WarsofTheWorld
Published 17 Jun 2023By 1942, the war was no longer another great European conflict. It was now a firmly global affair enveloping all of the world’s great powers as the Allies squared off against the tyranny and aggression of the Axis nations. Against such colossal forces, no one country could stand alone and events that affected one combatant would ultimately have consequences for the other further down the road.
To that end, while the western Allies and the Soviet Union were effectively fighting separate wars against the same enemy, there needed to be cooperation between the two fronts in order to squeeze the life out of Nazi Germany and insure victory against Fascism. However, the relationship was often a strained one as both Allied power blocks were suspicious of the other’s intentions once the war was over.
Thus, we come to the subject of today’s episode and a story of the war that is still the subject of much debate today. It was an operation with no specific military objective other than to experiment with conducting division-sized amphibious landings against a fortified beach and as a gesture to the Soviet Union who were starting to feel abandoned by their Allies. It is an operation that has become seared into the hearts and minds of the Canadian people for the sacrifice they were asked to make for it.
0:00 Introduction
3:26 A Red Request
7:50 Planning and Preparation
13:32 Operation Rutter – A False Start
18:10 Reviving Rutter
24:02 Operation Jubilee
35:52 A Necessary Lesson?
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August 19, 2025
Operation Jubilee: Canada’s Devastating WWII Loss
August 18, 2025
Confederate Morse Carbine: Centerfire Cartridges Ahead of Their Time
Forgotten Weapons
Published 23 Oct 2017George Morse of Baton Rouge patented a design for a remarkably modern centerfire cartridge and breechloading rifle action in 1856 and 1858, using a standard percussion cap as a primer. This was coupled with a gutta percha washer for sealing and a rolled brass cartridge body that was strong and robust — easily reloaded, if somewhat complex to manufacture.
After positive trials by the Army and Navy, Morse received a contract to make first complete guns and then a royalty contract for the conversion of existing muskets to his system. Work began at the Harper’s Ferry Arsenal, but money ran out with only 60 conversion completed. When the Civil War broke out, Morse chose to side with the Confederacy, and the tooling for his conversions was taken from the captured Armory to be put to use. He initially set up in Nashville, but the city fell to the Union in 1862, and he was forced to relocate to Atlanta and the Greenville South Carolina. It was in Greenville that Morse was finally able to manufacture guns in quantity, and he built approximately a thousand brass-framed single shot cartridge carbines for the South Carolina state militia.
Unfortunately for the Confederacy, the infrastructure to supply a modern type of cartridge ammunition really did not exist in the South, and this crippled any chance of Morse’s carbines becoming a significant factor in the war. The best technology in the world is still of no use if ammunition cannot be provided!
This Morse carbine is of the third type, using a sliding latch on the breechblock to hold the action closed when firing. Two previous versions used different and less secure systems, but this third type was introduced around serial number 350 and would comprise the remaining 2/3rds of the production run.
Cool Forgotten Weapons merch! http://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forg…
August 16, 2025
This is just crazy enough to work …
Disclaimer: I’m not an American and I don’t know the details of the US immigration system, but from what I’ve read elsewhere, Copernican‘s suggestion has a lot of merit:
I can’t be the only one sick of H1Bs destroying the western labor market, particularly in tech, but across the board. Out-of-work tech workers further compress the labor market in other areas. This problem is not unique to the United States, but I understand the laws of the US better, so I’ll be arguing from that perspective.
I know it. Walt Bismarck has a whole organization dedicated to trying to find reasonable employment by job-stacking. A few new and interesting resources have appeared, dedicated to screwing with these companies that open the floodgates to a horde of foreign software engineers. Seven-eleven clerks, and SAAR YOU MUST REDEEMs, that can crash our software, our ships, and our interstate semi-trucks for us.
Fortunately, there’s something we can do to fight back.
[…]
Well, while the government doesn’t seem intent on doing anything about it, the Millennials and Zoomers that have been fucked-over appear to finally have enough cultural weight to start pushing back. Here’s the thing about hiring H1B workers: doing so requires that the company demonstrate that no American Citizens can fulfill the role. That demonstration usually takes the form of a listing in a newspaper with 500 readers, the back-end of a website with black text on a black background, or something similar. They don’t want Americans to apply for these jobs; they want to successfully demonstrate that no Americans even applied.
So they make the application process nearly impossible.
