Trump’s Complaints about Overseas Tariffs Ignore Some of the U.S.’s Own

The Washington Post

16:56 JST, March 31, 2025

To hear President Donald Trump tell it, the world is full of crafty foreigners who use “unfair” tariffs and other trade barriers to steal jobs and wealth from hapless Americans.

But foreigners have their own complaints about the United States.

Brazilians grumble about U.S. limits on imported sugar. Koreans bemoan U.S. tariffs on light trucks. And the Chinese gripe about restrictions that prevent their smartphone makers from selling in the U.S. market.

Before Trump’s recent trade moves, the U.S. had one of the most open economies on Earth – unless you were trying to sell Americans foreign-made pickup trucks, clothing, tobacco, cereal or several dozen other products. In that case, the U.S. government charges double-digit import taxes designed to discourage consumers from buying foreign goods and to protect domestic producers. Just like most other nations do.

“Yes, the United States is very open. I would say some of our peer countries are even a bit more open than we are. Folks in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones because everybody’s got their sins,” said Chad Bown, who was the State Department’s chief economist during the Biden administration and is now a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

On Wednesday, the president is scheduled to reveal his plan to impose “reciprocal” tariffs on U.S. trading partners. The new taxes, which could hit most of the $3.3 trillion in annual U.S. imports, are the centerpiece of Trump’s plan to remake a global trading system that he and his supporters blame for hollowing out the nation’s manufacturing base.

Trump initially suggested he would raise U.S. tariffs to match those of all other countries on a product-by-product basis. Last week, he reset expectations, saying the new tariffs would be “very lenient” and “in many cases [would be] less than the tariff that they’ve been charging us for decades.”

On Sunday, Peter Navarro, White House senior counselor for trade and manufacturing, said the administration intends to raise $6 trillion over the next decade via the reciprocal tariffs, suggesting that Trump will opt for the most comprehensive option. That would represent the largest peacetime tax increase in U.S. history, according to the Tax Foundation, although Navarro insists other administration initiatives would reduce taxes for average Americans.

The president has not reached a final decision on the specifics of the April 2 announcement, which aims to shrink the $1.2 trillion annual trade deficit. But Wall Street is placing its bets, based on recent remarks by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. In an interview with Fox News, Bessent said that roughly 15 percent of U.S. trading partners, which he dubbed the “Dirty 15,” were in line for higher tariffs.

Trump’s principal targets are likely to be a group of roughly 20 countries that the U.S. runs the largest trade deficits with, including China and the European Union, according to Michael McLean, a policy analyst with Barclays Bank.

In a report to clients on Friday, McLean said Trump is likely to impose “reciprocal” tariffs starting at 10 percent and increase them over time, relying on a 1930 trade law that authorizes the president to apply taxes up to 50 percent on goods from any nation that “discriminates” against American goods.

Trump is correct when he says that many nations impose much higher tariffs on American products than the U.S. levies on their goods. The E.U., for example, slaps a 10 percent tax on American-made cars, while vehicles produced in German, French or Italian factories face a 2.5 percent U.S. tariff.

On April 3, that U.S. tax jumps to 27.5 percent, following Trump’s announcement last week of new tariffs on all imported automobiles.

Likewise, India’s average tariff on farm products is 65 percent, but in some cases the rate can run as high as 113 percent, according to the World Trade Organization. The comparable U.S. averages are 4 percent and 4.8 percent.

“LIBERATION DAY IN AMERICA IS COMING, SOON. FOR YEARS WE HAVE BEEN RIPPED OFF BY VIRTUALLY EVERY COUNTRY IN THE WORLD, BOTH FRIEND AND FOE. BUT THOSE DAYS ARE OVER – AMERICA FIRST!!!” the president said in a Truth Social post on Thursday.

But today’s tariffs were not forced upon the U.S. government. They resulted from decades of negotiations that involved hard bargaining among diplomats from more than 100 countries.

The most recent global tariff-cutting talks, called “the Uruguay Round,” concluded in 1993, when developing countries like India were a much smaller part of the global economy.

Washington negotiators focused on keeping U.S. tariffs high on the industries that had the greatest employment and output, according to Jennifer Hillman, who participated in the talks as chief U.S. textile negotiator.

