The world is hostage to Trump's tariff game
On Tuesday, US President Donald Trump again postponed the introduction of higher tariffs on imports to the US until August 1.
When asked by CNN whether the new deadline was the final deadline, Trump replied that it was not 100%. With the addition that if the countries concerned call and say that they would like to do something differently, we will be open to it. However, it is wrong to act under pressure.
A fortnight ago, the Europeans went to the NATO summit to meet their "daddy" with his demand of five percent of GDP for defense. But now the threat of a tariff war with the United States hangs over them again.
The European Union hopes to "pay off" with them an additional ten percent tariff, whether it will accept it is not at all certain. Trump threatened that without an agreement it could be 50 percent.
It is already enough that imports of cars and their parts are subject to a 25 percent tariff, and steel and aluminum to 50 percent. There is also a threat of a sectoral tariff of 17 percent on imports of agricultural and food products.
The fate of the world's largest trade relationship is at stake - transatlantic trade in goods and services reached a volume of 1.7 trillion euros (almost 42 billion crowns) last year. In any case, another postponement means increasing uncertainty, which is definitely not good for the global economy.
However, the trouble with tariffs shows Europe's vulnerability. French President Emmanuel Macron warned of the risk of dependence not only on the US, but also on China. According to him, France wants an "open world" and for this it is necessary to build the continent's strategic autonomy. But so far, it is only talked about. Will it not end up that Europe will have to choose between a bad and a less bad solution in the tariff dispute with Washington?
However, Washington's two largest Asian allies - Japan and South Korea, who were "punished" with tariffs of 25 percent, also have problems. Trump announced this to them in a letter, which the head of the political department of Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party, Itsunori Onodera, called "extremely disrespectful."
Will such a policy ultimately lead Tokyo and Seoul to deepen economic cooperation with China, which the US considers its biggest challenger?
Trump is also fighting on another front. He threatened the ten members of the BRICS group of non-Western powers with additional tariffs because the bloc is "anti-American." Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva showed him from the summit of his leaders in Rio de Janeiro that "the world has changed. We don't want an emperor." He added that the BRICS countries want to find a different way to organize the world economically.
The key question at the moment is whether Trump's strategy to restructure global trade, which is supposed to lead to more production being transferred back to the US, is not ultimately counterproductive and potentially harmful to the geopolitical interests of the United States. We are no longer living in a "unipolar" world.
Miloš Balabán, Právo Daily