This note responds to Helal Uddin Ahmed's piece "Pitfalls of Trumpian tariffs" (P4, FE, January 30, 2026) by examining the analytical assumptions underlying the critique rather than the policy itself.
The critique of Trumpian tariffs rests on a familiar and largely accurate observation: tariffs raise domestic prices, and American consumers bear most of the immediate cost. Empirical studies, including those cited by the author, convincingly show that tariffs function in practice as a consumption tax rather than a direct levy on foreign producers. On this narrow point, the argument is sound. Tariffs are not costless, and they do not extract foreign wealth in the simplistic way political slogans suggest.
Yet stopping the analysis creates a serious distortion. It treats price effects as the sole metric of policy evaluation, while silently excluding the strategic objectives for which tariffs are designed. Tariffs are not introduced primarily to make imports more expensive; higher prices are the mechanism, not the objective. The objective is structural: to alter incentives, reshape production decisions, and reduce dependency on external suppliers whose reliability is increasingly uncertain.
The article's central weakness lies in its failure to engage with this distinction. By framing tariffs only as a tax on consumers, it implicitly assumes that the pre-tariff equilibrium-cheap imports, persistent trade deficits, and deep foreign dependence-is both optimal and sustainable. That assumption is asserted through omission rather than argument. Nowhere does the author examine whether a system in which the United States (US) functions indefinitely as the world's dumping market, absorbing surplus production from dozens of countries, remains viable in a world of geopolitical rivalry, supply-chain weaponisation, and technological competition.
The tariff critique also treats trade deficits as benign side-effects of openness rather than as structural signals. Persistent deficits are not merely accounting outcomes; they reflect long-term patterns of industrial hollowing, labour displacement, and strategic vulnerability. When domestic manufacturing capacity erodes, the economy loses more than jobs. It loses production ecosystems, skilled labour pools, and the ability to scale critical goods quickly in times of crisis. The pandemic-era shortages of medical equipment, pharmaceuticals, and semiconductors exposed the cost of that dependence with uncomfortable clarity. To acknowledge that tariffs raise prices without addressing the cost of dependency is to present only half the balance sheet.
Reserve-currency privilege allows the United States to sustain consumption despite production erosion, but it delays adjustment rather than eliminating the underlying structural cost.
Moreover, the article treats employment effects asymmetrically. Job losses in export-oriented sectors are highlighted, while potential job gains in import-competing and upstream domestic industries are largely dismissed or assumed away. This reflects an implicit preference for consumer welfare over producer resilience. Yet economic policy has never been guided by prices alone. Employment, wage stability, and regional industrial balance are political-economic variables, not externalities. A tariff that raises prices today but restores domestic production capacity tomorrow may impose a short-term cost in exchange for long-term resilience. Whether that trade-off is worth making is a legitimate debate-but it cannot be avoided by reducing tariffs to inflation statistics.
National security, too, appears in the article only as a rhetorical footnote rather than a serious analytical category. In an era where trade dependencies are increasingly leveraged for political coercion, supply chains are no longer neutral conduits of efficiency. Dependence on foreign producers for critical inputs-from energy components to advanced electronics-creates strategic exposure. Tariffs, in this context, function less as protectionism and more as insurance premiums. Like all insurance, they carry an upfront cost that is visible and unpopular, while the benefit lies in risks that materialize only under stress.
This does not imply that all trade should be securitised, but it does require recognising that in critical sectors, efficiency alone is no longer a sufficient organising principle.
Finally, the article's historical framing is selective. Smoot-Hawley is invoked as a cautionary tale, but without acknowledging that the global economy of the 1930s bore little resemblance to today's deeply financialised, reserve-currency-anchored system. The United States now issues the world's dominant currency, finances its deficits through capital inflows, and anchors global demand. These privileges allow it to run trade deficits-but they also mask the erosion of domestic production beneath stable aggregate consumption. Treating that erosion as irrelevant because prices remain low confuses short-run comfort with long-run strength.
This rebuttal does not assume that tariffs are universally effective or sufficient on their own. Tariffs are instruments, not guarantees. Their ability to reshape production incentives depends on scope, design, duration, and the presence of complementary policies such as investment incentives, infrastructure, and workforce development. A poorly designed tariff regime can indeed entrench inefficiency or invite rent-seeking. But acknowledging conditional effectiveness does not invalidate the rationale for tariffs any more than acknowledging implementation risk invalidates monetary or fiscal policy. The relevant analytical question is not whether tariffs are flawless, but whether a price-only framework is adequate for evaluating policies intended to influence production capacity, strategic resilience, and long-term economic structure.
In the end, the article's discomfort with tariffs reflects a deeper attachment to the pre-Trump global trade order-one in which the United States consumes, others produce, and adjustment costs are absorbed quietly by domestic labour rather than reflected in consumer prices. Tariffs disrupt that arrangement by making those costs visible. Whether one supports or opposes tariffs, an honest analysis must confront that reality. To focus exclusively on price effects while ignoring production, employment, resilience, and strategic autonomy is not neutrality. It is a choice of frame-and one that leaves the most important questions unasked.
Dr Abdullah A Dewan, Professor Emeritus of Economics, Eastern Michigan University (USA); former physicist and nuclear engineer, Bangladesh Atomic Energy Commission (BAEC).
aadeone@gmail.com
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