Usually, the way this is done is that when an H1B is hired, they are permitted to remain in the country for up to 6 years (2 renewals of 2 years). Once that’s completed, either the H1B worker is forced to return to where they came from, or the job must be re-posted for 2 weeks for a potential American worker. If no American worker applies (because they didn’t see it because it was posted in a hidden corern of the website or a newspaper with no readers), then the H1B may be sponsored for perminent US residency.
What was clearly once a method for gaining the Best and Brightest as potential employees in the United States has become a system of exploitation. H1Bs are underpaid, undervalued, and often booted from the country, so there’s no impetus for them to assimilate. It’s a mess all the way around, and the only ones who benefit are stockholders for billion-dollar tech companies.
For the most part, we all know the story.
But … what if during that 2-week posting, a qualified American candidate does apply for the job? Well, then everything goes to shit. The company is legally not allowed to deny an American Candidate that job without opening themselves up to a massive lawsuit and fines, and penalties. If only one American candidate has applied, then the company has to hire that individual … and if they don’t hire the American candidate and then apply for another H1B to fill that slot, the company is in deep shit in a legal sense.
August 15, 2025
Ted Gioia on Hunter S. Thompson
I must admit that I got hooked on Hunter S. Thompson’s writing very early. I read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in my mid-teens and it blew my mind. I couldn’t actually believe everything he wrote, but I couldn’t completely discount it either. I certainly haven’t read everything he wrote … especially his later sports commentary, but I have read most of the best-known books. On his Substack, Ted Gioia is running a three-part series on the writer and his work:
That’s Hunter Thompson. There’s always someone in control behind the wheel — even when he seems most out of control.
This hidden discipline showed up in other ways. Years later, when he ran for sheriff in Aspen or showed up in Washington, D.C. to cover an election for Rolling Stone, savvy observers soon grasped that Thompson had better instincts and organizational skills than some of the most high-powered political operatives. People rallied around him — he was always the ringleader, even going back to his rowdy childhood. And hidden behind the stoned Gonzo exterior was an ambitious strategist who could play a long term game even as he wagered extravagantly on each spin of the roulette wheel that was his life.
“I don’t think you have any idea who Hunter S. Thompson is when he drops the role of court jester,” he wrote to Kraig Juenger, a 34-year-old married woman with whom he had an affair at age 18. “First, I do not live from orgy to orgy, as I might have made you believe. I drink much less than most people think, and I think much more than most people believe.”
That wasn’t just posturing. It had to be true, merely judging by how well-read and au courant Thompson became long before his rise to fame. “His bedroom was lined with books,” later recalled his friend Ralston Steenrod, who went on to major in English at Princeton. “Where I would go home and go to sleep, Hunter would go home and read.” Another friend who went to Yale admitted that Thompson “was probably better read than any of us”.
Did he really come home from drinking binges, and open up a book? It’s hard to believe, but somehow he gave himself a world class education even while living on the bleeding edge. And in later years, Thompson proved it. When it came to literary matters, he simply knew more than most of his editors, who could boast of illustrious degrees Thompson lacked. And when covering some new subject he didn’t know, he learned fast and without slowing down a beat.
But Thompson had another unusual source of inspiration he used in creating his unique prose style. It came from writing letters, which he did constantly and crazily — sending them to friends, lovers, famous people, and total strangers. Almost from the start, he knew this was the engine room for his career; that’s why he always kept copies, even in the early days when that required messy carbon paper in the typewriter. Here in the epistolary medium he found his true authorial voice, as well as his favorite and only subject: himself.
But putting so much sound and fury into his letters came at a cost. For years, Thompson submitted articles that got rejected by newspapers and magazines — and the unhinged, brutally honest cover letters that accompanied them didn’t help. He would insult the editor, and even himself, pointing out the flaws in his own writing and character as part of his pitch.
What was he thinking? You can’t get writing gigs, or any gigs, with that kind of attitude. Except if those cover letters are so brilliant that the editor can’t put them down. And over time, his articles started resembling those feverish cover letters — a process unique in the history of literature, as far as I can tell.
When Thompson finally got his breakout job as Latin American correspondent for the National Observer (a sister publication to the Wall Street Journal in those days), he would always submit articles to editor Clifford Ridley along with a profane and unexpurgated cover letter that was often more entertaining than the story. In an extraordinary move, the newspaper actually published extracts from these cover letters as a newspaper feature.
If you’re looking for a turning point, this is it. Thompson now had the recipe, and it involved three conceptual breakthroughs:
- The story behind the story is the real story.
- The writer is now the hero of each episode.
