The Deep Slice | What Ricardo, Tocqueville and History Are Telling Us About Where America – and the World – Goes From Here
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The fracturing of US-China trade has pushed supply chains to diversify. Electronics, pharmaceuticals, defence manufacturing, semiconductors – India is the most credible destination in each. The geography is right. The scale is there. And democratic credentials matter increasingly to Western corporations that are watching carefully where they are seen to operate.
By Pavan Choudary
Fifteen months ago, I wrote a piece predicting that Trump’s tariffs, his suspension of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and his treatment of allies would end badly – for America and for the world. I drew on Ricardo and Tocqueville to make the case. I also, I confess, left a small door open: wishing the tariff threats were bluff, maybe the FCPA suspension would shock other nations into reform, and maybe the humiliation of allies would stop in time.
It did not stop in time. The door I wishfully left open was shut, firmly, by events.
The Supreme Court has since ruled, Trump has circumvented the ruling, and Ricardo and Tocqueville feel less like historical references than like people who saw this coming. This column – The Deep Slice – picks up where that piece left off.
The Clock Trump Set for Himself
When the Supreme Court struck down the Liberation Day tariffs on February 20, 2026 – six votes to three – the legal commentators noted the ruling. And that three of those six votes came from justices Trump himself had appointed.
His response within hours, invoking Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, had the texture of a man publicly humiliated by people he had trusted, who needed the world to see he was not finished. Section 122 is a rarely used provision that allows a president to impose a 15% tariff across the board for up to 150 days when the country faces a large balance of payments deficit – no congressional approval required. Trump has not escaped the ruling. He has bought time – and set a clock.
The question nobody is asking urgently enough: what happens on day 151?
Ricardo understood this pattern well. Protectionism never arrives as a permanent policy. It arrives as an emergency. It extends as a necessity. And it becomes a way of life before anyone has decided to make it one.
The Map Is Already Changing
Ricardo’s most important insight is not the one that gets quoted. Comparative advantage is not merely an argument for free trade. It is a description of how trade routes form – and how permanently they change once disrupted – by forces other than competitive advantage.
Markets do not wait for politicians to settle their disputes. While Washington litigates, circumvents, and litigates again, supply chains are quietly rerouting. Canadian buyers are finding European suppliers. Asian manufacturers are deepening trade with each other. The $155 billion in Canadian retaliatory tariffs is not just a negotiating position. It is a structural shift that no future trade agreement will simply undo.
The protectionist Smoot-Hawley Act of 1930 collapsed American exports by 61%. What is less remembered is that those trade relationships took decades to rebuild. Some never did.
American households are bearing an average additional burden of $1,500 in 2026 alone – the largest tax increase as a proportion of GDP since 1993. The countries being alienated today are making new arrangements. Those arrangements will outlast this administration, whatever the courts decide.
The School America Founded
There is one aspect of the FCPA story that has received almost no attention – and it is the most historically significant.
America did not merely follow global anti-corruption norms. America wrote them. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977 was the world’s first law making it a crime for domestic companies to bribe foreign officials. Washington used it for three decades as a template – pressuring trading partners, conditioning aid, shaping the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention of 1997.
The EU’s wave of corporate accountability laws – France’s Duty of Vigilance Law, Germany’s Supply Chain Due Diligence Act, the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive – all trace their intellectual lineage back to American norm-setting. The school America founded is still running. Its graduates are raising the bar further.
Meanwhile America suspended the FCPA. The stated reason was competitive parity with China’s Belt and Road. The actual signal was something else entirely: that American ethical standards are instruments of commercial strategy, not expressions of national character. Standards that are revealed to be tactical lose their authority. The FCPA survived. Its moral weight did not.
In March 2026, the Paris Judicial Court held Yves Rocher liable for misconduct committed by its Turkish subsidiary – the first time France’s Duty of Vigilance Law produced not just a compliance order but actual financial compensation for victims of harm caused abroad. The law requires large French parent companies to identify, prevent and remedy human rights and environmental violations anywhere across their supply chains – regardless of the country where the harm occurs. The message to multinationals is unambiguous: it no longer matters where you operate. What matters is who owns you.
