Trump says more tariffs will stop wars. Experts disagree.  

Former President Trump offered a new strategy for world peace during a rally in North Carolina last month: massive tariffs on countries that start wars.  

“We don’t have to send troops, I can do it with a telephone call,” he said. “You go to war with another country that’s friendly to us, or even not friendly to us, you’re not going to do business in the United States and we’re going to charge you 100 percent tariffs.”

“And all of a sudden, the president or prime minister or dictator or whoever the hell is running the country says to me, ‘Sure, we won’t go to war,” Trump continued.  

Trump has made similar remarks in several of his campaign speeches, repeatedly blaming President Biden — and more recently Vice President Harris — for bringing the world to the brink of World War III, and promising that he will restore peace and global order if elected.   

But pressuring countries with tariffs, a tax on imported goods, is unlikely to work, experts say, especially because the U.S. does not trade with most of its adversaries besides China.  

And historically, tariffs have a blowback for the U.S. economy, with experts pointing to the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 that saw Washington impose tariffs to protect American industries during the Great Depression, only for countries to respond in kind to devastating economic effect in America.

George Lopez, professor emeritus of peace studies at the University of Notre Dame and a leading economic sanctions expert, said tariffs are even less effective than sanctions, the more widely used foreign policy tool that prohibits business with a targeted nation’s companies and individuals. 

“Even China is going to put down the phone from an American president and [his] closest allies,” he said of a tariff policy. “There’s nobody in the room who’s going to take that seriously.” 

The cost of a major tariff campaign as a foreign policy tool is troubling, added Lopez. 

“This really is economics 101, and the notion that [Trump sees this] as a high priority, bold statement of economic policy, must be sending just chills to the spines of Wall Street and others,” he said. 

Karoline Leavitt, the Trump campaign’s national press secretary, credited Trump’s tariffs on China and sanctions on Iran for the “thriving economy and peace around the globe” while he was in the White House. 

“Kamala Harris’ weakness and failures have emboldened our adversaries and pushed us to the brink of WWIII,” she said in a statement. “No one believes for a second that Kamala Harris has what it takes to stand up to our adversaries and restore the economy that she broke.”   

“When President Trump is back in the White House, he will stand up to our adversaries, negotiate better trade deals, restore peace around the world, and make America strong again,” she added.  

Although the U.S. Constitution awards the power of taxes to Congress, the legislative branch has over time given the president vast authority to impose tariffs. 

Trump has pledged to impose a 60 percent tariff on Chinese goods if he takes office in January. Both the Trump and Biden administrations have placed heavy tariffs on China targeting electric vehicles, semiconductor chips, semiconductors, steel and aluminum products and other goods. 

It’s unlikely that the threat of more tariffs will deter China from potentially invading the self-governing island nation of Taiwan or escalating conflict with the Philippines in the South China Sea, said William Reinsch, Scholl Chair in international business at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. 

“The only U.S. threat that will make a difference is a military one,” he said.  

Tariffs will likely drive nations to accept the cost or seek out other markets, but Reinsch said the U.S. may have some leverage over smaller countries that rely more on the U.S. economy – Serbia, which has threatened Kosovo in recent years, is one example. But it would still have a limited impact on their decision-making. 

“When you start talking about geopolitical and military things, it’s not easy to use an economic weapon if other countries think that their fundamental territorial integrity is at risk,” he said.

A major tariff campaign on China, the world’s second-largest economy, would almost certainly hurt American consumers and the U.S. economy, with higher taxes forcing Americans to pay higher prices to import the goods. 

Kristen Patel, a professor of practice in policy studies at Syracuse University, said the “risks and costs outweigh the benefits” with tariff policy.

“The cost to the private sector is quite high,” she said. “Former President Trump has not coherently explained how tariffs would benefit us, companies and consumers.” 

“This case is economic machismo … ‘I’m going to slap the sanction of tariff on you, and it’s going to force you to do what I want you to do,’’ she added. “And it’s not clear how tariffs would actually change China or any other country’s behavior.” 

Trump has pitched tariffs as the solution to a number of problems at home and abroad, including America’s child care affordability crisis, other countries moving away from using the U.S. dollar, and general foreign malevolence. 

“We have China, we have Russia, we have Kim Jong Un. We have all sorts of countries out there,” he said at a March rally in Atlanta. “But the real problem is not from them. A competent president can handle them. You can say, ‘Really? You’re going to do that to us? We’re going to tariff the hell out of you. We’re going to do this.’”  

Daniel McDowell, a professor of international affairs at Syracuse University who studies the global economy, said Trump wrongly believes tariffs are a “one size fits all foreign policy tool that you can use for all kinds of problems.” 

“The idea of using tariffs to deter countries from invading other countries, it’s pretty out there,” he said. 

McDowell added that a Trump maximum tariff policy could transform the international market, potentially increasing the price of goods if the U.S. must source from other countries. In the case of China, it would have the largest impact, he said. 

“The tariffs that are already in place against China are high, but 100 percent would be substantially larger, given the amount of trade with China,” he said. “That would be passed through to consumers.” 

Trump in his first term slapped tariffs on China and engaged in a trade war with Europe and other countries, which increased taxes by $80 billion on Americans, according to the Tax Foundation. 

Trump also used heavy sanctions to punish adversaries in his first term, but has offered conflicting views on how he would deploy sanctions if he wins in November. 

At the Economic Club of New York last Thursday, Trump said using sanctions too frequently would disempower the value of the dollar and that he would “put them on and take them off as quickly as possible.”  

But he also added that he would continue to “use sanctions very powerfully against countries that deserve it.”  

Benjamin Coates, an associate professor at Wake Forest University who has studied the history of U.S. sanctions, said his analysis of Trump’s proposals is that he wants to offer a combination of tariffs and sanctions to deter adversaries.  

But he cautioned in an email that “history offers few examples where even greater forms of economic pressure have successfully persuaded targets to dramatically transform their foreign or domestic policies, and in many cases economic pressure has made the problem worse.” 

Sanctions, which have skyrocketed in the past 20 years as a foreign policy tool, have an uneasy history, and have mostly failed for an array of reasons, including adversaries finding ways to skirt their effects, as Russia has done. 

Reinsch, from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said Trump believes that “access to the American market is a big thing for other countries” and that he can use it as leverage.  

“He comes from that point of view. I don’t think anyone can dissuade him,” he said, but “the shattered cliche about sanctions is they’re only effective until you pull the trigger.”