Trump will soon find that winning a trade war is not that easy | Larry Elliott

The US president need only look as far as Obama’s experiment with tariffs to see the problem

The trade war is getting nastier. Phase one began when Donald Trump whacked duties on imported steel and aluminium, and announced $50bn (£37.8bn) worth of tariffs on Chinese goods. Beijing retaliated dollar for dollar, while the EU targeted Levi’s jeans, bourbon whiskey and Harley-Davidson motorcycles.

Harley-Davidson responded by saying it would shift production of motorbikes for the EU market out of the US. A different president might have seen this as a warning of the collateral damage likely to be caused to the US economy from a trade war, but not this one.

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