I'm skeptical of tariffs in general, but it seems like there's a clear strategic case for tariffs on a country whose market may become unavailable entirely when they begin their long-promised invasion of their neighbor.
You're looking at a derivative and confusing it for the underlying metric. Trade between the US and Russia remains heavily restricted - what the US government is "chomping at the bit" for is a negotiation, not yet materialized, that would remove many of those restrictions in exchange for peace in Ukraine.
But one key piece of leverage the US has in these negotiations is that they don't need Russian trade. 3 years of heavy restrictions hasn't really changed much in any American's daily life, and I think the public would happily accept 5 or 10 years of the same if it were necessary to achieve some important geopolitical objective. The public would not accept 5 or 10 years of a collapse in the computer hardware market.
Reducing trade with China (and sure, tariffs work for that purpose, why not?) is one of the only things I agree with as far as policies Trump has actually taken action on (both terms).
... I think it'd be more effective and less painful if we weren't signaling to other liberal democracies that we're an unreliable trading & security partner at the same time, but hey, it's something.
Biden maintained the tariffs against China and many companies were moving out of China to other countries like Vietnam, India and of course Mexico. When suddenly Trump wanted to put tariffs on Mexico it took some of them off guard. Labor costs in Mexico are lower than China from what I heard. The problem has been that in many cases Chinese companies have been moving their production to those other countries. But even that could have been solved with cooperation and incentives to these countries.
Yep, exactly, you want a united front to make it effective, especially when you're dealing with an economy as large as China's. That's why it'd be nice if we were focusing mainly on that, and not also on weird low-value games with other less-abusive and more-ideologically-aligned trading partners.
