Upon entering the White House in January 2025, Donald Trump launched a trade policy ostensibly to reduce the US trade deficit with major partners, including China and the EU, by imposing tariffs on surplus countries to shrink imports and encourage reshoring of manufacturing into the USA.
Economic—ultimately national—security (as defined by the USA) was the underlying motivation for a tsunami of WTO-illegal tariff measures. As Trump made clear in his 2 April “Liberation Day” Executive Order imposing punitive duties on partners:
“Persistent trade deficits have hollowed out…and rendered the defense-industrial base dependent on foreign adversaries.”
Whilst China was perceived as the main threat to US hegemony, the US did not disguise its dislike of the EU, which, in Trump’s typically elegant vocabulary, was invented “to screw us.”
The historical inaccuracy here is not the point. Perception is all; China and the EU had abused US magnanimity by running unacceptable trade surpluses [1] and, in the EU case, over-regulating. Läs artikel