Stop the presses!
When I originally wrote this article – way back around midnight last Friday, April 4th – I noted that five countries had already come to the bargaining table to see what could be done to create zero-based tariffs with the U.S. on a reciprocal basis.
Then, on Sunday, April 6, the usually reliable Epoch Times, citing an interview between Kevin Hassett – head of the White House’s National Economic Council – and ABC’s “This Week” host and anchor, George Stephanopoulos, noted that the number of nations eager to do away with reciprocal tariffs with Trump’s White House had grown by an order of magnitude, from five to fifty.
This dramatic growth in our new no-tariff trading partners happened over the weekend. This is usually a time when all good U.S. bureaucrats and foreign ambassadors had better things to do than make news.
What does that mean?
It means that Trump’s straw man – reciprocal tariffs between the U.S. and any one of 180 countries – had already begun negotiating with America, with the goal of zeroing out all tariffs between the U.S. and their own countries.
Since Trump’s commitment to raise tariffs is set to begin on April 9, 2025 – just a few days from now – it’s clear that Trump’s threat has already accomplished exactly what he wanted it to do – get our trading partners to start negotiating in good faith with the goal of eschewing two-way tariffs with the U.S.
While Director Hassett didn’t name names, the president has not been reluctant to do so. We now know that among those 50 countries eager to put tariffs between their counties and ours includes Argentina, Vietnam, Canada, Mexico (those latter two had earlier tariff changes announced, which led to immediate and positive results for America) as well as Taiwan, the U.K., and Thailand.
To understand what this means and how we got there, please read on.
From the moment that President Trump announced an increase in tariffs with 180 trading-partner nations, from Gabon to the People’s Republic of China, the far left Democrats have demonstrated that the wailing and gnashing of teeth is not something confined to the Old Testament Hebrews, who reserved that for times when they really screwed up, earning them the wrath of God.
The Democrats made all manner of assumptions about the negative economic impact of raising tariffs and international trade wars.
No matter how many times they bemoan the “end of the world” impact of one of Trump’s initiatives, they just don’t get it that our president wants to bring other nations to the negotiating table, where fair and equitable solutions can be hammered out, one nation at a time.
Which is exactly what Trump’s proposed tariffs are really all about. And this is no secret.
Earlier this week, Fox News broadcast an on-camera interview with Donald Trump – way back in 1989 – that clearly demonstrated how, even then, he wanted the U.S. to use tariffs as a useful leveraging tool for bringing our trading partners to the negotiating table.
In the gnashing of teeth department, the media once again played the mouthpiece of the ultra-progressive far left.
Their threat had, they said, millions of people rushing to see how badly their 401(k)s had faired, in response to a tariff increase that had yet to take place.
In short, Wall Street was drinking its own Kool-Aid, horrified at the nonsense the Democrats had been spewing.
The first stock-market reaction to Trump’s long-promised reciprocal tariff decision – finally announced earlier this week – was to see a significant and seemingly sudden downturn in share value, even on the heels of the second beyond-expectation monthly jobs report, which revealed strength.
The media told worried investors that this act, even before it was implemented, should be terrifying to all those with 401(k) retirement accounts.
There was, in fact, a downturn, primarily in the stock exchanges, known as a correction, that had already been happening.
So this response was fueled, not by the loss in actual profitability of thousands of stock-traded companies, but by anti-Trump business and news media outlets eager to create the sudden downturn in stock prices – then claim it was all Trump’s fault. In the spirit of Ouroboros – the ancient mythological snake-God always busy eating itself, tail first – this self-created downturn has given the anti-Trump media something else to crow about.
However, here’s a prediction: By this time next week, our stock markets will have reversed their trend once again, creating quite literally the shortest economic downturn in American history.
Why? Because these new tariffs are already working, just as Trump’s earlier ventures into tariffs with Mexico and Canada have already made significant inroads into economic trade barriers that had existed between the three economic allies, Canada, the U.S. and Mexico.
Just shy of a month ago, on March 13, I explained to American Thinker readers the real reason for our generations-long massive tariff trade imbalance with our economic partners -– to provide “back-door funding” to support the Marshall Plan for restoring Germany and Western Europe, as well as Japan and East Asia.
So, put Trump’s proposed tariff revisions into context -– that the tariff imbalance hadn’t served America’s strategic interests since at least 1960, and perhaps longer. Certainly, with the fall of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, those tariff imbalances have served no national strategic mission.
However, unlike the secret justification for Truman’s intentional trade-imbalance tariffs, Trump’s rebalancing of those tariffs has a very specific purpose: reduce the reciprocal cost of foreign trade by wiping out tariffs altogether.
This new strategy comes straight out of “The Art of the Deal,” Donald Trump’s seminal business best-selling book, originally published in 1987.
This remarkable book was published thirty years before Trump became the 47th president. At time it came out, I owned a business -– and, having read it, I compelled my employees to read it, then to participate in weekly discussions on how we could use Trump’s focus on the deal to improve our own bottom line.
In case you haven’t already read The Art of the Deal, specifically in context with the tariffs imposed earlier this week, here’s how it works:
Within this past week, Trump implemented his long-promised tariff increase, especially regarding our “trading partners.” Trump was sure some of our current trading partners were ready to start backing away from this anti-reciprocal trade imbalance. He’s been quickly proven correct.
The first to the negotiation table was Argentina, proposing reciprocal zero-sum tariffs – i.e., no tariffs – between our two countries. Before negotiations, the reciprocal trade between the U.S. and Argentina hovers at around $20 billion -– not a huge amount compared to our powerhouse economic “allies” in Europe and the Far East -– but still worth addressing.
