Opinion

Why Biden won’t beat China by out-Trumping Trump on trade tariffs

Joe Biden’s decision to double down on Donald Trump’s China tariffs harks back to policies that might have worked in the 1980s, and is a loser

The US president was on the right track with building US economic muscle at home, and he and the country would be better served by focusing on that

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William Pesek is a Tokyo-based journalist, former columnist for Barron’s and Bloomberg and author of “Japanization: What the World Can Learn from Japan’s Lost Decades”.

Published: 8:30pm, 20 May 2024

One of the biggest missteps so far of US President Joe Biden’s tenure is not scrapping former president Donald Trump’s China tariffs on his first day in the White House.

All Trump’s 2017-2021 tariffs did was raise prices for US consumers. They did little, if anything, to alter Sino-US trade dynamics. China’s economy has largely steered around Trump’s trade war, leaving US allies such as Japan and South Korea with the collateral damage.

Why would Biden think doubling down on this approach is a good idea with US inflation already stubbornly high? And all this as the White House says it is pursuing a reboot of China relations.

Last week, Biden announced a 100 per cent tariff on electric vehicles (EVs) from China, roughly a quadrupling of earlier levies. Tariffs are also surging on solar cells, advanced batteries, construction cranes and medical equipment, as well as steel and aluminium.