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Opinion | Why Japan is losing sleep over nightmare of a Trump re-election
- Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, is already indicating his return to the White House would make life even worse for China
- Japan would deeply feel these shock waves and be at risk of Trump tariffs itself, and its frenzy to get out ahead of this possibility is telling
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Tokyo officialdom is having a low-grade panic over the spectre of another Donald Trump presidency, an event sure to make economic risk great again across the Asia-Pacific region if it comes to pass.
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Remember that Japan was, according to Trump, the original sinner when it comes to predatory trading nations that had “systematically sucked the blood out of America”. He uttered this phrase on a New York television talk show in 1989 while in his early 40s.
Japan, he argued ad nauseam, had to be stopped with huge tariffs. Today, it’s the threat from China that draws the ire of Trump, who is now 77.
Trump is all but certain to be the Republican nominee in the November election versus US President Joe Biden, the Democratic Party standard-bearer. Trump is already telegraphing that a Trump 2.0 White House would make his previous tenure seem like a minor inconvenience for Beijing.
For starters, Trump promises a 60 per cent tariff on all Chinese goods, revoking “most favoured nation” status and hobbling the mainland’s electric-vehicle industry. This latter move is one for which Trump fan Elon Musk is begging, lest China “demolish” the US market.
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Japan would feel these shock waves early and often as its biggest trading partner confronts a new Trumpian onslaught. It hardly helps that Japan, Asia’s second-largest economy, approaches the US election cycle at a moment of domestic weakness.
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