Donald Trump’s tariff strategy has at least one biblical connection: like the peace of God, it “passeth all understanding” (Philippians 4:7). Rival attempts to extract a rationale from the chaos include the idea that he is trying to devalue the dollar, or that he is seeking to “reshore” the manufacturing capacity that the US lost through decades of globalisation. My own hunch is that he just wants to show who’s the big boss around here – or as British science fiction author Charles Stross puts it, that he “expects individual nations to come to him, hat in hand, like terrified...