025

We all know the ancient Chinese curse: May you live in interesting times!

Oh, OK, it's not ancient and it's not Chinese, but it's a good curse, nonetheless. And it's hard to think of a more apt description of 2025 than "interesting."

It seems like every day this year there's been a new, blockbuster story to displace yesterday's blockbuster story from the 24/7 doomscroll feed.

Israel is preparing a "Hell Plan" for Gaza.

The EU is creating its own army and setting up its own nuclear deterrence.

A 108-year-old Japanese woman has just been recognized as the world's oldest female barber.

Truly, we are living in world-historical times.

Given all of these amazing events, it would be easy to overlook the decidedly less-sexy story about tariffs and trade disputes. But if we do ignore the global trade war that is currently brewing, we run the risk of overlooking one of the most important stories of all.

As we shall see, the trade war isn't just a spat over the flow of fentanyl or the price of aluminum. It's about the future of the global economy, and, ultimately, the next Great Powers war. In other words, the future of you, your family and civilization itself is on the line here.

Today, let's explore what's happening, why it's happening and what you can do about it.

THE TRADE WAR STARTS

Oh, what a difference a week makes!

Just last week, the stock markets were riding high, the banksters were predicting solid global economic growth in 2025 and Canadians and Americans thought some booing at a hockey game was about as vicious as things were going to get between the two countries this year.

Cut to this past Thursday: the Dow Jones was down 1,300 points, banksters were slashing their economic predictions and Canadians had already started boycotting Kentucky bourbon and threatening to cut off energy exports to their neighbour to the south.

So, what happened? A trade war happened, that's what.

Specifically, the deep state that operates the puppet known as Donald Trump enacted a 25% tariff on Canadian and Mexican goods and a 20% tariff on Chinese goods because of . . . *checks notes* . . . fentanyl? . . . or dairy? . . . or cars? . . . or something. The point is, Canada and Mexico have been taking advantage of Uncle Sam, and it's about time they pay! What idiot signed this horrible Canada-US-Mexico trade agreement, anyway?

Oh, right.

Well, never mind all that! The war is over! Trump's deep state handlers have promised (another) one month pause on (some of) the tariffs!

. . . Nah, just kidding! The war continues. Less than 24 hours after announcing the pause comes the threat that Uncle Sam will be hitting Canadian dairy and lumber with new tariffs today. (Or maybe Tuesday.)

Regardless of which tariffs do or don't kick in on which particular dates, we're about to learn a funny thing about trade wars: you can start them with a simple declaration but you can't end them the same way. The US may or may not be "pausing" its tariffs, but Canada is keeping its first wave of retaliatory tariffs in place and renewing its threat of a second round of tariffs in April. China, meanwhile, is vowing to fight back even harder after accusing the US of "two-faced acts" and of "meeting good with evil."

And that war is expanding. After Trump's threats last month to levy 25% tariffs on products from the EU, the EUreaucrats have fired back, mulling a number of countermeasures, including "block[ing] agricultural products containing pesticides banned in the region." (But relax, everyone! The "Make America Healthy Again" administration is going to get rid of all those poisonous pesticides anyway, right?!)

Now China is hitting back . . . at Canada? That's right, the Chicoms have just announced $2.6 billion in agricultural tariffs against the Great White North for levies that Ottawa introduced against China last October.

Feeling dizzy? Of course you are. But that's the point. For the New World Order to be brought in, the old order must first be destroyed, and nothing sweeps away 80 years of international relations like the world's undisputed unipolar superpower reneging on its own trade deals, threatening to rip up security pacts that it wrote in the first place and musing about invading its erstwhile allies.

Now, as conspiracy realists who were certainly not fans of the Old World Order, we might be tempted to cheer this whole spectacle on. "Good! Let the system burn!"

But unfortunately a trade war is never just a trade war, and this international firestorm isn't about cutting a better deal for the average working stiff.

In fact, when you start to look at what this trade war really portends, things get very dark very quick.

THE REVERSE KISSINGER

OK, obviously this trade war isn't about the 43 pounds of fentanyl that crossed from Canada into the US last year. And it's not about the price of tea in China. Heck, it's not even about the price of milk in Saskatoon. So, what is it about?

Well, one theory that's been floated (and denounced!) by the inside-the-Beltway policy wonks is that Trump is attempting a "reverse Kissinger."

You see, back in the depths of the Cold War, Henry Kissinger—at the behest of the Rockefellers, naturally—flew to China for a top-secret mission to normalize relations between the US and China. It might be hard for those who weren't around at the time to understand it, but the US establishing diplomatic relations with communist China in the midst of a Cold War against communism was utterly shocking.

As we now know, Heinz' visit helped to plant the seeds of the Rockefeller-backed China World Order that have sprouted here in the 21st century. But there was a Machiavellian geopolitical strategy in this ploy as well. Kissinger and his deep state handlers reasoned that by bringing the Chicoms into the globalist fold, they could deepen the Sino-Soviet split and, ultimately, play their Chinese frenemies off against the Soviets.

The "reverse Kissinger" theory, then, holds that Trump's moves on the geopolitical chessboard are the new deep state's attempt to repeat the Kissinger strategy, but in reverse. According to this theory, instead of partnering up with China to isolate Russia, the Trump swamp-dwellers are partnering up with Russia to isolate China.

Seen through this lens, some of the seemingly chaotic events of recent weeks appear to add up. Disrupting America's commerce with its closest trading partners, for instance, creates a pretense for dropping sanctions against Russia. And if the US drops support for Ukraine in its war against Russia, it offers Putin an incentive to ditch Beijing—which has never been fully supportive of the Ukraine war—and instead cozy up to Washington.

