As the breadth of the Trump revolution has spread across Washington in recent weeks, its most defining feature is a burn-it-down-first, figure-out-the-consequences-later recklessness. The costs of that approach are now becoming clear.

最近几周，特朗普革命的浪潮席卷华盛顿，“先一把火烧了，然后再考虑后果”的鲁莽行事风格是其最显著的特征。这种做法的代价眼下正逐渐显现出来。

Administration officials knew the markets would dive and other nations would retaliate when President Trump announced his long-promised “reciprocal” tariffs. But when pressed, several senior officials conceded that they had spent only a few days considering how the economic earthquake might have second-order effects.

政府官员知道，当特朗普总统宣布他承诺已久的“对等”关税时，市场会暴跌，其他国家会采取报复措施。但在记者的追问下，几名高级官员承认，他们只花了几天时间来考虑这场经济地震有可能会产生怎样的二阶效应。

And officials have yet to describe the strategy for managing a global system of astounding complexity after the initial shock wears off, other than endless threats and negotiations between the leader of the world’s largest economy and everyone else.

除了无休止的威胁、世界最大经济体的领导人与其他所有国家的谈判之外，官员们尚未阐明在最初的冲击消退后如何应对一个极其复杂的全球体系。

Take the seemingly unmanaged escalation with China, the world’s second largest economy, and the only superpower capable of challenging the United States economically, technologically and militarily. By American and Chinese accounts, there was no substantive conversation between Mr. Trump and China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, or engagement among their senior aides, before the countries plunged toward a trade war.

中国是世界第二大经济体，也是唯一有能力在经济、技术和军事上挑战美国的超级大国。根据美国和中国的说法，在两国陷入贸易战之前，特朗普和中国最高领导人习近平之间没有进行过任何实质性对话，他们的高级助手之间也没有任何接触。

Last Wednesday, Mr. Trump’s hastily devised formula for figuring out country-by-country tariffs came up with a 34 percent tax on all Chinese goods, everything from car parts to iPhones to much of what is on the shelves at Walmart and on Amazon’s app.

上周三，特朗普匆忙制定了针对各国的关税方案，其中对所有中国商品征收34%的关税，征收范围涵盖汽车零部件到苹果手机，再到沃尔玛货架以及亚马逊应用程序上的大部分商品。

When Mr. Xi, predictably, matched that figure, Mr. Trump issued an ultimatum for him to reverse the decision in 24 hours — waving a red flag in front of a leader who would never want to appear to be backing down to Washington. By Wednesday morning, the tariff is supposed to go to 104 percent, with no visible strategy for de-escalation.

习近平不出所料地作出对等回应后，特朗普向他发出了最后通牒，要求他在24小时内撤销决定——这无异于在一位绝不想表现出向华盛顿让步的领导人面前挥舞红旗。到本周三上午，关税预计将提高到104%，却看不到任何缓和局势的策略。

上周，特朗普总统对所有中国商品加征34%的关税，促使中国国家主席习近平对美国商品征收对等关税。周三，对中国产品的关税提高至104%。

If Mr. Trump does get into a trade war with China, he shouldn’t look for much help from America’s traditional allies — Japan, South Korea or the European Union — who together with the United States account for nearly half of the world economy. All of them were equally shocked, and while each is negotiating with Mr. Trump, they seem in no mood to help him manage China.

如果真的要与中国打贸易战，特朗普不能指望从美国的传统盟友——日本、韩国或欧盟——那里得到太多帮助，这些国家与美国一起占世界经济的近一半。它们都同样感到震惊，虽然都在与特朗普谈判，但这几个国家似乎没有心情帮助他应对中国。

“Donald Trump has launched a global economic war without any allies,” the economist John Lipsky of the Atlantic Council wrote on Tuesday. “That is why — unlike previous economic crises in this century — there is no one coming to save the global economy if the situation starts to unravel.”

“唐纳德·特朗普在没有任何盟友的情况下发动了一场全球经济战争，”大西洋理事会的经济学家约翰·利普斯基周二写道。“这就是为什么——与本世纪以前的经济危机不同——如果局势开始失控，没有人会来拯救全球经济。”

The global trading system is only one example of the Trump administration tearing something apart, only to reveal it has no plan for how to replace it.

