Slapping high tariffs on Japan, South Korea, and other Indo-Pacific nations hands China a victory in its geopolitical contest against America.
On Monday, President Trump announced that new tariffs on 14 countries will go into effect on August 1 unless they agree to deals with the United States. The rates range from 25 percent to 40 percent and will apply to nearly all imports from the affected countries. Notably, more than half of the countries listed are in the Indo-Pacific region: Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Cambodia, Bangladesh, Laos, and Myanmar. Together, these nations provide over 14 percent of America’s total imports, worth $478 billion last year.
Reducing American trade with the Indo-Pacific is a rather odd aim, as the region is both strategically crucial to the United States and hotly contested by China. The 2022 National Security Strategy, a comprehensive document prepared by the executive branch under President Biden, identified China as “America’s most consequential geopolitical challenge” and found that “Beijing has ambitions to create an enhanced sphere of influence in the Indo-Pacific.” To counter China’s growing influence in the region, it urged policymakers to find “new ways to integrate our alliances in the Indo-Pacific and Europe and develop new and deeper means of cooperation.”
One of China’s most successful methods of drawing Pacific countries into its orbit has been economic integration through trade. Over the past decade, the Chinese government has furiously inked free trade agreements with surrounding nations to decrease trade barriers and encourage the exchange of goods and services. In 2021, it entered into a new free trade bloc, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), with 14 other Asian countries. And China continues to negotiate a deeper trade agreement with two of the RCEP’s most important signatories, Japan and South Korea.
China’s greater economic integration with smaller states entails its greater geopolitical influence over them. The proper response by American leaders should be to join the fray and expand U.S. trade relationships in the Indo-Pacific. Developing that economic counterweight would help keep allied nations in America’s sphere of influence and prevent neutral countries from falling into China’s. Instead, with his massive tariffs, the president is effectively surrendering the field to China.
The dismaying effects are already evident. In March, the usually fractious nations of China, Japan, and South Korea met for their first economic dialogue in half a decade, aiming to increase trade with one another following Trump’s tariff threats. Now that those threats have been realized, Japan and South Korea are in desperate need of stability. This creates a golden opportunity for China to step in, present itself as a reliable trading partner, and make America’s two most powerful Asian allies more dependent on its economy. Stronger ties with China are becoming a hedge against uncertainty churned up by the United States’ erratic trade policy.
High tariffs on friendly Asian countries are economically foolish to begin with. Given the geopolitical context, they are also dangerous. China’s unflagging hunt for economic influence — which the CCP is keen to translate into strategic advancement — will fill any gap that America leaves open. Trump’s deliberately carving out an opening by obstructing U.S. trade with the Indo-Pacific is self-sabotage.