Trump Wields Tariffs as a Force in Diplomacy, to Questionable Effect

New York Times

a day ago

As President Trump pushes to end the war in Ukraine, he is using tariffs to try to persuade Russia to agree to a cease-fire that would halt its invasion.
The economic tool is not often associated with war and peace.
Mr. Trump said last month that Russia's trading partners could face 'very severe tariffs,' in what would be a roundabout way of trying to hurt Moscow.
To show that he means business, Mr. Trump raised tariffs on Wednesday on imports from India to an extraordinary 50 percent, saying he was punishing the country for buying Russian oil. The taxes would be paid by American companies importing goods and would result in higher costs for consumers in the United States.
An Aug. 8 deadline for Russia to agree to a cease-fire came and went, and Mr. Trump did not impose new tariffs on its trading partners. Instead, he announced plans to meet with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in Alaska on Friday.
For Mr. Trump, tariffs are not just about raising revenue for the government or protecting American industries from foreign competition. They are a cudgel to try to get other countries to do as he wishes on matters that are entirely separate from trade, and to punish them when they do not. He has used or threatened them on everything from armed conflict to deportations to legal proceedings tied to his political grievances.
Late last month, Mr. Trump raised tariffs on Brazilian goods to 50 percent, with a few exceptions, largely because of a coup-plot case in the country's Supreme Court against Jair Bolsonaro, the former right-wing president, whom Mr. Trump sees as an ally.
Around that time, Mr. Trump threatened to impose 36 percent tariffs on Thailand and Cambodia if they did not halt their border war.
American presidents have typically used financial sanctions targeting specific foreign companies to end certain channels of trade between countries, in hopes that pain changes a government's behavior. Sanctions have had mixed results at best.
Tariffs used in diplomacy are somewhat different. Their aim is to make some or all of a nation's goods less competitive in the U.S. market, also with the end goal of causing pain to change a country's behavior (compelling India to stop buying Russian oil, for instance).
Previous American presidents have tried to use the tariff threat in this manner, but not nearly to the degree that Mr. Trump has a half-year into his second term.
He is betting that other countries care about access to the American market — he calls the United States 'a giant, beautiful store' and 'the biggest department store in history.'
'I put these in a mental framework that honestly has very little to do with trade and a lot more to do with coercive economic statecraft,' said Emma Ashford, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center who studies U.S. foreign policy. 'The tariffs that are used as leverage on some other issues are more like sanctions, in that they're leveraging U.S. economic power to some other policy end.'
'You could even see the use of tariffs this way as a continuation of the trend toward evermore draconian coercive economic measures by the U.S. in recent years' she added, citing sanctions and export controls as two of those measures. 'We keep using bigger and bigger economic guns when it becomes apparent that the smaller ones aren't achieving what we want.'
Mr. Trump's threat of tariffs appears to have influenced other governments a couple times. One instance involved Colombia, which accepted U.S. military flights with deportees early this year, There was also the recent diplomacy between Cambodia and Thailand.
But on larger challenges, Mr. Trump's threats have had no effect so far. Mr. Putin has continued to press his war against Ukraine despite the threats of further economic pain on Russia, which was subjected to heavy U.S.-led sanctions after its invasions of Ukraine in 2014 and 2022.
And Indian officials have been defiant in the face of Mr. Trump's tariffs, saying they would continue to buy Russian oil.
'He doesn't want to do anything against Putin directly, so imposing tariffs on oil-buying countries is his preferred option right now,' said Fiona Hill, a senior director for Europe and Russia on the National Security Council during the first Trump administration.
Even Mr. Trump has acknowledged the questionable value of the tactic: He told reporters on July 29 that new financial penalties on Russia 'may or may not affect them.'
Sanctions are more effective at pushing a country to change its behavior than tariffs, said Edward Fishman, a former State Department official and current scholar at Columbia University who has written a new book on economic warfare.
