This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “If tariffs make things more expensive for the other party, why is putting counter tariffs a good idea?”

Let’s first begin by dropping the notion that throwing counter-punches is a “good thing.”

A vast difference exists between a “good thing” and a “necessary thing.”

“Good things” result in mutual progress and shared benefit of growth.

A “necessary thing” is a strategy for mitigating loss and facilitating the reversal of destruction.

Punching someone back after they have punched you isn’t a “good thing,” but a “necessary thing” because they will continue to beat on you until you can do nothing but submit like a broken animal to their assaults until they decide to stop or until you’re dead.

Tariffs are often used in negotiations to achieve balanced results between two parties.

Tariffs can be a means of securing a stable trade relationship.

Tariffs can also be used punitively to attack a negotiating partner, precisely how bullies like Trump approach their negotiations. He championed this strategy of overwhelming negotiating partners with force in his “Art of the Deal” piece of provocative garbage. Bullying is his life pattern.

Trump has always been a bully and his behaviours have destroyed people’s lives.

The only way to deal with a bully that tries to overpower you is to debilitate them.

This approach is precisely how Putin has resolved his conflicts. He has never stopped at just pushing someone back. He has always taken his conflicts to an extreme resolution to eliminate any shred of threat as a message to anyone else who might threaten him. None of his political opponents were beaten to live their lives in a reclusive or marginalized state. They were all murdered to ensure they could no longer pose a threat against him.

Being assaulted by someone like Trump with a long history of behaving in a consistently bullying manner and whose commitments aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on — and who is backed by a psychopath like Putin whose goal is the total eradication of resistance means the necessary option of overpowering Trump and his strategy to such a degree that he is beaten to the ground like a rabid dog is a survival necessity.

Until he has been so broken and defanged that he can do nothing more than gum his way through future assaults, he will always be an existential threat to human civilization. Preventing him from throwing punches isn’t enough. He must have every single weapon of his broken beyond repair so that he lives in a state of total impotence like the swamp slug he is.

This is not a “good thing” by any stretch of the imagination. This is a horrifyingly “necessary thing,” if we want to see something resembling sanity return to society that can allow some form of stability to emerge.