(Wine Searcher) - When President Donald Trump took office in the United States, he pledged to create 25 million new jobs in the next decade.

"We will bring back our jobs. We will bring back our borders. We will bring back our wealth, and we will bring back our dreams," Trump trumpeted in his inaugural address. He planned to accomplish this feat (which, by the way, would mean breaking President Clinton's record-making 23m jobs created during the go-go 1990s) by building a "big, beautiful wall that will be named after me", fixing infrastructure and making America "competitive" through a series of tariffs and taxes on exported goods from US trade allies.

And now, it seems, he is putting his plans into action. At midnight on July 6, the US officially imposed a 25 percent penalty tax on a laundry list of Chinese products worth $34 billion, and the Chinese government responded in kind. Less than a week later, Trump escalated his threat, pledging to slap an additional 10 percent on $200bn worth of Chinese goods. China, again, promised a counter-attack. This follows the tariffs and counter-tariffs traded between Canada and Europe. In short, the US launched a trade war on multiple fronts, turning sworn enemies – the Chinese Ministry of Commerce, Republicans, big business and hippies everywhere – into strange bedfellows.