Middle-class Americans, like many Europeans, have suffered the most painful consequences of the economic crisis and the sea changes in international trade. It is not only a matter of economic setbacks, but above all a general fear has spread deriving from the clouding of the positive prospects of an improvement in the social position for oneself and for one's children. Trump's response (similar to many European leaders) has been to promise greater protection of American manufacturing against imports and a large deficit-financed public works program given that at the same time the federal budget should suffer from the lower revenues deriving from the promise of tax reductions on the middle class and on businesses.
In short, a classic twentieth-century response, probably not suitable for dealing with problems that have origins other than those that had caused the crises of the last century and that could have completely opposite results to those imagined both on the economy and, above all, on the side of international politics.
Much will depend on the doses of the Trump cure that will actually be administered, but protectionism could have quite the opposite effect to the desired one. Indeed, instead of strengthening the middle class, would increase, and a lot, the weight of large corporations mostly based in the US. He would therefore favor the monopolies and their pricing policies sure they would harm those lower and middle classes that you would like to encourage.
Also investments in infrastructure, even thought necessary, could bring little work to white Americans, while they would require a sharp increase in immigrants which Trump has promised to send home instead. If then this policy were to lead to a depreciation of the dollar, the rest of the world would suffer a further depressive effect in addition to that deriving from the slowdown in world trade due to the raising of the tariff walls. As has already been demonstrated in the last century, protectionism in the economy leads to a general impoverishment and would not even be able to cure the inequalities complained of by the middle class.
But even more serious would be the political consequences the imposition of tariff or regulatory barriers to trade, especially in Europe where, moreover, there are already various political forces proposing recipes similar to the American ones. In Europe, the closure of the economy within the confines of home would inevitably be accompanied by a return to nationalism, similar to what we have already known several decades ago and which has sown many losses throughout the world.
From a strictly political point of view, the will of the new president to start a relaxing policy towards Putin's Russia, while in theory it may be a good thing, it could represent a grave danger to Europe, especially if this policy were accompanied by a partial American withdrawal from NATO and by an abandonment of guarantees to many Eastern European countries together with a withdrawal from the Middle East theatre. Europe, weak and divided, runs the risk of finding each other exposed to the will of Russia to recreate on its western borders at least a number of buffer states governed by regimes attentive to Moscow's interests, while from an economic point of view it would be penalized by the spread of neo-protectionism (which would also involve China and the rest of Asia) with the consequent chain of actions and retaliations.
Contrary to what the pentastellato Di Battista (who evidently did not have time to study history well) says, peace with Russia may not be a good thing for Europe, which would be the first to have to pay the price and which should at least launch a major rearmament program to keep the Russian Bear's hunger at bay. And then other than F 35, we will have to do much, much more.
American populism and its abandonment of the role of policeman of the world are different from European nationalism. However, there is a strong country there which, after the electoral battle, is trying to find a unified basis in being all American, while in Europe the return within the borders of the individual states not only it would destroy the fragile community constructionbut is bound to bring a further serious impoverishment of the population within individual countries. Other than the reconquest of popular sovereignty that the Salvinis and the Grillos talk about, we would end up with much more stringent national and international bonds than those that we now tend to reject with too much superficiality.
