So were Donald Trump’s tariffs a negotiating tactic all along – never intended to come into force but rather as a shock tactic to bring other governments to the negotiating table?
That was a popular theory before ‘Liberation Day’, but one rather snuffed out by the severity of the tariffs announced and the realisation that Trump might actually be deadly serious about wanting to price foreign goods out of US markets.
Lord Hague, for example, wrote earlier this week that people had fooled themselves into thinking that Trump didn’t always mean what he said; we were naïve to think that he should not be taken literally.
But with today’s announcement that tariffs will be put on hold for 90 days – with the exception of those on Chinese goods, which have been increased again – it looks once more possible that Trump may never have intended punitive tariffs to be a permanent fixture of US trade policy.
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