“Every time Trump or members of his administration have lashed out at Europe, including Ukraine, Europeans have absorbed the blow with a forced smile and bent over backwards to flatter the White House.” (…)
“While a systemic answer to Europe’s security conundrum is not in sight, Europeans do have the levers to prevent Ukraine’s capitulation and create the conditions for a just peace.”
It’s an essay format, not a deductive argument so the thesis is stated, then it’s given support. Not saying you should be convinced, just explaining why it seems like this. It’s also a light year away from an exhaustive analysis. I can’t do that here and now. It takes books to do this.
To this point, I’ll restate that there is competition for profit (not in a single market but profit making overall) and therefore state control between billionaires since state control modulates profits. What tariffs are good for some are bad for others. E.g. lumber tariffs are great for the lumber industry billionaires but bad for the construction ones due to increased cost of lumber. They both compete for making profit because if say lumber makes a lot more than construction for a while, they could buy construction. Cross-industry consolidation happens all the time. So when a billionaire doesn’t want tariffs but there are tariffs anyway - then it probably wasn’t their call. Instead it’s either the call of another, or an uninfluenced politician. I think the latter is an endangered species given how much billionaires spend on lobbying and I don’t think it’s a more complicated explanation. In fact given how capital-intensive political campaigns are, the existence of an uninfluenced politician that rose to a position of power where they got to set industry tariffs might be more complex. Obviously there are regional differences, e.g. US vs Canada vs EU. I think the tendencies are the same but the degree is different at any point in time.
To be clear I am not excluding ideology entirely, I think the owner class is a much bigger driver, including significantly driving the ideology of the day at a given place and time.
E: In the hypothetical where the tariff-profiting lumber billionaire buys construction, their attitude towards tatiffs may change depending on how the profit maximization formula works now that they own both lumber and construction. It may turn out that getting rid of the lumber tariffs yields higher profits overall, in which case that billionaire and the politicians who represent them would become anti-tariff.