President Trump speaking with the press pool on Air Force One. Photo / Eric Lee, The New York Times
Dozens of foreign governments were trying to appeal to the president to have steep tariffs rolled back, but the president and his advisers have indicated negotiations could be difficult.
President Donald Trump’s plan to impose sweeping tariffs on most of America’s trading partners has Governments around the world racing to schedule phone calls, send delegations to Washington and offer up proposals to lower their import taxes in order to escape the levies.
On Monday, European officials offered to drop tariffs to zero on cars and industrial goods imported from the United States, in return for the same treatment. Israel’s Prime Minister was expected to personally petition Trump on Monday in meetings at the White House. Vietnam’s top leader, in a phone call last week, offered to get rid of tariffs on American goods, while Indonesia prepared to send a high-level delegation to Washington, DC, to “directly negotiate with the US government”.
Even Lesotho, the tiny landlocked country in Southern Africa, was assembling a delegation to send to Washington to protest the tariffs on its exports to the United States, which includes denim for Calvin Klein and Levi’s.
Trump and his advisers have given mixed signals on whether the United States is willing to negotiate. On Sunday, Trump said that the tariffs would remain in place until US trade deficits disappeared, meaning the United States is no longer buying more from these countries than it sells to them. But the administration still appeared to be welcoming offers from foreign nations, which are desperate to try to forestall more levies that go into effect Wednesday.
On Monday, as markets recoiled for a third day and Trump threatened even more punishing tariffs on China, the President said that “negotiations with other countries, which have also requested meetings, will begin taking place immediately”.
“Countries from all over the World are talking to us,” the President wrote on Truth Social Monday morning. “Tough but fair parameters are being set. Spoke to the Japanese Prime Minister this morning. He is sending a top team to negotiate!”
But asked Monday afternoon if Europe’s offer of zero tariffs on American cars or industrial products was enough, Trump replied: “No, it’s not. The EU has been very tough over the years.”
The turmoil in the stock markets since the President announced tariffs Wednesday has prompted speculation that the President might be willing to strike some deals to roll tariffs back. On NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Senator James Lankford, R-Oklahoma, predicted that tariffs would be “a short-term issue while the negotiations are actually happening”.
“I think once the president starts announcing some negotiations in some different countries we’ll start to see the market calm, and we’ll start to see the rates come down pretty quickly,” Lankford said.
But both Trump and many of his advisers have downplayed the prospect of any immediate changes. On Sunday night, Trump told reporters on Air Force One that he would not reverse tariffs on other nations unless the trade deficits that the United States runs with China, the European Union and other nations disappeared.
“Hundreds of billions of dollars a year we lose with China,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One. “And unless we solve that problem, I’m not going to make a deal.” He added that he was “willing to deal with China, but they have to solve their surplus”.
The tariffs that go into effect Wednesday range from 10% to 40% on nearly 60 countries. They are calculated based on the US trade deficit with each country and will be added to a 10% global levy that went into effect Saturday.
Some countries – like Canada – have threatened to impose retaliatory tariffs on American goods, while others have decided to hold off to avoid Trump’s ire. On Monday, Trump responded angrily to China’s decision to retaliate and said he would impose “additional tariffs on China of 50%, effective April 9”.
Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission President, reiterated a threat of retaliatory tariffs Monday even as she proposed dropping some tariffs between the United States and Europe to zero. “We are also prepared to respond through countermeasures, and defend our interests,” she said.
Lai Ching-te, Taiwan’s President, said in a video address Sunday night that Taiwan had no plans to retaliate with tariffs. He added that investment commitments made by Taiwanese companies to the United States would not change as long as they remained in the national interest.
Across Asia – where Trump has targeted some of his harshest levies and where factories specialise in making electronics, auto parts and shoes for the United States – leaders have been offering to strike deals and working to set up meetings with Trump. The tariffs are a particular threat to multinational companies that have relocated factories from China to Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand in recent years, after Trump opened a trade war with China in his first presidency.
On Monday, the trade secretary of the Philippines said the country would reduce tariffs on goods coming from the United States and meet “soon” with the US economic team. The leader of Cambodia – which faces the highest tariff rates of any Asian country, at 49% – sent a letter to Trump on Friday, saying it was reducing tariffs on 19 categories of American imports immediately. Thailand, which is facing tariffs of 36% on its exports, expressed its “readiness to engage in dialogue”.
In Vietnam, where many people had been expecting tariffs of around 10%, the announcement of 46% tariffs came as a blow. Vietnam’s deputy prime minister, Ho Duc Phoc, was scheduled to leave Sunday for a trip to the United States with a delegation that included executives with the country’s two main airlines, which have been promising to buy Boeing aircraft.
