Aris Hadjistefanou
137 years ago, Friedrich Engels was able to predict the end of the British Empire by analyzing the tariffs it began to impose on imported products. Today, he might be writing about the end of the American Empire by analyzing LLMs and chatbots.
"The President (Trump) has about as much chance of succeeding in reindustrializing America (with tariffs) as you have of trying to fix your computer by hitting it with a sledgehammer," British historian Sir Niall Ferguson wrote early last week.
The fact that Trump, pressured by the bond markets, was ultimately forced to make what the Monty Pythons would call a "very brave retreat" does not change much in Ferguson's analyses.
Whatever one's opinion of the conservative, yet liberal historian, who declared himself a friend of Kissinger, an admirer of Reagan, and a companion of Trump in the fight against the "Woke agenda," it is a fact that he knows a thing or two about the fall of empires - especially the British one.
So when he argues that the American empire is "broken" beyond repair and that Pax Americana is moving towards a form of decolonization by relinquishing control over its zones of influence, many listen to him with attention.
At least he didn't fall into the trap of the liberal flagships of the American press who more or less claim that the tariff war is the result of the personal obsessions that a now-depraved president has had since his youth. Trump may have imposed tariffs on penguins and presented an algorithm for calculating them that made even high school students laugh, but his basic idea has much deeper roots and a history that goes back centuries.
In ancient Greece, as in ancient Rome, there were tariffs, which reached up to 25%. It is noteworthy that the Roman philosopher and general Pliny the Elder complained about the inflationary pressures that tariffs created in the ancient market on products such as peppers.
However, the aim of these tariffs was not to protect local industry (they were usually imposed on exotic products from countries such as present-day India that could not be produced locally) but to bolster state coffers.
This practice is perhaps reminiscent of Trump's policy, who, as King's College professor Alex Callinicos recently explained, taxes citizens through tariffs to compensate for the damage caused by tax breaks for the rich. However, to better understand the current situation, we must leave antiquity behind and talk about two empires that truly linked their existence to tariffs: the British and the American.
Friedrich Engels remembered traveling on a train in the early 1870s when a merchant from Glasgow began complaining about the tariffs imposed by the United States on imports of iron and other raw materials.
Engels silenced him (the conclusion was his), saying that if the young American state did not immediately develop its own industry by exploiting its own resources, it would remain in a permanent state of barbarism and servitude."Protectionism," Engels explained, "as an artificial method of manufacturing manufacturers can help an incompletely developed class of capitalists fighting feudalism, but also the rise of the capitalist class of a country, like America, which has not known feudalism." In contrast, the United Kingdom, which had secured monopoly supremacy in the industrial sector by crushing competition, had every reason to promote free trade.
Fifteen years later, however, the terms had reversed. America, having created its own industry, was entering the world of free trade, while the British Empire was bidding farewell to its monopoly of power by introducing high tariffs.
It is worth reading the following excerpt from Engels's preface to Karl Marx's work "On the Question of Free Trade", putting today's America in the place of England, China in the place of its competitors, and American Artificial Intelligence applications that are now lagging behind Chinese applications such as DeepSeek in the place of non-competitive English products: "In England, Engels wrote, the realization is constantly gaining ground that the country's industrial monopoly has been irretrievably lost, that England is comparatively still losing ground while its rivals are making progress, and that it is sliding into a situation where it will have to be content with being yet another industrial nation among many others and not, as it dreamed, "the laboratory of the world."
To avert its fate, protectionism, barely hidden under the veil of so-called “fair trade” and retaliatory tariffs, is now being fervently promoted by the children of the people who, 40 years ago, had pinned all their hopes on free trade. And when English manufacturers find that free trade is ruining them and ask the government to protect them from their foreign competitors, then surely the time has come for the competitors to take revenge on them. They will do so by throwing overboard the system of protectionism, which will henceforth be useless, to fight England's fading industrial monopoly with its own weapon: free trade.
Engels essentially describes the beginning of the economic collapse of the British Empire, which would also lead to political discredit after World War I and especially World War II, and would finally deliver the final blow with the Suez Crisis.
As for us, as Engels would explain a few years later, "It is not important to defend protective tariffs or free trade, but to criticize both systems from our own point of view. The communist point of view...".
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