{"id":303382,"date":"2025-09-22T12:00:03","date_gmt":"2025-09-22T11:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=303382"},"modified":"2025-09-19T10:53:10","modified_gmt":"2025-09-19T09:53:10","slug":"trump-wages-economic-war-on-us-allies-while-brics-builds-alternative-system","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2025\/09\/trump-wages-economic-war-on-us-allies-while-brics-builds-alternative-system\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump Wages Economic War on US Allies while BRICS Builds Alternative System"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p><em>Donald Trump imposes tariffs and unequal treaties on Europe, Japan, and South Korea, forcing them to move factories to the US, while BRICS creates a multipolar world order. Trump\u2019s imperial strategy to exploit US allies.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><em>17 Sep 2025\u00a0<\/em>&#8211;\u00a0Donald Trump is imposing tariffs and unequal treaties on longtime allies in Europe, Japan, and South Korea, forcing them to pay and move their factories to the US.<\/p>\n<p>Meanwhile, BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) are building a new multipolar world order based on mutually beneficial trade and investment.<\/p>\n<p>Ben Norton is joined by economist Michael Hudson to discuss.<\/p>\n<h3 style=\"text-align: center;\">Video<\/h3>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Trump can&#039;t stop BRICS, so he plans to exploit US allies\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/wpYgXMkzWc8?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h3 style=\"text-align: center;\">Podcast<\/h3>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Trump wages economic war on US allies, while BRICS builds alternative system by Geopolitical Economy Report\" width=\"500\" height=\"400\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" src=\"https:\/\/w.soundcloud.com\/player\/?visual=true&#038;url=https%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F2170330317&#038;show_artwork=true&#038;maxheight=750&#038;maxwidth=500\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<h3 style=\"text-align: center;\">Transcript<\/h3>\n<blockquote><p><em>(Introduction)<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><strong>Ben Norton<\/strong>: The US government has always had a very aggressive foreign policy. The United States has intervened in dozens of countries all around the world.<\/p>\n<p>But what is unique about Donald Trump is that many of his aggressive policies not only target US adversaries like China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba, but also longtime US allies.<\/p>\n<p>Trump has imposed high tariffs that have hurt the economies of key US allies such as Japan, South Korea, and Europe.<\/p>\n<p>In fact, the details of the agreement that Trump imposed on Japan are quite shocking. This was reported on by the Financial Times, which wrote that \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.ft.com\/content\/678dae36-003f-4df8-ad3f-cff7eeb598d6\"  target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer nofollow\">Japan confronts the increased price of US friendship<\/a>\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>Although I would say it\u2019s not so much \u201cfriendship\u201d; rather it\u2019s vassalage. Japan has been militarily occupied by the US for 80 years, and we\u2019re now seeing the cost of this imperial relationship.<\/p>\n<p>Because as part of the trade deal that Trump imposed on Japan, the US will be putting 15% tariffs on Japanese exports to the US, whereas Japan is not allowed to impose tariffs on US exports to Japan.<\/p>\n<p>Moreover, what\u2019s shocking about this deal is that Japan is being forced to invest $550 billion in the US economy, and Japan must do this by January 19, 2029, which is Trump\u2019s last day as US president.<\/p>\n<p>But that\u2019s not all. In this extremely one-sided, imperial agreement, the US government has complete control over Japan\u2019s investment. We\u2019re talking about half a trillion dollars of investment. And as the Financial Times put it:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>[The deal] <strong>reeks of coercion<\/strong>: a sovereign nation forced to funnel private and public-sector investment to a much richer one under a <strong>structure unashamedly directed by the US president.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Once Japan recoups its investment, <strong>it then reaps only 10 per cent of the cash flows from the project, to America\u2019s 90 per cent<\/strong>. Yes, Japan has nominal input via a consultative committee into which projects are chosen, but there are no Japanese on the more powerful investment committee and <strong>it\u2019s Trump who makes the ultimate call<\/strong>. Yes, Japan can elect not to fund an investment, but if it does so the US may impose new tariffs on Japan \u201cat the rate determined by the President\u201d.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>So this is an extremely one-sided deal. The US gets 90% of the return on investment, and Trump personally has control over Japan\u2019s $550 billion of investment in the US.<\/p>\n<p>But it\u2019s not just Japan. South Korea \u2014 another longtime US ally that has been militarily occupied by the US for over 70 years \u2014 has also been forced to sign an unequal treaty with the US, in which the US imposes 15% tariffs on Korean exports, and Korea is not allowed to retaliate.<\/p>\n<p>But that\u2019s not all. Trump has been humiliating Korea, and the US immigration agency ICE carried out a raid against a major factory in Georgia run by the Korean companies Hyundai and LG, and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.pbs.org\/newshour\/nation\/more-than-300-south-korean-workers-detained-in-immigration-raid-leave-atlanta-and-head-home\"  target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer nofollow\">detained more than 300 South Korean workers<\/a> in humiliating circumstances, putting handcuffs on them and treating them like criminals.<\/p>\n<p><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/geopoliticaleconomy.com\/2025\/09\/17\/trump-economic-war-us-allies-michael-hudson\/\" >TO READ FULL ARTICLE Go to Original &#8211; geopoliticaleconomy.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>17 Sep 2025\u00a0&#8211;\u00a0Donald Trump imposes tariffs and unequal treaties on Europe, Japan, and South Korea, forcing them to move factories to the US, while BRICS creates a multipolar world order. Trump\u2019s imperial strategy to exploit US allies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":303383,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[239,1126,1050,923,249,70],"class_list":["post-303382","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-anglo-america","tag-brics","tag-hegemony","tag-imperialism","tag-sanctions","tag-trump","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303382","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=303382"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303382\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":303385,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303382\/revisions\/303385"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/303383"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=303382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=303382"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=303382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}