News editors sometimes choose odd titles: “First country to cut tariffs down for US and awaits deal — Trump.” That is for a brief Oleh Velhan article from RBC Ukraine. OK: maybe something got lost in translation. But the article follows a theme from this week’s Common Sense commentary and yesterday’s update: Trump’s goofy schedules of tariffs and what to do about them.
Vietnam is ready to completely scrap tariffs for the United States. This may become possible after an agreement between the two countries, according to US leader Donald Trump and his statement via Truth Social.
Trump reported that he had held talks with the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam, To Lam. According to him, Lam stated that Vietnam is ready to reduce its tariffs to zero.
“Vietnam wants to cut their tariffs down to zero if they are able to make an agreement with the US. I thanked him on behalf of our country, and said that I look forward to a meeting in the near future,” said the US president.
Oleh Velhan, Saturday April 5, 2025.
Meanwhile, the United Kingdom and other countries are going the proverbial other direction, responding with a “list of 8,000 US products that could be subject to tariffs. This list includes various items, ‘from binoculars to bourbon whiskey.’”
Is that Trump wants? Retaliatory tariffs? That happened under Smoot-Hawley.
That is what economists fear: Like the McKinley Tariff of 1890 (which President Trump has praised), the Smoot-Hawley tax hike on goods coming into the country (which is what a tariff is, an international trade tax) to a whopping amount — higher than the nearly 50 percent tariff duty level of the 1890 effort. The Smoot-Hawley hikes have long been known to have factored in the Great Depression, with economist Thomas Rustici (see Lessons of the Great Depression, 2005) arguing that the influence was far more significant than previously thought.
An international war of tariffs, with each nation responding to others’ tariffs with tariffs of their own, is just not good for business. But as wars go, it is an extremely foolish one. A tariff chiefly harms consumers (economists like Milton Friedman tell us) in the national economy of the state that erects them: a tariff war is where each nation shoots itself in the foot, and retaliates for others’ self-harm by further harming themselves.
This was made clear by Frederic Bastiat, whom no one in power appears to have read.
But there is still the inscrutable Trump. If he likes tariffs so much, why does he want them for America but for no one else? That is the implication — right until he praises To Lam and Javier Milei for responding to his tariffs not as Britain is retaliating, or as the EU prepares to. If Trump is really after free trade, apparently he demands a special form of it: not unilateral but multilateral.
So why not just honestly aim for that?
Because it is not popular?
Still, his current strategy seems a bit like Cleavon Little’s strategy when a town turns guns on him: he points his own gun at his own head. But with Trump’s tariff hike policy, there’s less provocation.
