Donald Trump won the US election on a promise to ‘make America great again’. Now he is in the Oval Office, he will actually have to make good on those promises. He will need to create new jobs and improve living standards for America’s ‘left-behind’ who turned out en masse to vote him in. Trump appears to believe that the quickest way to achieve this is by revamping and restructuring the US’s global economic relationships, particularly with China.
Inevitably, such an upheaval will cause geopolitical tensions and Britain must be careful not to get sucked into a vortex of trade warfare. However, if we play our cards right, the process could provide a fantastic global opportunity for the UK.
The next four years are going to be about the economy. We know that the US can mount a military operation anywhere in the world but whether it can compete economically across the globe is much less certain. Trump clearly intends to change that and will use an arsenal of trade sanctions, economic tariffs and market access to do so.