In his first week in office, President Trump tried to look for governments worldwide to put an end to drug flow in the United States, accepting planes full of deported migrants, stopping wars and giving territory to the United States.
For all of them, it deployed a common threat: the countries that did not meet their demands would face rigid tariffs in the products they send to US consumers.
Trump has exercised rates for a long time as a weapon to resolve commercial concerns. But the president now uses them frequently for profits on issues that have little to do with trade.
It is a strategy rarely seen from other presidents, and never at this frequency. While Trump threatened governments like those of Mexico with tariff He said Colombia would face rates After his government returned the airplanes that carry deported immigrants.
“The will rhetorically launch the kitchen sink and use the entire tool kit is trying to send the message to other countries beyond Colombia that they must fulfill and find ways to address these border concerns,” said Rachel Ziemba, a Attached in the Senior in the Center for a new US security.
Last week, Trump threatened to put a 25 percent tariff on the products of Canada and Mexico and a 10 percent tariff on Chinese products on February 1 unless those countries did more to stop drug flows and migrants to the United States. Previously, he threatened to punish Denmark with tariffs if his government did not yield Greenland to the United States and impose taxes to Russia If your war in Ukraine did not end.
Sunday afternoon, Mr. Trump wrote On social networks, 25 percent tariffs would impose to Colombia and raise them to 50 percent in a week. In a few hours, the Colombian president, Gustavo Petro, saying He responded with his own tariffs. But for Sunday night, the White House had issued a statement by saying that Petro had accepted all its terms, and that Trump would maintain the threat of tariffs and sanctions “in reserve”.
This fast resolution can only further be empouling the use of Trump rates to extract concessions that have nothing to do with typical commercial relationships.
Speaking to the Republicans of the House of Representatives in Florida on Monday, Trump made reference to his threat that countries such as Colombia, Mexico and Canada reduce the flow of migrants to the United States or face tariffs.
“They will take them quickly and if they don’t, they will pay a very high economic price,” he said.
Ted Murphy, a lawyer from Sidley Austin who handles trade -related problems, said tariffs would have been a significant blow to industries that depend on Colombian imports, but that the implications of the threat were much broader.
“Tariffs could be used in response to almost anything,” he said.
Even having a free trade agreement with the United States is not a guarantee of security: Colombia signed such agreement with the United States in 2011, while Mr. Trump himself signed the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement in 2020.
Mr. Trump is not limited to the laws related to the trade in which he trusted to impose tariffs in his first mandate, Murphy said. For Colombia and for other nations, Trump has seemed willing to deploy a legal statute, the International Law of Emergency Economic Powers of 1977, or IEEPA, which gives presidents broad powers to impose trade measures and sanctions if they declare a national emergency .
Murphy said the bar for Trump to declare a national emergency seemed “not very high.”
Governments in Mexico, Canada, Europe, China and other places have prepared reprisal tariff lists that can apply to US products if Trump decides to move forward with their own taxes. But foreign officials seem very aware of the economic damage caused by cross -border tariffs, and have tried to calm tensions to avoid a harmful commercial war.
Kaja Kallas, the main diplomat of the European Union, said on Monday that Europe needed to join as the Trump administration threatens to mark the beginning of an era of changes in policies, including rates.
“As the United States changes to a more transactional approach, Europe needs to close the ranks,” Kallas said, speaking at a press conference after a meeting of foreign ministers in Brussels.
“Europe is a heavyweight and geopolitical economic couple,” he added.
The presidential use of trade -related measures for affairs not related to trade is not unprecedented. Douglas A. Irwin, an economic historian at the Dartmouth College, said President Richard Nixon conditioned Okinawa’s return to Japan by agreeing to limit the amount of textiles he sent to the United States. President Gerald Ford signed the Jackson-Vanik amendment, which linked to the concession of the Soviet Union “the most favored nation” the commercial state, and the lowest tariff rates, which allow the Jews to emigrate.
Even so, Mr. Irwin described Mr. Trump’s approach as “unusual.”
“Trump is very manifest and transactional in his approach,” he said.
In recent decades, presidents have been less willing to exercise tariffs or other measures that would restrict trade, partly by deference to the World Trade Organization. WTO members, including the United States, have agreed certain rules about when and how tariffs impose other countries within the organization.
The WTO spits exceptions for its members to act on national security issues, and governments have used that exception more liberally in recent years by imposing rates or limiting certain types of trade.
Eswar Prasad, a professor of commercial policy at Cornell University, said that many administrations, including those of Joseph R. Biden Jr., had used national security considerations “as a veil to implement tariffs and other protectionist measures without going into conflict in conflict WTO rules “.
Although no president of the United States has exercised the threat of tariffs as Trump has done, they have pressed other countries with other types of economic measures, such as sanctions or embargo. And in recent decades, US presidents have been more willing to use trade as a carrot, instead of a stick, maintaining the perspective of free trade agreements and other preferential commercial treatment for governments that politically support the country.
If Trump really happens with his tariffs, he remains to be seen if the United States courts finally decide to reduce them.
Peter Harrell, who served as senior director of the International Economics of the White House in the Biden Administration, said In social networks that IEEPA had never been used before to impose the types of tariffs Trump threatened with Colombia, Canada and Mexico. (Mr. Nixon Used a precursor statuteTrade with the enemy law of 1917, to briefly impose a universal rate of 10 percent in 1971 to address the commercial balance, unemployment and inflation).
Mr. Harrell suggested that such an expansive interpretation of the law could face legal challenges. He said it was “skeptic” that the courts would allow Mr. Trump to use the legal statute to impose a broad global tariff, but the most specific tariffs, such as those of Colombia, would be “a much closer and more interesting trial case.”
Jeanna Smialey Contributed reports from London.
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