All politics is local, even when it involves global trade. The imposition of US import tariffs on Chinese tyres less than a week after duties were placed on steel pipes brought a swift response from Beijing. But the posturing on both sides is mostly for the domestic audience and unlikely to escalate.
Trade spats usually serve narrow industry interests. In the case of the tyre dispute, even US manufacturers opposed the complaint. The low-end tyres in question hardly compete with domestically manufactured ones, and some affected Chinese plants are owned by US firms. Both the pipe and tyre tariffs were a sop to the United Steelworkers union, a key Obama administration supporter and an ally in healthcare legislation.
Nervous stock markets briefly saw shades of Smoot-Hawley, the disastrous US tariff imposed less than a year after the crash of 1929 that helped cripple international commerce. Coming on the anniversary of Lehman's collapse, the prospect of a trade war between the world's two largest economies is a scary one. But, on the whole, protectionism has not been a hallmark of this economic downturn.