“We didn’t cut if we weren’t pushed hard by somebody else who had something to give us that we wanted,” she said.

The Uruguay Round established the World Trade Organization and resulted in agreements governing just about every aspect of global commerce. In return for accepting the tariff structure that exists today, the U.S. got what it wanted in the form of new copyright and patent protections for intellectual property and the first-ever global rules for the lucrative services trade.

These were huge wins for Hollywood, Silicon Valley and Wall Street, and brought order to a type of trade that the U.S. dominated. While the U.S. has run a deficit in its merchandise trade since 1975, it has consistently sold more services to the rest of the world than it has imported. The U.S. last year exported more than $1 trillion worth of services, enjoying a nearly $300 billion trade surplus.

“To say the U.S. is getting totally ripped off is just not true,” said Keith Rockwell, a former WTO official now with the Hinrich Foundation in Singapore.

Administration officials, however, also cite a slew of “nontariff barriers,” such as value-added and digital taxes; health, safety and environmental regulations; and industrial subsidies. The president has said he will take those into account in formulating the reciprocal tariffs.

Navarro, for example, last week blamed differing safety and testing requirements, along with tariffs, for minuscule sales of U.S.-made automobiles in Europe, Japan and South Korea.

Some practices that the administration regards as “unfair” reflect different judgments by other nations about their domestic regulations. Those differences are permitted under global trade rules, so long as they apply to all companies operating in a given market, said Kyle Handley, an associate professor of economics at the University of California at San Diego.

U.S. trading partners since 1995 have filed 174 WTO complaints against the U.S.. The E.U. tops the list with 35 disputes. Canada is second at 22 and China has filed 19 cases. The WTO usually rules in favor of complainants, at least partially.

Last year, for example, a WTO panel agreed with an E.U. complaint alleging improper U.S. duties on ripe olives from Spain. The trade body also backed the Europeans in a portion of their 2020 complaint against Washington state subsidies for the aircraft maker Boeing. And in 2009, the WTO sided with Brazil in a dispute over U.S. subsidies for cotton farmers.

Chinese officials griped in recent comments submitted to the U.S. trade representative’s office that U.S. technology controls unfairly cost their smartphone makers. These companies must pay “billions of dollars in intellectual property licensing fees” to suppliers like Qualcomm but are barred from the U.S., wrote Shi Yonghong, vice president of the China Chamber of Commerce for Import and Export of Machinery and Electronic Products.

“In contrast, 50 million iPhones are sold in China every year,” Shi added.

While Trump has described his tariffs on automobiles and auto parts as “permanent,” he may negotiate over the reciprocal levies. The president has hinted at “flexibility” on the terms, and many on Wall Street anticipate a flurry of bilateral talks starting as soon as the tariffs are announced.

The ultimate goal remains unclear.

“We focus on other countries’ tariff spikes or their high tariffs. But there’s no self-reflection. Actually, the U.S. does this too. And if we’re asking other countries to get rid of their spikes, what are we putting on the table?” said Douglas Irwin, an economics professor at Dartmouth College and author of “Clashing Over Commerce,” a history of U.S. trade policy.

High tariffs on specific products generally reflect an industry’s political or economic clout in the country imposing them.

Kenya protects its coffee industry, a major source of export revenue that employs roughly 600,000 small-scale farmers, with a 25 percent tariff. The U.S. has no similar tax because it does not have a coffee-growing industry to protect. But it does shield its steel mills, located in politically important states such as Pennsylvania.

Some high U.S. tariffs are the legacy of distant trade battles. The 25 percent U.S. tariff on light trucks is left over from a 1964 battle over European poultry tariffs.

After several European nations hiked taxes on imported chicken, threatening a major U.S. export, President Lyndon B. Johnson retaliated by tariffing European brandy, potato starch, dextrin – and light trucks. The levies were eventually lifted on the first three products. But Detroit soon grew accustomed to churning out profitable pickups in a protected domestic market.

“We were in a spat with Europe in the 1960s. They did something on chickens. We retaliated by raising the tariffs on pickup trucks,” said Bown, the former State Department economist. “And then that’s been at 25 percent ever since.”