President Donald Trump's announcement on Thursday, February 13, that he would introduce reciprocal tariffs within the next six months stunned the United States's partners and destroyed the fragile international trade architecture built on the World Trade Organization (WTO) rules. It also constitutes a real headache. US Customs manages 13,000 different tariffs for each of its 200 partner countries, which means it will have to review nearly 2.6 million customs duties... even as Elon Musk seeks to purge the administration of its civil servants.

Trump's advisers have made it clear, however, that these tariffs will be reconsidered "on a case-by-case basis," suggesting that they could be used as negotiating tools on issues that have nothing to do with trade. A few weeks earlier, the threat of higher tariffs had already been raised to force Colombia to accept the return of migrants and to extract greater cooperation from Canada and Mexico in the fight against drug trafficking.

With his executive order, Trump is tearing down all the free-trade treaties that were negotiated at great length with countries such as South Korea, Mexico or Canada, which risks depreciating the value of trade agreements signed with the US. Washington's new rules authorize it to impose tariffs, even on a country that charges none, if it considers some of its practices to be "unfair" or if a country has depreciated its currency to make its exports more competitive.

This new policy has hardly received unanimous support from American economists. For Douglas Irwin, tariff reciprocity amounts to "outsourcing US tariff policy to other countries." "They would dictate what our tariffs would be. If other countries put high tariffs on American goods, then we would impose high tariffs on their goods. So much for American sovereignty. So much for deciding what's in our own national interest," he wrote in The Wall Street Journal.

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