全球贸易体系只是特朗普政府毁掉某些东西却缺乏取代计划的一个例子。

State Department officials knew that eliminating the U.S. Agency for International Development, the nation’s premier aid agency, would inevitably cost lives. But when a devastating earthquake struck central Myanmar late last month and took down buildings as far away as Bangkok, officials scrambled to provide even a modicum of help — only to discover that the network of positioned aid, and the people and aircraft to distribute it, had been dismantled.

国务院的官员们知道，撤销国际开发署（美国的主要援助机构）不可避免地会导致一些生命损失。但上月底，缅甸中部发生毁灭性地震，远至曼谷的建筑物都遭到毁坏，官员们急忙想提供哪怕一点点帮助，却发现原本已部署好的援助网络、负责分发援助物资的人员和飞机都已被裁撤。

Having dismantled a system that had responded to major calamities before, they settled on sending a survey team of three employees to examine the wreckage and make recommendations. All three were terminated from their jobs even while they stood amid the ruins in the ancient city of Mandalay, Myanmar, trying to revive an American capability that the Department of Government Efficiency — really no department at all — had crippled.

在以往应对重大灾难的系统已被拆除的情况下，他们决定派遣一个由三名员工组成的调查小组前往灾区查看并拿出建议。就在他们站在缅甸曼德勒古城的废墟中，试图重振被政府效率部——其实并不存在这么一个部——瘫痪的美国影响力时，三人都遭到了解雇。

Mr. Trump has appeared mostly unmoved as the knock-on effects of his policies take shape. He has shrugged off the loss of $5 trillion in the value of the American markets in recent days. Aboard Air Force One on Sunday night, he said: “Sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something.”

当特朗普政策的连锁反应逐渐显现时，他似乎基本上无动于衷。最近几天，美国股市市值蒸发5万亿美元，但他毫不在乎。周日晚上，他在“空军一号”上说，“有时你必须吃药才能解决问题。”

上月，缅甸发生毁灭性地震，美国官员急于提供帮助，却发现以前应对重大灾难的系统后已被裁撤。

In their public appearances, Mr. Trump’s aides have often contradicted each other, even on the rationale for imposing the tariffs. Peter Navarro, the most enthusiastic defender of the tariffs, has repeatedly described them as a new, permanent feature of America’s economic defenses.

在公开场合，特朗普的助手们常常相互矛盾，甚至在实施关税的理由上也是如此。彼得·纳瓦罗是关税最热情的支持者，他多次将其描述为美国经济防御体系的一个新的、常在的特性。

“This is not a negotiation,” he wrote in The Financial Times. “For the U.S., it is a national emergency triggered by trade deficits caused by a rigged system.”

他在《金融时报》上写道：“这不是一场谈判。对美国来说，这是由一个被操纵的体系导致的贸易逆差引发的国家紧急状态。”

Like Mr. Trump, Mr. Navarro has made the case that tariffs will become a major source of government revenue, as they were in the 1890s, before the creation of the income tax. (Among the skeptics of Mr. Navarro’s analysis is Elon Musk, who is leading the Department of Government Efficiency and is the world’s richest man. He called Mr. Navarro “truly a moron” and “dumber than a sack of bricks” on social media.)

和特朗普一样，纳瓦罗也认为，关税将成为政府收入的主要来源，就像19世纪90年代所得税设立之前一样。（对纳瓦罗的分析持怀疑态度的人当中，包括政府效率部的负责人、世界首富埃隆·马斯克。他在社交媒体上称纳瓦罗是“真正的白痴”，而且“比一袋砖头还笨”。）

But if you listen to Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, who has looked pained as he has had to defend the tariff strategy, the taxes on imports are a negotiation tool. He said on Monday that he is overseeing such talks with Japan, which is the world’s No. 3 economy and the United States’ most critical ally in containing Chinese power. But it is unclear whether that negotiation is about tariffs, nontariff barriers or geopolitics.

但如果你听听财政部长斯科特·贝森特的说法，他在为关税策略辩护时看起来很痛苦，他认为对进口商品征税是一种谈判工具。周一的时候他表示，他正在督办与日本的谈判，日本是世界第三大经济体，也是美国在遏制中国势力方面最关键的盟友。但目前尚不清楚这次谈判的内容是关于关税、非关税壁垒还是地缘政治。

Mr. Trump, never one to be pinned down on strategy, declared that all explanations for the purposes of his tariffs work for him. “They can both be true. There can be permanent tariffs and there can also be negotiations, because there are things we need beyond tariffs.”

