Comment by adventured | Hacker News Reader

Comment by adventured | Hacker News Reader

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> Technically you've started a trade war with everyone

That's incorrect. The US is in meaningful trade confict with only a few nations:

China, Germany, France, Canada, and Mexico.

While the EU operates as a whole for the most part on these matters, the conflict is overwhelmingly with Germany's extreme trade surplus.

Canada and Mexico are about NAFTA positioning primarily.

For one example, the US runs a vast trade deficit with Vietnam. So far this year there is a five to one ratio between imports and exports with Vietnam (in favor of Vietnam). For 2017, the trade deficit with Vietnam was so large it's equal to about 20% of their entire economy. The US is not starting a trade war with Vietnam, and isn't going after Vietnam as eg the EU. Do you know why? Strategic positioning. Vietnam is a valuable future and present offset to China on offshore manufacturing; to be used to debase some of China's regional economic hegemony and to build up more regional powers that the US can work with against China in the future.

Pursuing tariffs on steel and aluminum is legitimately about US national security. It's stupid to allow those industries to erode any further given their importance. You don't want to be dependent on Japan (5%) and South Korea (11%) for steel imports in the middle of a conflict with China and or North Korea. You don't want to be asking for steel from Russia (7% of steel imports) during a conflict with Russia.

Going after Canada is primarily about positioning for the NAFTA talks. Canada does in fact have some substantial barriers in their dairy and agriculture markets. The US by contrast has nearly the lowest agriculture tariffs of any nation. The trade conflict with Canada will ultimately be trivial and will be over shortly.

All other nations are universally allowed to shelter and protect all sorts of pet domestic industries, whether it's dairy or maple syrup in Canada or energy in Mexico, or practically everything in China. The US the only nation held to an entirely different standard.

US raw sugar prices are 40% higher than world market prices, due to a complex system of tariffs, subsidies, quotas, and price supports [1].

The leading importer of steel to the US is Canada, with a 20% share [2]. I'm not quite sure how "national defense" can be used to justify tariffs on Canadian steel. (You stated that the steel tariffs against Canada are merely positioning for the NAFTA negotiations, but the White House proclamation [3] only mentions national defense).

You write: "The US is in meaningful trade confict with only a few nations". I can't be bothered to do any research to see if your list is complete, but until recently, 3 of the 5 nations you listed were considered close allies, and the 4th was considered at least friendly. Declaring a trade war on one's allies is, perhaps, not the best way of ensuring one's allies' cooperation in conflicts with one's actual adversaries.

In other words, even a hyper-power should think twice about waging a multi-front war, against allies as well as enemies, on numerous issues simultaneously.

(Edit: If the US concern is that China might disrupt its Asian supply chains, it should probably focus on high-tech components such as RAM, SSDs, displays, etc, rather than on steel. I sometimes get the feeling that the current administration is basing its industrial strategy on the lessons of World War II, which would seem to be about 70 years out of date.)

[1] https://www.heritage.org/trade/report/us-trade-policy-gouges...

[2] https://www.trade.gov/steel/countries/pdfs/imports-us.pdf

[3] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/presidential...

> The US by contrast has nearly the lowest agriculture tariffs of any nation.

In trying to find evidence either way for this statement I came across the OECD data website, which is pretty cool. The following link shows "government support for agriculture" (which is a greater set than just tariffs) across a few select countries (though note, EU28 is treated as a single entity). Interesting stuff!

https://data.oecd.org/chart/5duj

Note: I'm not making a point regarding parent's claim.

EDIT: adding parent page FYI: https://data.oecd.org/agrpolicy/agricultural-support.htm

Just want to point out an often forgotten fact: the tariff imposed on dairy product by Canada that Trump keeps repeating in order to validate his new tariff is deliberately confusing. It's true that they exist and are pretty big (it's almost at 250%), but dairy products accounts for 0.1% of all trade between the two nations. It's a rounding error. Turns out even with those tariff, US has a trade surplus of dairy products. I also believe agriculture is a national security concern, but that's just an opinion.

I guess I don't understand the ulterior motive of pissing off allies over such minor concerns. The steel tariff will have an impact, but the proposed car tariff will have devastating effects on both side of the borders.

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