Yes, Trump Really Put Higher Tariffs on Israel Than Iran
A few hours before President Donald Trump slapped huge new tariffs on nearly all imports to the United States, Israel preemptively dropped all its tariffs on American goods.
That’s what some of Trump’s defenders say is the goal of this whole madcap scheme: to get foreign countries to lower their barriers to American exports.
Mission accomplished, right?
Apparently not. In Wednesday’s announcement, Trump imposed new 17 percent tariffs on all imports from Israel.
Amusingly, that’s a higher tariff rate than the president put on Iran—Israel’s sworn enemy and America’s biggest geopolitical foe in the Middle East. The Islamic Republic got hit with a 10 percent tariff.
The comparison is somewhat silly since the boatload of sanctions on Iran already makes it difficult for Americans to trade with Iranians regardless of any tariffs. However, it should also underscore the blunt and foolish way that the Trump administration is pursuing its trade policies, as well as the bad math that was used to calculate these new tariff rates.
In advance of Wednesday’s announcement, Trump said the new tariff rates would be based on various trade barriers that foreign countries levy against American goods. That’s not what actually happened. As the White House has now confirmed, the new tariff rates announced by Trump were based on a crude calculation that merely divided America’s trade deficit with each country by that country’s total exports to the United States.
Iran exports very little to the United States because of those sanctions. In fact, America runs a (small) trade surplus with Iran. Because that’s the only thing that matters in the formula used by the Trump administration, Iranian imports got hit with the 10 percent tariff baseline and nothing else.
That ought to demonstrate how completely insane the Trump administration’s tariff calculations are. Calculations that have now become the baseline for a global regime of tariffs that will cost Americans an estimated $1.8 trillion over the next decade and reduce incomes by more than 2 percent.
Over in Israel, the tariffs will mean hiring freezes, higher costs, and other economic disruptions, The Jerusalem Post reports. “We are all going to feel this in our pockets,” Ron Tomer, president of the Manufacturers Association of Israel, said during a radio interview on Thursday, according to The Wall Street Journal. He said the tariffs felt like “abandonment by a friend.”
If Trump is going to treat America’s geopolitical friends like that—even after they tried to play ball—he might soon find that the world contains a lot more enemies.
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