Following the White House announcement of the “Liberation Day” tariffs on April 2, the response globally has been overwhelmingly negative, combined with substantial derision. Within the United States, the criticism is also increasingly sharp.

The Economist argued a few days after the Rose Garden presentation that “Market carnage has gone global”, adding, “Trump is probably delighted. A man who loves to be at the center of everything is putting the squeeze on every economy on the planet.”

They also noted how this was a problem that Trump “alone has globalized”. And that is how the rest of the world sees it. Many easily intimidated US allies from the Global West and, more understandably, vulnerable jurisdictions from the Global South are too frightened to speak the blunt truth about this brutal exercise of power.

However, China is not. And most fearful jurisdictions, dazzled by the tariff headlights, will be firmly — if mutely — pleased to see that this is so. Beijing responded to the initial massive American bullying exercise by announcing a reciprocal tariff of 84 percent on American imports into China. Trump then launched himself into another wild-eyed tariff orbit, imposing additional tariffs on Chinese imports into the US, raising new tariffs to 125 percent. Beijing swiftly and aptly identified this crude tariff escalation “as a mistake on top of a mistake, which once again exposes the US’ blackmailing nature”, adding that, while it sought “dialogue”, it would fight US tariffs “to the end”.

Apart from putting almost all nations, globally, offside, Trump and the most avid devotees within his inner circle, including White House counselor Peter Navarro and the US secretary of commerce, Howard Lutnick, have also visited grave damage on the short- and long-term stock-based savings plans of millions of people around the globe. It may be that never before (in peacetime) have so many been made so angry by so few.

Predictably, global media outlets have highlighted how Trump happily headed off to play golf once he had triggered worldwide economic mayhem. He followed this up by telling Americans, “Don’t be stupid or weak”, as the tariff turmoil persisted.

Meanwhile, a recent, penetrating report in the US journal Foreign Policy focused on Australia (the US’ closest ally in the Indo-Pacific) emphasized how a local survey confirmed that 60 percent of Australians believe Trump’s election has been bad for Australia. More Australians now see the American president as a greater threat to world peace than Russia’s President Vladimir Putin or China’s President Xi Jinping.

Within the US, criticism of Trump’s tariff “medicine” has intensified. Larry Fink, the CEO of the investment giant Blackrock, said that he and other CEOs think the US “is probably in a recession” already. Another billionaire fund manager, Bill Ackman, who backed Trump’s election campaign, claimed: “We are heading for a self-induced economic nuclear winter”.  Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, argues that the new tariffs will likely fuel inflation. And Elon Musk, who is still a member of Trump’s inner circle, has openly disparaged Navarro’s economic credentials.

However, some inadvertent humor has materialized within this willful creation of extraordinary, globalized economic turmoil. The Economist noted this in another story titled Five Crazy Trump Tariffs You Wouldn’t Believe.

“Liberation Day” tariffs were, for example, applied explicitly to two tiny, sparsely populated French islands adjacent to Newfoundland and another two frozen Antarctic islands subject to Australian rule. Penguins and seals populate these latter islands.

The web and social media are now brimming with animated satirical commentary about penguins versus the US. Faced with this mounting ridicule, the US commerce secretary agreed to be interviewed on this topic on CBS’ Face the Nation. Lutnick explained that it was important that there were “no countries left off”.  This was because, unless you closed this loophole, countries like China could export through such “other countries” to America. In this interview, Lutnick confirmed that the paramount tariff zealots in the White House (and Trump himself, presumably) get by relying on a kindergarten level of world geographic understanding.

Next is the dangerously simplistic system Washington has used to determine this huge global imposition of new tariffs.  Political commentator Fareed Zakaria lately described this calculation method as “closer to voodoo than economics”.

More seriously for the US — and for China — journalist Andrew Tillett, writing in the Australian Financial Review, argued that the “Liberation Day” tariffs have just given “China a free kick to tilt Asia in its favor”.

Tillett was measurably anxious about how Trump was “squandering American prestige” and how this had empowered Beijing to tell its neighbors in Southeast Asia and the Pacific that “America cannot be relied upon and will treat you badly”, noting, implicitly, that Beijing’s stress on Washington’s “bullying” resonated in Southeast Asia.

It is too early to tell if Trump and his feverish, tariff-devoted cabinet are eventually bound to hole the US below the waterline. But we can see that, to the rest of the world, the US looks increasingly unhinged and a danger to itself and the global community.

Remarkably — or maybe predictably — Washington still prefers to see itself, according to a recent BBC report, as an almost delicate, innocent victim, forced to revert to massive tariffs in order to protect its vaunted virtues.

A rising young Chinese scholar, Mao Keji, recently captured the essence of a central American vulnerability that sharply indicates why we are geopolitically in the extraordinary position outlined above. He quotes a single sentence from the 2008 Chinese multivolume science fiction novel, The Three-Body Problem: “Weakness and ignorance are not barriers to survival, but arrogance is”.

The author is an adjunct professor in the Faculty of Law, the University of Hong Kong.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.