- All this gets written in the style of a personal communication to the reader of the real, dirty inside stuff — straight, with no holds barred.
Why can’t you write journalism like this? In fact, a whole generation learned to do just that, mostly by imitating Hunter S. Thompson …
QotD: American Puritanism
The American, in other words, thinks that the sinner has no rights that any one is bound to respect, and he is prone to mistake an unsupported charge of sinning, provided it be made violently enough, for actual proof and confession.
H.L. Mencken, “Puritanism As a Literary Force”, A Book of Prefaces, 1917.
August 14, 2025
D-Day’s Flat Pack Ports OR Lord HT Gets Cross with The Fat Electrician
HardThrasher
Published 13 Aug 2025In which we use the @the_fat_electrician as an excuse to talk about the Mulberry Harbours, make a specific threat to a building in the United States and get to oogle at giant bits of floating concrete.
Primary Source – Codename Mulberry – Guy Hartcup, Pen & Sword Military. Kindle Edition 2014 (org. 1977)
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“Just war” theory and nuclear weapons practice
On Substack, Nigel Biggar discusses the postwar argument about whether the use of nuclear weapons against Japan was justified or not:
Atomic cloud over Hiroshima, taken from “Enola Gay” flying over Matsuyama, Shikoku, 6 August, 1945.
US Army Air Force photo via Wikimedia Commons.
For pacifists, Christian or otherwise, the answer is clear: since any deliberate killing is wrong, the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August 1945 was wrong about two hundred thousand times over.
But that clear answer generates further questions whose answers aren’t so obvious. If killing is always wrong, then the United States should never have gone to war against Imperial Japan and therefore its ally, Hitler’s Germany. What, then, would have stopped the triumph of brutally racist Japanese imperialism in Asia and massively murderous Nazism in Europe? The noble witness of innocent non-violence?
Unfortunately, the historical evidence is that the kind of people who ran the slave-labour camps in Burma, and the likes of Dachau in Germany and Auschwitz in Poland, were not at all shamed by the face of vulnerable innocence; on the contrary, it excited their lust for domination and they fed upon it.
On the other hand, those who think that war can sometimes be justified, might judge that the mass killing of civilians by the atomic bombs was, simply by its massive extent, indiscriminate and therefore unjust. But there are two problems here. The first is that the vast majority of people, certainly in the UK and the USA, regard the war against Hitler and his allies as morally justified, notwithstanding the fact that that cost between 60 and 80 million deaths, well over half of them civilian.
Image credit – Wikipedia
And the second problem is that the ethical tradition of “just war” thinking doesn’t say that we may not kill civilians, even on a massive scale; it only says that we may not kill them intentionally. If a military objective can’t be achieved except by risking the possible or probable deaths of civilians, then it may still be attempted, provided that the objective is sufficiently important, militarily, and that all reasonable measures are taken to avoid or minimise the side-effect of civilian casualties. The reason for this permissiveness is that in most circumstances just war would be impossible to prosecute otherwise.
So, for the “just war” proponent, if the intention in dropping the atomic bombs on Japan was to destroy vital military or military-related targets, and if there was no more discriminate way of achieving that end, then the bombing was morally justified. It was deeply, deeply tragic—but nevertheless just.
QotD: It’s not hypocrisy when progressives do it …
Severian, “Fade to Black”, Founding Questions, 2022-01-23.
August 13, 2025
The Korean War Week 60: Neutral Zone Violations and the 38th Parallel Standoff – August 12, 1951
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 12 Aug 2025UN Commander Matt Ridgway is extremely frustrated by the Communist delegation’s unyielding stance on the 38th Parallel at the Kaesong peace talks. Chinese violations of the neutral zone highlight the fact that the war still goes on, though, as do the preparations for a UN offensive soon to be launched, to really reignite the active war in a big way.
Chapters
00:00 Hook
00:50 Recap
01:15 Ridgway’s Frustration
05:01 Neutral Zone Violations
08:57 Van Fleet’s Plans
12:28 Conclusion
13:50 Call to Action
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QotD: The New York Times and their 1619 project
It’s a good point, isn’t it? If you don’t believe in a liberal view of the world, if you hold the doctrines of critical race theory, and believe that “all of the systems in the country” whatever they may be, are defined by a belief in the sub-humanity of black Americans, why isn’t every issue covered that way? Baquet had no answer to this contradiction, except to say that the 1619 Project was a good start: “One reason we all signed off on the 1619 Project and made it so ambitious and expansive was to teach our readers to think a little bit more like that”. In other words, the objective was to get liberal readers to think a little bit more like neo-Marxists.
