The recent escalation of U.S. tariffs under Donald Trump has sparked a seismic shift in global economic dynamics, thereby inadvertently accelerating the reinforcement of a multipolar world. In a stunning development, China, Japan, and South Korea (three of Asia’s economic powerhouses) have announced plans to jointly respond to American tariffs, signaling a unified push for enhanced trade cooperation—although Japan’s Trade Minister Yoji Muto, in a press conference, tried to tone it down, by describing the meeting as just an exchange of views. This move underscores a growing resistance to U.S. economic hegemony and highlights the unintended consequences of weaponizing the dollar.
Far from strengthening America’s position, Trump’s tariffs are in fact backfiring, thus further fueling the de-dollarization process.
Washington has long leveraged the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency to exert influence over global trade. Trump’s tariffs go beyond mere trade policy—they mark the beginning of an ambitious strategy to fundamentally reshape the global economic landscape. The strategy has often been dubbed the “Mar-a-Lago Agreement”. It seeks to maintain dollar dominance while using tariffs as a “monetary weapon” to rebalance trade.
It would seem Trump is trying to weaken the dollar’s attractiveness without relinquishing its reserve status, thereby hoping to boost American exports. By doing so, he externalizes costs onto allies, injecting uncertainty into the global economy. Apple, Google, Amazon, and others have taken hits, and Trump could lose the support from Big Tech which he has thus far secured for his presidency.
This economic coercion has not gone unnoticed. China, Japan, and South Korea, feeling the brunt of Trump’s 25% tariffs on cars and auto parts, have decided to take matters into their own hands. The three nations held their first economic dialogue in five years on March 30, 2025, agreeing to “closely cooperate for a comprehensive and high-level” South Korea-Japan-China free trade agreement.
While South Korea and Japan have downplayed the idea of a “joint response” to U.S. tariffs, the intent is clear: these nations are seeking to insulate themselves from American economic pressure by deepening regional trade ties. South Korean Trade Minister Ahn Duk-geun emphasized the need to strengthen the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) and to expand trade cooperation through a trilateral free trade agreement (FTA) between the three nations, a move that directly challenges American dominance in global trade.
This development is a textbook example of how U.S. policies are backfiring. As I recently wrote, we’ve seen the same thing with Mexico: Washington’s aggressive tariff policies are alienating even its closest allies. Mexico, another target of Trump’s measures, has seen its trade relations with Washington strain, pushing it to seek alternative partners.
The same pattern is now unfolding in Asia. By further weaponizing the dollar and imposing punitive tariffs, the Atlantic superpower is driving its trading partners into each other’s arms, thus inadvertently fostering a multipolar economic framework where regional blocs seek to thrive somewhat independently of American influence.
The broader implications of this shift are profound, particularly in the context of de-dollarization. For years, the U.S. has used the dollar as a tool of economic coercion, a practice that has not gone unnoticed by the global community. The dollar’s supremacy in fact enables the United States to enforce sanctions and influence other countries, frequently at the expense of worldwide economic balance.
Already in late 2023 we saw how BRICS nations—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—were actively working to reduce their reliance on the dollar by promoting trade in local currencies. The emerging collaboration between China, Japan, and South Korea is a step in the same direction, signaling a growing global consensus that the dollar’s dominance must be curtailed.
There is an issue that goes even beyond tariffs, which has to do with the weaponization of the dollar currency itself—the “dollar bomb”, as it is called (as Federal University of Rio de Janeiro experts Luís Eduardo Melin describes it), on which I’ve commented before. It is basically a tool of financial warfare that disrupts economies without the costs of physical invasion.
The dollar, a fiat currency issued by the U.S., extends American sovereignty worldwide, backed by no tangible asset since Washington abandoned the Bretton Woods system in 1972. This shift to a “non-system” (as Brazilian politician, and politologist Cesar Benjamin calls it) of floating exchange rates and unbacked currencies grants the U.S. immense debt capacity and economic dominance, thereby reinforcing its hegemony across economic, military, political, and cultural spheres, with the dollar’s status as the sole global currency at the core of this power.
The dollar’s reserve status has allowed the American superpower to live beyond its means, running massive trade deficits while the world absorbs the cost. Just look at the record: the U.S. has run trade deficits consistently since the mid-1970s, coinciding with the dollar’s solidified status post-Bretton Woods (after 1971, when the gold standard ended).
For example, the American trade deficit in goods and services was $784.9 billion in 2023, per the U.S. Census Bureau. Despite this, the dollar remains strong due to global demand, unlike countries without reserve currencies, which often face currency depreciation from such imbalances. The US ships dollars abroad and gets cars, computers and other goods in return (it is the world’s largest importer of cars and the second importer of oil). This is an ambiguous privilege, which harms American domestic productivity and burdens the rest of the world.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) reports that about 60% of global foreign exchange reserves are held in dollars (as of 2024), reflecting this dynamic. Studies suggest that U.S. monetary policy impacts global commodity prices, partially shifting inflation abroad. So, Donald Trump’s feast of tariffs in a way is just another blunt display of power which is the continuation (albeit in an intensified manner) of something the US has been doing for decades.
However, Trump’s tariffs, intended to bolster American industry, are instead hastening the decline of American economic dominance. By pushing nations like China, Japan, and South Korea to band together, the U.S. is inadvertently creating the conditions for a consolidated multipolar world to flourish.
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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.
Uriel Araujo, PhD, is an anthropology researcher with a focus on international and ethnic conflicts. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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