One reason is that tariffs aim to punish a country by hobbling its commercial competitiveness in the U.S. market. But the United States takes in only 13 percent of global imports, he said, so some nations targeted with tariffs might decide they can weather that pain. U.S. sanctions, on the other hand, can cut off entire channels of commerce because many companies cannot trade without access to a global financial system that the U.S. dollar underpins. (That said, many governments have weathered sanctions, even as the penalties pummel national economies and daily lives.)
'I'm personally skeptical of secondary tariffs as a weapon of economic warfare,' Mr. Fishman said. 'The United States as a destination for imports is not a choke point the way the dollar is. And it's a roundabout targeting action.'
In addition, tariffs raise tensions between governments, as in the case of the United States and India, whose relationship had been improving until Mr. Trump's latest actions. And tariffs punish American companies and consumers, because U.S. companies paying the taxes generally pass on the costs to buyers, which can lead to inflation in the United States.
Some American diplomats say they worry that the long-term effects of the tariffs, and how they will affect U.S. diplomacy and the global economy, have been overlooked in the State Department as a result of a recent purge that has emptied its ranks of economic, energy and other such subject-matter experts.
The Trump administration is not the first to impose tariffs on nations for reasons unrelated to trade policy. During the Napoleonic Wars, the United States wielded tariffs against Britain and France for geopolitical reasons, Mr. Fishman said.
And after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, he added, the Biden administration imposed tariffs on imports of Russian aluminum instead of sanctions on Russian aluminum companies, because American officials feared that prices would surge globally if those companies were forced out of the market.
'A sanction is a full cutoff,' Mr. Fishman said. 'Tariffs are a relatively weak tool of economic warfare.'
But Mr. Trump has continued to try to use tariffs as leverage, perhaps because of his success with Colombia.
Just days after he took office, Colombia turned back two American military aircraft carrying Colombian immigrants deported from the United States in late January. Mr. Trump responded by announcing new tariffs, sanctions and travel restrictions against the country, which has long been an important U.S. partner.
Then President Gustavo Petro of Colombia announced retaliatory tariffs.
'You don't like our freedom, fine,' Mr. Petro said at the time. 'I do not shake hands with white enslavers.'
By that night, they had reached an agreement. The White House claimed victory and said Mr. Petro would accept deportation flights.
Later that month, Mr. Trump threatened to impose the penalty on Mexico and Canada unless they did more to stop the flow of migrants and fentanyl into the United States. He did not lay out exactly what the countries needed to do — he often keeps his demands vague so he can more easily declare a victory.
When Mr. Trump postponed those tariffs, the White House claimed it had secured a series of concessions from both countries. Some of the actions though, including Canada's commitment to send more security personnel and technology to its southern border, had already been agreed to.
'President Trump has leaned on tariff threats to pressure some countries to take back more deportation flights, but oftentimes, these threats amount to no more than political theater,' said Andrea Flores, who directed border management for the National Security Council in the Biden White House.
Perhaps Mr. Trump's most overtly political use of tariffs involves Brazil.
Mr. Bolsonaro is accused of trying to carry out a plot to remain in power after losing the presidential election in 2022. Mr. Trump has demanded that Brazil drop the charges.
That case echoes one the Justice Department brought against Mr. Trump on charges that he had conspired to overturn the 2020 U.S. election, which he lost to Joseph R. Biden Jr. The department asked a court to dismiss the case after Mr. Trump won the 2024 election, because of a Justice Department policy saying it is unconstitutional to pursue prosecutions against sitting presidents.
'Trump's secret weapon is doing what other leaders neither expect or would do themselves,' said Ricardo Zúniga, a former senior State Department official and U.S. consul general in São Paulo, Brazil.
Although U.S. courts might eventually rule against Mr. Trump's use of emergency authorities to impose tariffs, Mr. Zúniga said many businesses around the world have already felt the economic toll.
'I've seen it in Brazil, where the tariffs and the tariff exemptions are disrupting trade in everything from coffee to beef to Brazilian-built transformers critical to U.S. data centers,' he said. 'And the fact is that President Trump himself will decide whether to tie the outcome of trade negotiations to Bolsonaro's trial, so companies and sectors are struggling to make their case with U.S. officials.'
Lara Jakes contributed reporting from Rome.