The New York Times, by its executive editor’s own admission, is increasingly engaged in a project of reporting everything through the prism of white supremacy and critical race theory, in order to “teach” its readers to think in these crudely reductionist and racial terms. That’s why this issue wasn’t called, say, “special issue”, but a “project”. It’s as much activism as journalism. And that’s the reason I’m dwelling on this a few weeks later. I’m constantly told that critical race theory is secluded on college campuses, and has no impact outside of them … and yet the newspaper of record, in a dizzyingly short space of time, is now captive to it. Its magazine covers the legacy of slavery not with a variety of scholars, or a diversity of views, but with critical race theory, espoused almost exclusively by black writers, as its sole interpretative mechanism.
Don’t get me wrong. I think that view deserves to be heard. The idea that the core truth of human society is that it is composed of invisible systems of oppression based on race (sex, gender, etc.), and that liberal democracy is merely a mask to conceal this core truth, and that a liberal society must therefore be dismantled in order to secure racial/social justice is a legitimate worldview. (That view that “systems” determine human history and that the individual is a mere cog in those systems is what makes it neo-Marxist and anti-liberal.) But I sure don’t think it deserves to be incarnated as the only way to understand our collective history, let alone be presented as the authoritative truth, in a newspaper people rely on for some gesture toward objectivity.
Andrew Sullivan, “The New York Times Has Abandoned Liberalism for Activism”, New York, 2019-09-13.
August 12, 2025
AOL to shut down its last dial-up access: dozens to be inconvenienced
James Lileks on the end-of-era announcement from AOL — and I can’t recall the last time I thought of that company — that they’ll be eliminating the last of their dial-up internet access accounts:
New tech: shiny today, tarnished tomorrow. Everything that was once bright and brilliant now stamps its walker towards the exit door. The headlines wave goodbye: Last telegram office in the US shut down.
Last phone booth in New York is decommissioned. The latest: AOL to shut off its landline customers.
You’d think this would be news on the level of “homing pigeon trainer employment hits record lows”.
Who uses dialup? Yahoo, which now owns the AOL brand, says that the user base is in the “low thousands”, which suggests that some people forgot to turn off autopay in 2005. What does AOL do today? The usual basket of dross and chum. A website that offers “trending videos” — gosh, don’t know where else you’d find those — and a lot of news stories, supplied by Yahoo, and its … numberless army of journalists, I guess.
It’s a legacy brand for people who want to slide into the internet like comfy slippers they left under the desk. And that’s fine. Facebook serves the same function. It’s a place to start, a home base. A familiar window out which we gaze daily We all have them. But let us not get nostalgic for AOL and the early days of the internet. Some people, of course, love to talk about the pioneer days, and how it required some technical know-how:
Well, we didn’t have those fancy little pre-made modems like you got in the 90s, so we had to get a little matchbox and fill it up with a certain kind of specially-bred insect that sang a note at a particular pitch when exposed to electrical current. So you’d crank up the generator and put the little alligator clips on the box and hold the box up to the phone while you entered your user name in Morse code by pushing on the hang-up buttons, and then you had to shake the box so the insect singing would modulate. Took about an hour, but then you’d be “On the Line”, as we said, and you could go to a Usenet group and call people Nazis. Kids today, they can call someone a Nazi without lifting a finger.
August 11, 2025
The problem with the theory that local government is more responsive is … people
Poor Chris Bray is having a moment of deep cognitive dissonance over the vast chasm between his prior belief that local government is more sensible, more grounded, more responsive to the electorate than huge, distant, impersonal big government:
The more you deal with government, the more you are likely to agree with Thoreau
The problem of underlying principles and structural assumptions in a moment of profound cultural decay.
Like my old friend James Madison, the core of my understanding of political power is that authority becomes more rational and balanced as it gets closer to the people who are governed. Starting from home in my list of ideological priors, centralized power is usually going to be a steamroller, managed on top-down premises by people you’ve never met; local government, government by neighbors, is usually going to be more adept at listening and adapting. Your mayor is down the block, mowing his lawn. You can wave to him. When I worked at small town newspapers, I’d have breakfast with the city manager and the police chief — mostly so they could threaten to call my editor and have me fired, but still. They were here, right in front of me. I could talk to them. In the town where I’ve lived for a few years, now, I’ve waited at Trader Joe’s for a city councilman in cargo shorts and an old t-shirt to move over so I could get to the ground beef. They aren’t distant autocrats.