Next came Vietnam. This one-time rigid “communist” enemy, imposed a 94 percent tariff on trade goods sold to Vietnam by America – at a value north of $165 billion dollars. This reflects a tariff imbalance that is an order of magnitude larger to the benefit of Vietnam than it is to the benefit of the U.S. However, once Vietnam’s dictatorial leaders did a quick analysis of what Trump’s reciprocal tariff policy would do to the Vietnamese economy, they, too – and very quickly – expressed a desire to negotiate a zero reciprocal tariff policy. This underscored their commitment to trade with America by offering to begin bilateral negotiations immediately.
In Vietnam’s wake came NATO, which –- trying to show that they weren’t kowtowing to Trump’s tariff-based trade-war tactics -– said they would immediately begin increasing their military defense budgets, even while rushing to deny this had anything to do with the new reciprocal tariffs.
Uh, right.
Since then, Great Britain’s prime minister, Keir Starmer, has reached out to begin negotiations to zero-balance tariffs between America and the U.K. – a major NATO member.
You do the math …
In Asia, our economic trading partners -– Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines -– let it be immediately known that they were ready to start negotiating toward a fair, and low, tariff.
Singapore, with its somewhat top-down economy, announced a desire to explore low -– perhaps zero-based –- reciprocal tariff rates governing trade between our two countries.
India – not exactly an American ally, but a huge trading partner with a tariff on American goods of around a hundred percent, has the largest per-capita market –- more than a billion souls eager to buy American quality … if the price is right.
This past Thursday, due to these generational tariff imbalances, motorcycle giant Harley Davidson still found itself virtually shut out of India, a huge “motorcycle” market. However, by this time next week, those tariffs could be ancient history.
These are just those trading partners who, as of Friday, April 4th, have already gone public with their desire to immediately negotiate an end to tariffs. However, most of those nations are sufficiently low volume that, whatever accommodations are being offered, they aren’t truly “newsworthy.”
The naysayers and fear-mongers in the business and economic news media act like this tariff policy was brand new.
However, for Trump, his tariff-based business strategy is hardly new, or news. Check out The Art of the Deal, published several decades before Trump’s first foray into politics.
In advance of bilateral tariff negotiations, just the suggestion of rising tariffs with the two countries who share our borders caused the following:
• A massive, multi-billion-dollar Chinese auto manufacturing plant already under construction in Mexico has been abandoned. China knew that strict and significant tariffs would make Chinese cars -– whether made in Mexico or Manchuria -– economically non-viable. Only fair and zero-summed bilateral tariff agreements will open the U.S. economy to Chinese autos.
• When Panama – which had until recently also been courting Chinese investments – saw how Mexico prudently responded to Trump’s bilateral tariff negotiations, they also quickly canceled two multi-billion dollar planned Chinese port cities near the entrances to the Panama Canal. In both cases, the canceling of those Chinese deals left the door open for American firms or consortiums to replace China in the development of those projects.
• China felt that reciprocal tariff rates were unworkable in their top-down command economy, to the point that China tied its all-but-concluded negotiation for sale of Tik Tok to a reciprocal high-tariff agreement. This put the Tik Tok sale on hold for 75 days, to allow larger negotiations to proceed. Prediction: China has too much to lose, so it will ultimately negotiate with Trump to essentially zero-sum tariffs between the world’s two largest economic powerhouses.
• Canada’s faltering prime minister, Justin Trudeau, found himself out of a job immediately, not in September. This action took place when Trudeau just hinted that he might fight Trump on reciprocal tariffs, regardless of that fight’s negative impact on the Canadian economy.
• Mexico took immediate action to secure their northern border – our Southern border – from crossings by illegal migrants, and by job-lots of fentanyl, a move that also financially impacted China as well as defeating their plan to cost America a hundred thousand deaths from fentanyl each year.
• As an aside, while Canadian provinces are more-or-less equivalent to American states, they have a lot more independence in terms of operations. For instance, Canadian provinces can levy tariffs independent from the federal government in Ottawa.
Even as Trudeau moved to stand up to Trump, the province of Ontario – if it had been an independent nation, proposed doing away with tariffs with the U.S.
Our $450 billion in two-way trade with Ontario makes them our third largest trading partner. Quickly cycling through the five levels of (economic) grief, Ontario was suddenly eager to reciprocally reduce the tariff levels between this major province and the U.S., which represent twenty percent of all Ontario jobs rely on trade with America.
On the whole, Canada in 2024 sold more than $750 billion in Canadian trade goods to America, while Canada imported more than $400 billion in American trade goods. No rational leader in Canada wants to risk the loss of –- or even short-term interruption of -– that economic balance.
That’s why Trudeau was shown the door months ahead of his own schedule, and why the U.S. and Canada have been negotiating mutually beneficial tariff agreements ahead of Trump’s broad-based announcement of the implementation of reciprocal tariff adjustments.
Trump knows that zero-based tariffs will create a less expensive and more level playing field between the U.S. and each of its trade partners around the world since at least the authoring of his Art of the Deal in 1987. Trump’s discussed tariff reciprocity in a 1989 network news interview -– rebroadcast on Fox Special Report this past Friday. Even if he hadn’t been able to draw upon his first term’s experience, Trump knew tariffs work as a negotiation tool.
He’s about to prove this again.
And if you’re worried about your 401(k), wait a week or two and see how things turn out. The facts are not even close to what the media’s been telling you.
nedbarnett51@gmail.com or 702-561-1167.
Image: Grok, AI-generated image, via X
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