The Inner Monologue

There is a comforting simplicity in the rhetoric of economic nationalism: Raise tariffs, punish foreign cheaters, rebuild American greatness. It’s a tidy story. A rallying cry. A flag-wrapped solution served in a single sentence. But simple narratives are often seductive precisely because they conceal complexity. They avoid the uncomfortable truth that economic systems are biological, not mechanical—that nations, like bodies, are fragile ecosystems held together by balance, diversity, and circulation.

So let us consider a more honest metaphor: tariffs are chemotherapy.

Chemotherapy is not a vitamin. It is not a tonic. It is poison. The miracle of chemo lies not in its gentleness but in its brutality. It works—when it works—by killing faster than disease can. A doctor who prescribes chemotherapy understands they are walking a tightrope: kill the cancer, but not the patient. Buy time. Give the body room to heal, rebuild, and strengthen before the tumor finds another weak seam.

That is how wise nations use tariffs: sparingly, strategically, and only when the alternative is collapse.

The Case for the Needle

There are tumors in the global economy. Nations subsidize key industries to dump underpriced steel, solar panels, and microchips into foreign markets until domestic competitors suffocate. Others exploit cheap labor, lax environmental rules, and state-controlled capital to manufacture dominance rather than earn it.

In those moments, tariffs can be chemotherapy:

Strategic protection of steel, semiconductors, advanced batteries, pharmaceuticals

Counteracting predatory pricing or intellectual-property theft

Stabilizing labor markets during industrial transition

Buying time for investment in capacity and innovation

A nation must sometimes defend itself economically, just as a body must sometimes fight for cellular survival.

But modern protectionists forget the rest of the analogy: chemo is not a lifestyle. It is a last-resort intervention, not a governing philosophy.

The Poison in the Cure

Chemotherapy ravages the body even when it succeeds.
So do tariffs.

They raise prices for consumers.
They inflate input costs for manufacturers.
They trigger retaliation that shuts farmers out of export markets.
They slow investment, dull innovation, and invite global supply chains to relocate elsewhere.

Tariffs, like cancer drugs, do not discriminate. They do not ask whether the steel in your tractor or the aluminum in your RV frame is enemy metal. They simply make everything cost more and arrive slower.

And here’s the part the populists prefer to ignore: the wealthy are not the first to feel it.
It is the paycheck-to-paycheck household who becomes nauseated first. The small manufacturer who sees margins evaporate. The farmer whose soybeans rot after retaliation closes Asia’s ports.

The pain is not hypothetical. It is measurable in grocery aisles, car payments, mortgage quotes, and business bankruptcies.

The bill for economic patriotism always arrives at the kitchen table before it reaches the yacht club.

Recklessness as Policy

A competent oncologist does not prescribe chemotherapy because they like the symbolism of it, or because the patient cheers when they hear the word “fight.” Good medicine is measured, not emotional. It is grounded in data, not slogans.

Tariffs without a plan are the medical equivalent of screaming “strength!” while shoving poison into the veins.

Blanket tariffs against entire trading blocs.
Impulsive trade wars announced by tweet.
Punitive duties levied against allies as well as rivals.
Protectionism treated not as surgery but as lifestyle branding.

This is not treatment—it is malpractice.

Reckless tariffs do not make nations stronger. They make them brittle. They encourage crony capitalism, reward inefficiency, and conflate patriotism with self-harm. They abandon the precision of policy for the adrenaline of noise.

A nation can bleed to death waving its own flag.

The Real Work Begins After the Treatment

A doctor does not stop at chemotherapy and declare victory. They rebuild the immune system, monitor the recovery, invest in the long process of renewal. Likewise, a serious industrial strategy does not end with tariffs—it starts there.

The cure requires:

Massive investment in workforce training and technical education

Modern infrastructure and resilient energy grids

Stable industrial policy across election cycles

Research funding that fuels innovation rather than nostalgia

Automation and robotics adoption, not fear of them

Trade alliances with partners, not casual antagonism

Tariffs alone cannot rebuild an industrial base any more than chemotherapy alone can rebuild muscle and marrow. The real healing begins after the poison stops.

Patriotism as Stewardship, Not Spectacle

There is a particular irony to the populist drumbeat for tariff crusades: the loudest champions of industrial patriotism often have the poorest grasp of industrial reality. They speak of self-reliance while demanding universal economic chemo. They promise strength while prescribing sickness. They mistake the fever of crisis for the heat of resurgence.

A strong nation does not fear trade—but it does not surrender blindly to it either.
A wise nation protects its strategic organs—but does not amputate healthy limbs to prove a point.
A patriotic nation understands that power comes not from isolation but from resilience.

The Choice

America can choose treatment or theatrics. It can choose to target its trade policy with the discipline of a surgeon… or drown itself in a bath of patriotic poison and call it courage.

History is littered with nations that mistook pain for progress.

The great experiment of the coming decade is whether America remembers that tariffs are tools, not totems—medicine, not ideology.

Prosperity requires more than defiance. It requires design. And if we forget that, we will learn the horrific truth whispered in every oncology ward:

You cannot save a patient by killing them faster than the disease.