Sadly, though, a good few of them turn out to be proximate autocrats, and almost miraculously stupid. The problem with the theory of relatively well-balanced local authority is that some of the biggest goobers I’ve ever met have served on small town city councils and school boards, and your HOA board of literal neighbors makes Mussolini look like a hippie.
[Deleted a video here of an HOA officer being arrested, because it was staged.]
I wrote a quite carefully reported newspaper story about wasted money at a suburban school district, decades ago, that was critical but fair and elaborately sourced. The subsequent conversations I had with the members of the school board made me wonder if they had actual brain damage. No one on earth is more susceptible to psychotic conspiracy theories than small town elected officials, who respond to mild criticism by demanding to know WHO PUT YOU UP TO THIS, WHO ARE YOU REALLY WORKING FOR!?!?!?! WHAT’S YOUR TRUE AGENDA!?!?!?! WHO SENT YOU!?!?!?!? If you ask me for a list of the top ten people I’ve known personally and can’t stand at all, roughly eight of them were elected to local government positions in towns with low-five-figure populations, and I start grinding my teeth at the sound of their names. Wait, no: nine.
This topic is back on my mind this week because of Lina Hidalgo, though a county of five million people may be a bad example of real localism and neighborhood authority. Hidalgo is the county judge — in Texas, the chief executive officer — of Harris County. And she’s mad as a hatter. Click on the link to watch the video, but a tax increase is “not about politics, it’s about kids.” Never heard that one before.
[…]
Making appalling decisions at the head of broken institutions, they respond to criticism by hiring men with guns as a shield against ordinary human contact. Like I said, the mayor is down the block, mowing his lawn, so you can wave to hi—STOP RIGHT THERE, GET ON THE GROUND.
The spirit of the NSBA letter lives on in a thousand local offices, where the problem with running schools is that parents exist, and the problem with running cities is that they have people in them.
August 9, 2025
Carney hints at backing away from Trudeau’s digital policy catastrophes
Michael Geist on the possibility that Prime Minister Mark Carney is starting to recognize just how damaging to Canadian interests the previous government’s various online bills have been:
Digital policies did not play a prominent role in the last election given the intense focus on the Canada-U.S. relationship. Prime Minister Mark Carney started as a bit of a blank slate on the issue, but over the past few months a trend has emerged as he distances himself from the Justin Trudeau approach with important shifts on telecom, taxation, and the regulation of artificial intelligence. Further, recent hints of an openness to re-considering the Online News Act and heightened pressure from the U.S. on the Online Streaming Act suggests that a full overhaul may be a possibility.
This week’s decision to let the CRTC’s decision on wholesale access to fibre broadband networks stand is a case in point. Last November, the Justin Trudeau-led government sent the CRTC’s initial ruling back to the Commission for reconsideration, noting that it “has concerns about future and ongoing investments in broadband infrastructure and services in Ontario and Quebec, including in rural, remote and Indigenous communities, and concerns that those investments could, if they are unprofitable, lead to a decline in quality and consumer choice in the retail Internet services market”. Nine months later, the CRTC came back with the roughly same ruling. That led to yet another request for a cabinet review but this time the government stood by the CRTC despite significant industry opposition. New leader, dramatically new approach.
The CRTC is example was preceded by the decision to eliminate the digital services tax. While the strategic approach seemed misguided – dropping the DST should have garnered more than just an agreement from the U.S. to return to the bargaining table – some noted at the time that perhaps Carney wasn’t a supporter of the DST and had few qualms with rescinding it. The tax had been a foundational part of the government’s campaign to “make web giants pay” but in a matter of 72 hours in late June it was gone.
The government has also shifted its approach on AI regulation. After months of supporting Bill C-27 and the EU-style AI regulatory approach, a new government brought a new minister and a new approach. Evan Solomon, the newly installed AI and Digital Innovation Minister, used his first public speech as minister to pledge that Canada would move away from “over-indexing on warnings and regulation” on AI. That too represents a significant shift in approach, particularly since Trudeau had embraced the EU style regulatory model.
Then there is the Online News Act and Online Streaming Act. When asked about the Online News Act this week, Carney seemed to suggest he was open to change, stating “this government is a big believer in the value of … local news and the importance of ensuring that that is disseminated as widely and as quickly as possible. So, we will look for all avenues to do that.” While that isn’t a clear commitment to change, it is far from an ironclad commitment to legislation is viewed by many to have done more harm than good. Further, reports indicate that the U.S. Congress is escalating pressure to rescind the Online Streaming Act, which may put that law on the chopping block, particularly if a court appeal strikes down elements of the bill or the CRTC’s implementation of the law puts the bill on the Trump radar screen.
