Tariff Leverage

This week we talk about trade wars, TACO theory, and Chinese imports.

We also discuss negotiation, protectionism, and threat spirals.

Recommended Book: More Than Words by John Warner

Transcript

In January of 2018, then first-term US President Trump announced a slew of tariffs and trade barriers against several countries, including Canada, Mexico, and those in the European Union.

The most significant of these new barriers and tariffs were enacted against China, though, as Trump had long claimed that China, the US’s most important trade partner by many measures, was taking advantage of the US market; a claim that economists tepidly backed, as while some of the specifics, like those related to intellectual property theft on the part of China, were pretty overt, the Chinese government fairly brazenly gobbling up IP and technology from US companies that do business in the country before hobbling those US interests in China and handing that IP and technology off to their own, China-born copies, claims about a trade deficit were less clear-cut—most of those sorts of claims seemed to be the result of a misunderstanding about how international trade works.

That said, Trump had made a protectionist stance part of his platform, so he kicked off his administration by imposing a package of targeted tariffs against specific product categories from China, including things like solar panels and washing machines. Those were followed by more tariffs on steel and aluminum—from a lot of countries, not just China—and this implementation of trade barriers between the US and long-time trade partners, which had mostly enjoyed barrier-free trade up till that point, kicked off a trade war, with the Trump administration announcing, out of nowhere, new tariffs or limitations, and the country on the pointy end of that new declaration announcing their own counter, usually something the US sells to their country, while in the background, both countries tried to negotiate new trade terms on the down-low.

There was a lot of tit-for-tatting in those first couple years of the first Trump administration, and they led to a lot of negotiations between the US government and these foreign governments, which in turn led to the lifting of many such barriers, though the weaponization of barriers continued, with the administration, for instance, announcing a tariff on all imports from Mexico until the Mexican government was able to halt all illegal immigration coming into the US; negotiation ended that threat, too, but this early salvo upset a lot of the US’s long-time allies, while also making it clear that Trump intended to open negotiations with these sorts of threats, whenever possible—which had the knock-on effect of everyone taking the threats pretty seriously, as they were often incredibly dangerous to specific industries, while also taking them less seriously because it was obvious they were intended to be a negotiating tactic.

When Trump left office, a bunch of international relationships had been scarred by this approach to trade deals, and when Biden replaced him, he dropped most of the new tariffs against long-time allies, but kept most of the China tariffs in place, especially those related to green technologies like electric vehicles and semiconductors, the local-made versions of which were becoming a big focus for the Biden administration. The administration then went on to expand upon those tariffs, against China, in some cases.

What I’d like to talk about today is how this approach to trade protectionism and negotiation has ballooned under the second Trump administration, and what a new threat against China by Trump might mean for how the relationship between these two countries evolves, moving forward.

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Trump’s second administration opened with an executive order that declared a national emergency, claiming that the Chinese were trafficking drugs, especially synthetic opioids like fentanyl, into the US, and that this allowed criminals to profit from destroying the lives of US citizens.

This declaration allowed him to unleash a flurry of tariffs against China, first imposing 10% on all Chinese imports, then increasing that to 20% in March of 2025.

China retaliated, imposing tariffs of 15% on mostly US energy products, like coal and natural gas, and on some types of agricultural machines, while also engaging in some legal pressure against US companies, like Google. They followed this up with tariffs against meat and dairy products, and suspended US lumber import rights, and disallowed three US firms from selling soybeans to China.

The US reciprocated, and China reciprocated back. There was a period of spiraling broad tariffs and import bans in the mid-2025 between the US and China, which led to an aggregate baseline tariff on Chinese imports of 104%, wh