But, like all trendy geopolitical hypotheses posited by the Beltway jet set, this "reverse Kissinger" theory, too, is full of holes.

First, for what it's worth, Chinese President-For-Life Xi Jinping and Russian President-For-As-Long-As-He-Wants Putin have already come out to dismiss the idea that the US is capable of driving a wedge between them and their "true friendship."

More seriously, Vladimir Putin is not Chairman Mao, China is not the Soviet Union, and none of the incentives in this "reverse Kissinger" strategy—if such a strategy even exists—play out in the way they did for Kissinger and the geopolitical strategists of the 1970s.

Back in the 1970s, there was a Sino-Soviet split that was used as a wedge to drive China towards the West. Today, not only is there no such split, but Sino-Russian relations are arguably better than they've ever been, with China now buying up over half of Russian exports and the two countries continuing to increase military cooperation and technology transfers. In fact, given China's reliance on the US as a key buyer of its exports and its reliance on the US-led world trading system for access to world markets, it would arguably be much easier for the US to lure China away from Russia than to lure Russia away from China.

Regardless of whether this "reverse Kissinger" hypothesis is true or not, however, it does point to an important underlying fact: this trade war is not about trade. It's about the shaping of a New World Order. And the reality is, whatever Trump and his cabinet of billionaires and tech oligarchs may think they are doing, they are just playing their part in a much larger story. One that is leading us toward a Great Powers war.

WHERE GOODS DON'T FLOW . . .

As renowned French economist Claude-Frédéric Bastiat famously (didn't) observe (but should have!): "When goods don't cross borders, soldiers will."

Sadly, whoever actually came up with that line was exactly right. And we now have some very important historical data to back up that claim. Data like the effects of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930.

In 1930, shaken by the stock market crash of 1929, Sen. Reed Owen Smoot (R-Utah) and Rep. Willis Chatman Hawley (R-Ore.) introduced legislation to add a further 20% tariff to already highly taxed agricultural and manufactured products coming to America from overseas. Driven by the rising protectionist and isolationist sentiment in the US population at the time, the bill squeezed through the Senate, sailed through the House of Representatives and was signed into law by President Hoover in June 1930.

The Smoot-Hawley tariffs are now universally regarded as a disaster. (In fact, that's one of the only things that most economists actually agree upon!) The act's passage began an era of trade wars and retaliatory tariffs that not only did nothing to remediate the effects of the stock market panic or boost American industry but actually exacerbated the resulting Great Depression.

Among other things, the tariffs ensured that Weimar Germany would be unable to pay the reparations it owed for WWI, which would have been paid in large part with goods exported to the US. It doesn't take a James Burke to trace the connections between the Smoot-Hawley tariffs, the collapse of the Weimar government, the rise of a certain Austrian politician and the subsequent decade of world turmoil that led to the creation of the post-WWII world order.

It's important not to gloss over these connections. Trade wars can become hot wars rather easily. The "beggar-thy-neighbour" game of tariffs and currency devaluations—the next stage of this escalating series of events and one we've already seen being broached by Trump and his handlers—not only drastically exacerbates price inflation, it creates tensions that, in the famous (not) Bastiat formulation, will more than likely be "resolved" by the flow of soldiers across borders.

Given all of this, I stand by my assertion that the real storyline of our times is the US-China rivalry that is leading us toward the next Great Powers war. And, if we stay along this path, the trade wars of the '20s (the 2020s, that is) will have their role in setting the stage for WWIII just as the trade wars of the '30s (the 1930s, of course) set the stage for WWII.

Now, readers of my work will already know that this coming WWIII event is as planned, staged and manipulated as WWI was. But that does not mean that the war itself will not be real, or that real everyday men and women will not pay for this staged conflict with their lives. In fact, that's part of the plan.

There is much to be said about this WWIII script and how it will be used, but, for the time being, a simple observation will suffice:

WWI led to the creation of the League of Nations (and the formation of the RIIA and the CFR and the creation of the Soviet bogeyman and the destruction of European royalty and the carving up of the Middle East . . .).

WWII led to the creation of the United Nations (and the formation of the WHO and the IMF and the beginning of the fake and staged Cold War and the creation of the Bretton Woods monetary system and the rise of the Bilderberg Group . . . ).

So, WWIII will lead to . . . ?

I'll let you fill in that ellipsis as you see fit, but hopefully you understand how a world war is exactly what is needed to bring in the New World Order. And hopefully you see how those who are concentrating on the pronouncements of the Trumps and Trudeaus and Sheinbaums and other political birdcage liners or those who are arguing about the economic merits of tariffs and levies are completely missing the point of these world-historical events. As usual, the public is playing checkers while the architects of the New World Order are playing chess.

The real question, then, for those who understand all this, is: what do we do about it?

Of course, there is nothing that the average working person can do to really influence the decisions being made in Washington and Ottawa and Beijing and Brussels on tariffs and levies and taxes and other forms of government theft. But there are things we can do to start detaching ourselves from our reliance on this system of international (or even national) trade and start connecting with those around us who will be our true partners in the parallel economy if and when our current economic system comes crashing down.

The generation that lived through the Great Depression was barely able to squeeze by, and that was a generation that had a connection to the land and knew their neighbours and participated in their community. Can you imagine how quickly the average city dweller in 2025 will perish if we enter into a new Great(er) Depression?

That's precisely why my next episode of #SolutionsWatch is going to be devoted to the all-important question of the creation of the parallel economy. Stay tuned!

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