Pre-Donald Trump, it was easy to find European subjects – good and bad – for this column.

We have plans in the EU to develop a new ‘bio-economy’ strategy, with all that means for agriculture. We have the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation saying more efficient livestock systems could halve antibiotic use. All interesting, but dwarfed by the Trump tariffs now akin to watching a car crash of the global economy.

In economic terms Trump is behaving like someone drunk on power. He believes his own rhetoric, no matter how many wise voices tell him US consumers and businesses will lose out.

Inflation will rip through the US and the losers will include many who voted for Trump and admired his policies. High on that list are farmers in the Trump-loving Midwest states. They are daily watching export markets built up over years fall victim to retaliatory tariffs. Even worse is that, as with Tesla cars, many people no longer want American products if they have a choice.

That will be cemented by the EU changing from seeking only negotiations to imposing sanctions on the US, including for soya, which will be a boost for Brazil.

The US has produced more Nobel prize winners in economics than any other country yet it now has a president who ignores all warnings that tariff wars produce only losers. Tariffs are the direct opposite of economic growth. If it were not so serious then this would be fascinating to watch to see how it plays out.

Trump has become the fabled emperor parading naked while an adoring public admire the finery of his non-existent clothes. That will change as prices rise in the US. What will be interesting are the alliances against the US, in trade terms, and how other exploit opportunities to seize markets lost to the US because of anti-American sentiments and retaliatory tariffs.

At the simplest level, Scotch whisky (without an e) and Northern Ireland whiskey (with an e) should gain from a 10% tariff advantage over Irish whiskey in the now huge US market. But the spending power of American consumers is set to fall and the country is awash with American bourbon no longer in demand in export markets.

This is why cause and effect are never linear when it comes to the uncharted waters of ego-driven tariffs.

Trump harbours a fantasy that the US is the world’s biggest consumer market – it is not and consumers are about to become poorer. He also believes US companies will be forced to bring manufacturing back to the US, but that takes years, not months, and they are operating overseas to escape American red tape and inefficient work practices.

A wider issue is what new trade alliances will emerge against Trump tariffs. The EU has been successful at forging free trade agreements – it has a road map to deliver these. China, communist as it is, now has a greater commitment to free trade than the US, once the bastion of capitalism and free trade.

China will be looking for new markets and new alliances and others will now seek to take advantage of that. It has targeted US food and agriculture with retaliatory and punitive tariffs. That is an opportunity for the EU and the UK to grab long-term business from American suppliers now on the ropes.

This is a better strategy than living in hope that a small tariff advantage over the EU will open the US to more imports from the UK. There are bigger fish than the US to pursue and those alternatives are better long-term prospects for agriculture.

One comfort in all of this is that when economic times get hard, as they certainly are now thanks to Trump torpedoing global economic growth, agriculture is one of the stable industries to which people turn. There is always demand in every country for food and while exports markets are important, it is only a small percentage of what is produced on farms globally that is traded. For traded food there are bigger and better opportunities than the United States, which has now left others with an open goal in markets it has dominated for years.

There are threats to agriculture in Trump’s tariffs, but there are also huge opportunists to seize markets from the US – not just until Trump’s tariff plan collapses, but on a long-term basis.