Slavery, Tariffs and the Dire Strait

Or, why America is on its own

Donald Trump is now pleading with other countries to rescue his war on Iran by helping to open the Strait of Hormuz — although Trump being Trump, his pleas for assistance take the form of threats. Regardless, help is not on the way. Germany, Australia and Japan have flatly said no, while Britain and France have been slightly equivocal but at most hinted at willingness to supply forces after the fighting stops.

Why this effectively unanmous rejection? A large part of the answer is that other countries couldn’t secure the Strait even if they wanted to. Boris Pistorius, Germany’s Defense Minister, was outright caustic in remarks Monday:

What does (...) Donald ​Trump expect a handful or two handfuls of European frigates to do in the Strait of Hormuz that the powerful U.S. Navy cannot do?

Beyond that, who wants to take risks in support of a U.S. government that nobody trusts, a government that neither shows gratitude for aid nor punishes those who do America harm?

Indeed, even as Trump begs in his graceless way for help, his administration is preparing to hit the very nations he is appealing to with another round of tariffs — tariffs that will be imposed based on an obviously false, bad faith, totally insulting argument.

As most readers probably know, almost a year ago Trump imposed tariffs on almost every other nation, including islands inhabited only by penguins, by invoking the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. This use of IEEPA was blatantly illegal, and after dragging its heels for many months, the Supreme Court finally agreed with lower courts that the tariffs were, in fact, illegal.

One important point that isn’t emphasized enough is that in addition to being illegal under U.S. law, the IEEPA tariffs were a gross breach of contract. Most U.S. tariff rates were set in 1995, as part of the negotiations that among other things created the World Trade Organization. These tariffs were “bound” by international agreements, which have almost as much force as treaties. But the U.S. just ripped those agreements up, without even trying to make a case for its actions.

Now the IEEPA tariffs are gone, but Trump isn’t giving up. On Sunday night he posted a long, falsehood-filled rant about the Court, beginning with a condemnation of its tariff ruling. And while he can’t simply defy Supreme Court rulings — not yet, anyway — his officials have been scrambling for legal strategies to reimpose high tariffs.

And the main one they’ve come up with is a doozy. Under U.S. law the executive branch has the authority to impose tariffs without new legislation in certain specified circumstances. These include Section 232 tariffs to protect national security, the (spurious) basis for most of the tariffs that survived the Supreme Court’s ruling. (I’m ignoring the Section 122 tariffs currently in place to deal with a nonexistent balance of payments crisis, not because they’re legal — they clearly aren’t — but because they will expire this summer.)

Looking forward, however, Trump officials are planning to impose another major round of tariffs using Section 301, designed to cope with unfair foreign trading practices. In particular, they’re proposing tariffs on 60 (!) countries, including Canada, the UK and the European Union, that they accuse of violating rules against international trade in goods produced with forced labor.

Wait — is the administration accusing Canada and Europe of using slave labor to produce their exports? No, they’re saying that these countries’ governments are guilty of “failure to impose and effectively enforce a ban on the importation of goods produced with forced labor,” and that these failures “burden or restrict U.S. commerce.” In other words, they’re going to slap tariffs on Canada, not because they claim that Canada uses slave labor, but because China does, and they claim that Canada is hurting America because it isn’t doing enough to stop those slave-produced goods from entering its own market.

Nobody, and I mean nobody, believes this story. Nobody believes that Canada or Europe are worse at policing global slave labor than the U.S. is. In fact, nobody believes that the Trump administration even cares about slave labor. After all, the alleged concerns that are about to be used to raise tariffs were nowhere to be found until the Court ruled against IEEPA.

So this is nothing but an excuse for another attempted end-run around the law — an end-run that is also a massive insult to other democratic nations, the same nations Trump is pleading with for help in undoing the disaster he has created in the Persian Gulf.

The point is that it’s all of a piece. The current U.S. government has, as Trump would say, treated our erstwhile allies very, very badly in multiple ways, with the arbitrary, illegal imposition of tariffs the most consequential. And now those erstwhile allies have no inclination to help Trump out of the Iran trap he created for himself. Funny how that works.

MUSICAL CODA