America invented that principle. Europe is now enforcing it. India attempted its own foreign bribery legislation in 2011 and never quite followed through. This may be the moment to revisit it – not to follow the West, but realizing that businesses will gravitate to the stable, just and trusted countries and show how an enlightened power should remember the lessons of history even in tumultuous times.
The Tyranny Without Law
Tocqueville identified the great danger of democracies as the tyranny of the majority – popular will overriding the rights of minorities and inconvenient institutions.
His remedy was independent courts and a civil society strong enough to outlast the passions of any single political moment.
February 20 offered some vindication. A court with three Trump appointees ruled against him. Trump said he was “ashamed of certain members of the court.” That is what majoritarian, transaction obsessed authority sounds like when it hits a wall.
But the more troubling Tocquevillian story is not in the courts. It is in the boardrooms.
Google, Amazon, Accenture and Goldman Sachs rolled back their diversity commitments – not because the law required it, not because of any executive order aimed at them directly, but because they anticipated political displeasure and acted first. Tocqueville feared tyranny enforced by law. He did not fully anticipate tyranny that works without it – where the threat alone is enough, where institutions abandon their own stated values before anyone demands it.
India has seen this before. During the Emergency of 1975–77, when Indira Gandhi imposed press censorship, L.K. Advani delivered his most withering verdict on the editors who surrendered: “You were asked to bend. You crawled.” The image endured because it named something precise: institutional surrender driven not by law but by proximity to power, and the quiet abandonment of stated values before anyone formally demands it.
McKinsey, Apple, JPMorgan and Delta held firm. The split matters. American civil society is not collapsing. But it is sorting. And those who moved under anticipation rather than compulsion will have difficulty explaining, when the political climate shifts, why they moved at all.
The Humiliation Trap
When America engineered Panama’s secession from Colombia in 1903, Colombia was weak – militarily and economically. It still took twenty years to restore diplomatic ties. No Colombian politician could afford to be seen reconciling with Washington. The humiliation lasted longer than the grievance.
The countries on the receiving end of Trump’s tariff onslaught are not Colombia in 1903. They are Canada, the EU, Japan, China, India – these are strong, consequential, and long-memoried. Several are currently negotiating trade agreements with each other that explicitly leave the United States out.
Humiliation is not a metaphor in international relations. It is a mechanism. Leaders who have been publicly insulted cannot pay the domestic political price of being seen to back down. Trade relationships broken this way do not heal on the signature of the next president.
Markets are relationships. And relationships carry memory.
India’s Uncommon Opportunity
For India, this is less a spectacle than a structural opening – if approached with the clarity that separates opportunity from wishful thinking.
The fracturing of US-China trade has pushed supply chains to diversify. Electronics, pharmaceuticals, defence manufacturing, semiconductors – India is the most credible destination in each. The geography is right. The scale is there. And democratic credentials matter increasingly to Western corporations that are watching carefully where they are seen to operate.
But Ricardo’s point is time-sensitive. Trade routes in motion will not stay in motion indefinitely. They are looking for new anchors. India needs to be that anchor before the routes settle elsewhere. The window is open. It will not stay open.
Tocqueville adds a dimension that is rarely discussed in this context: institutional predictability is itself a competitive advantage. Capital follows trust as much as it follows cost. Multinationals today are asking not just where they can manufacture cheaply, but where they can operate without reputational risk. That is a question India can answer well – if it chooses to.
The Verdict
No court can answer the deeper questions.
Will America’s trading partners wait patiently through this turbulence – or quietly complete the shift of their commercial relationships away from Washington? Will the companies that capitulated under anticipated pressure recover the conviction that separates institutions from instruments? Will the school America founded in corporate ethics produce graduates who ultimately hold higher standards than the founder?
History suggests the answers are already being written – in Paris courtrooms, in Canadian procurement offices, in Indian factories, in supply chains quietly rerouting to destinations that will long outlast the administration that set them in motion.
Ricardo and Tocqueville told us why. The only question is whether anyone in Washington is paying attention.
Pavan Choudary is the bestselling author of When You Are Sinking Become a Submarine and Machiavelli for Moral People. In his column 'The Deep Slice', Choudary writes on geo-commercial strategy viewed through history and philosophy.