QotD: The New Newspeak
I’ve read their explanation a few times and it seems to boil down to the idea that all people of African descent all around the world are somehow one single identifiable entity, while white and brown people are too diverse and variegated to be treated the same way. (The Times explains: “We’ve decided to adopt the change and start using uppercase ‘Black’ to describe people and cultures of African origin, both in the United States and elsewhere.”)
Given the extraordinary diversity of the African continent, and the vast range of cultural, ethnic, religious, and tribal differences among Americans of African descent — new immigrants and descendants of slaves, East and West Africans, people from the Caribbean and South America, and the Middle East — this seems more than a little reductionist. As Times contributor Thomas Chatterton Williams has noted, there are “371 tribes in Nigeria alone. How can even all the immigrants from Nigeria, from Igbo to Yoruba, be said to constitute a single ethnicity? Let alone belong to the same ethnicity as tenth-generation descendants from Mississippi share-croppers?” The point, of course, is to ignore all these real-life differences in order to promote the narrative that critical race theory demands: All that matters is oppression.
Andrew Sullivan, “China Is a Genocidal Menace”, New York, 2020-07-03.
August 8, 2025
China’s short- to medium-term reaction to Trump’s tariffs
In Reason, Liz Wolfe outlines some of the reasons China has not been suffering under the tariffs President Trump has levied on them over the last few months (unlike, say, Canada):
President Donald Trump and PRC President Xi Jinping at the G20 Japan Summit in Osaka, 29 June, 2019.
Cropped from an official White House photo by Shealah Craighead via Wikimedia Commons.
Total Chinese exports surged in July … but not to us. Compared to July 2024, Chinese exports were up 7.2 percent last month. “Its exports to Southeast Asia and Africa, key regions for reshipment to the United States, rose more than twice as fast as its overall exports”, per The New York Times‘ reading of the data. “China’s exports to the European Union, its main alternative to the American market, were also up very strongly.”
Specifically, “data released Thursday by the customs authorities showed the pickup was driven by strong growth in shipments to the European Union, Southeast Asia, Australia, Hong Kong and other markets, which more than made up for the fourth month of double-digit declines in US purchases”, reports Bloomberg.
Predictably, even the threat of tariffs has been enough to dampen trade. Remember, Washington and Beijing are still operating under a 90-day truce — set to expire on August 12, though it could be extended if a new agreement is reached — that holds off the imposition of higher tariff levels, namely, the tit-for-tat tariff increases that both countries had threatened. The truce also staves off export controls on certain critical rare-earth minerals and items that fall into the technology category. But still, current tariff levels mean a baseline 30 percent tariff on Chinese imports, which has been enough to depress trade.
For those in the Trump administration who are worried about trade deficits in particular, I suppose the good news is that we’ve made progress there: “For the last several decades, China has been selling as much as $4 worth of goods to the United States for each $1 of American goods that it buys”, reports The New York Times. Following China’s admission into the World Trade Organization, the trade deficit rose. Now, “tariffs have begun to reduce the imbalance. The United States announced on Tuesday that its overall trade deficit had narrowed in June to $60.2 billion, the smallest in nearly two years.”
It’s not clear why Trump administration officials, and the president himself, are so worried about trade deficits as something to eliminate for their own sake. We are dependent on Chinese goods to a rather substantial degree, which would pose a problem in the event of war with China (which is why the previous administration focused on improving our semiconductor manufacturing capabilities back in 2022). But you can just as easily make the case that it’s the vast volume of trade between the two countries — the deeply intertwined economies so reliant on each other (despite China’s claims of autarky and, more amusingly, communism) — that are incentivizing continued decent relations.
A few factors are at play that might help to explain why you likely haven’t felt a drastic increase in prices just yet. First, since there’s been a long lead-up to this trade war, many larger importers have stockpiled product over the last few months, so shortages haven’t been felt yet — they’ve just been selling off product they’ve been storing. Second, China has already managed to divert some stages of manufacturing to other countries—namely Vietnam — and some larger companies already have factories up and running in other Southeast Asian countries to avoid the “made in China” or “shipped from China” labeling. Expect more transshipping and manufacturing-locale creativity as a means of throwing customs officials off the scent.