Vietnam’s Trade Ministry asked the Trump administration to suspend the 46% tariff, and requested a phone call with the US trade representative, Jamieson Greer, “as soon as possible,” according to a statement on the Government’s website.
In a call with Trump last week, Vietnam’s top leader, To Lam, promised to slash tariffs to zero on liquefied natural gas, cars and other US goods coming into the country, and suggested his counterpart do the same, according to a statement from the Vietnamese Government.
“Just had a very productive call with To Lam, who told me that Vietnam wants to cut their Tariffs down to ZERO if they are able to make an agreement with the U.S.,” Trump wrote in a post on his Truth Social platform Friday morning.
But speaking on CNBC on Monday, White House trade counsellor Peter Navarro said Vietnam’s offer to lower tariffs would not be enough to convince Trump to back off given concerns about other barriers, beyond tariffs, that countries use to block American exports, such as taxes or regulations.
“When they come to us and say, we’ll go to zero tariffs, that means nothing to us, because it’s the nontariff cheating that matters,” Navarro said.
Navarro also urged the European Union to drop barriers such as its value-added taxes, which Trump officials claim discriminate against the United States. “You steal from the American people every which way is possible. So don’t just say we’re going to lower our tariffs,” he said.
In Japan, where stock markets fell by more than 7% Monday, Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba said he would be willing to meet with Trump to discuss the levies and would stress to Trump that Japan “is not doing anything unfair”.
Japan’s trade minister, Yoji Muto, did not hide his disappointment over the tariffs. He told reporters that he had immediately held “an online meeting” with Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, to tell him the “unilateral tariff steps were extremely regrettable”.
“The Ishiba government would prefer to negotiate rather than escalate,” said Tobias Harris, founder of Japan Foresight, a firm that advises clients on Japanese politics. “It is struggling to determine with whom it can negotiate, if anyone.”
Muto had travelled to Washington last month as the tariffs loomed for urgent talks with Lutnick. Muto argued for Japan to be given an exemption based on the roughly $1 trillion that his nation has invested in the United States, including in huge automobile plants built by Toyota and other Japanese automakers.
South Korea’s trade minister, Cheong In-kyo, also planned to visit Washington this week to try to lower the blanket 25% tariff Trump imposed on goods from South Korea. Cheong is expected to meet with Trump administration officials, including Greer, to express concern about the new duties and seek ways to minimise their impact on South Korea’s export-driven economy.
European officials have also been flocking to Washington to try to negotiate. On Friday, the EU trade commissioner, Maros Sefcovic, met with his US counterparts via videoconference for what he described as a “frank,” two-hour meeting, and pledged that conversations would continue.
Sefcovic has travelled to Washington repeatedly in recent weeks, but progress has been halting. EU officials who met with Lutnick and Greer had found that they were not prepared to negotiate before the tariff announcement on April 2.
European leaders have expressed a willingness to lower tariffs in some sectors and have dangled other potential carrots, like buying more American liquid natural gas and ramping up military expenditures. But they are also preparing to retaliate, hoping that hitting back with the power of the European economy will drive the United States to the negotiating table.
EU officials have spent the past several weeks refining a list of counter-tariffs that they plan to put into place starting April 15. They sent the refined list out to member state representatives Monday, and a vote on the list is expected Wednesday.
While that initial wave of retaliation is in response to only steel and aluminium tariffs, policymakers have indicated that more is coming if negotiation fails. Some national officials are even open to hitting America’s big technology companies with trade barriers, and EU policymakers have signalled that all options are on the table.
European nations export a lot of pharmaceutical products, cars and machinery to the United States, and companies across the Continent are bracing for pain as the fresh US tariffs kick in.
Only a handful of countries – including Mexico, Canada and Russia – have escaped Trump’s new levies. In an interview Thursday, Luis Rosendo Gutiérrez Romano, the Mexican deputy secretary for international trade, said that Mexico had been working hard to establish a constructive and positive dialogue with the United States over the past five weeks, and that the decision to exclude Mexico and Canada from the tariffs was a signal of the value of the trade agreement between the countries.
Lutnick had been speaking with Marcelo Ebrard, the Mexican economy secretary, weekly by phone or in meetings at the commerce department in Washington, Gutiérrez said. Mexican officials assured the Americans that Mexican exports were different from those from Vietnam or China, because Mexican manufacturers use far more parts and raw materials from the United States in their factories.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Ana Swanson, Alexandra Stevenson, Damien Cave and Jeanna Smialek
Photographs by: Eric Lee
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