特朗普从来不是那种会被战略束缚的人，他宣称，对他征收关税的目的所做的所有解释都说得通。“它们都可以是真的。可以有关税永久化，也可以有谈判，因为除了关税之外，我们还需要其他一些东西。”

What is missing, at least so far, is a vision of the future.

至于对未来作何展望，至少到目前为止还不得而知。

Mr. Trump’s aides insist the speed at which they are working is a feature, not a bug, of the system. Move too slowly, Mr. Musk has insisted, and the bureaucracy would dig in, never to be dislodged. “Nobody’s going to bat a thousand,” he said at the White House in February. “We will make mistakes. But we’ll act quickly to correct any mistakes.” He cited the restoration of some aid to contain Ebola, and the rehiring of workers at the National Nuclear Safety Administration who oversee nuclear weapons.

特朗普的助手坚称，他们的工作速度是系统的一个特点，而不是一个漏洞。马斯克坚持认为，行动如果太慢，官僚机构就会钻空子，永远无法将其赶走。“没有人会百发百中，”他今年2月在白宫说。“我们会犯错。但我们会迅速采取行动，纠正任何错误。”他举了一些例子，比如一些遏制埃博拉病毒的援助得到恢复，还有重新雇用了国家核安全管理局负责监督核武器的工作人员。

彼得·纳瓦罗（中）表示，关税是美国经济防御体系一个新的、常在的特性。

But it is impossible to move through the empty corridors of the Ronald Reagan Building — where U.S.A.I.D., the Environmental Protection Agency and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars all have been subject to DOGE mandates to fire many workers — without it becoming clear that there is little plan for dealing with the work left behind. U.S.A.I.D.’s doors are locked; the E.P.A. has stopped collecting some critical data; no one knows what is happening to the Wilson Center’s Cold War archive but its scholars are largely gone. Over at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, monitoring Russian and Chinese malware has taken a back seat to avoiding coming job cuts.

但是，当你走过罗纳德·里根大厦空荡荡的走廊时——国际开发署、环境保护署和伍德罗·威尔逊国际学者中心都因所谓政府效率部的指令而解雇了许多员工——你会清楚地看到，对于如何处理遗留下来的工作几乎没有任何计划。国际开发署的大门紧锁；环境保护署已经停止收集一些关键数据；没人知道威尔逊中心的冷战档案会怎样，而且它的学者大多已经离开了。在网络安全和基础设施安全局，监测俄罗斯和中国恶意软件的工作已退居次席，眼下更紧要的是避免即将到来的裁员。

All this suggests a failure to look around corners — which is hardly new in the American presidency. Herbert Hoover signed the Smoot-Hawley tariffs in June 1930, thinking they would help create jobs, then went fishing. They instead accelerated the Great Depression.

所有这一切都表明缺乏周全的准备工作——这在美国总统的历史上并非新鲜事。1930年6月，赫伯特·胡佛签署了《斯姆特-霍利关税法》，认为这将有助于创造就业机会，然后就撒手不管了。结果，它反而加速了大萧条的到来。

The White House insists this time the result will be the opposite. It is a huge bet, one on which not only Mr. Trump’s presidency but the fate of the global economy rests. And no one can predict where the bottom is for the markets, or where the top is for the escalation with China.

白宫坚称这次结果会相反。这是一场豪赌，赌注不仅是特朗普的总统任期，还有全球经济的命运。而且没有人知道股市会跌到什么程度，也没有人知道与中国的对抗会怎样收场。

“The speed and chaos surrounding President Trump’s policy rollout have created extraordinary global economic disruption; nobody alive has ever witnessed self-induced volatility on this scale,” Ian Bremmer, the founder of the Eurasia Group, a consulting firm, wrote this week.

咨询公司欧亚集团的创始人伊恩·布雷默本周写道：“特朗普总统推出政策的速度和混乱已经导致了极为严重的全球经济动荡；当今在世的人从未见过如此规模的自我引发的动荡。”

At the beginning of the year, the United States had the strongest economic position of any of the Group of 7 nations, he noted.

他指出，今年年初，美国还是七国集团中经济形势最好的国家。

Now, he concluded, “President Trump has become the principal disrupter.”

他总结说，“现在，特朗普总统已经成为头号破坏者”。