timelets

President Trump on Wednesday hailed the result of the latest trade talks with China as a great victory, but the best we can say is that it’s a truce that tilts in China’s direction.
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This gets to the larger problem with Mr. Trump’s tariff strategy—that is, he doesn’t have one. His latest walk-back shows he can’t bully China as he tried to do in his first term. China has leverage of its own.

A smarter trade strategy would be to work with allies as a united front to counter China’s predatory trade practices. Instead, Mr. Trump has used tariffs as an economic scatter-gun against friends as well as foes. This increases China’s leverage, and, like this week’s trade truce, that’s nothing to cheer about.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/china-trade-talks-donald-trump-tariffs-f730f437

...the U.S. campaign spiraled into a foreign-policy debacle, thwarted by familiar adversaries, Russia and Cuba, as well as allies, Turkey and India—all countries that one way or another helped Venezuela sidestep U.S. sanctions, according to current and former U.S. officials and Venezuelan opposition activists. The European Union watched from the sidelines.
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Almost half of the $1.5 billion in Venezuelan crude exported to India in the nine months after the U.S. sanctions was purchased by an Indian joint venture with Russia’s oil giant, Rosneft, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of data compiled by trade database Import Genius.
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The United Arab Emirates has imported around $1 billion in gold from Venezuela since gold sanctions were imposed in late 2018, according to Venezuela trade records. U.S. intelligence officials say the actual amounts are far higher, based on evidence that Venezuelan gold is leaving the country masked as originating from Colombia, Uganda and elsewhere. The exports land in Turkey, the U.A.E. and other gold-trade hubs.

The Trump administration, confident Mr. Maduro would fall, didn’t foresee Russia leading the way for other countries to eclipse the sanctions.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-the-u-s-bid-for-regime-change-in-venezuela-faltered-11580138560

“It’s a crisis the likes of which we just never had to deal with before,” said Matthew Gutchess, president of Gutchess Lumber Co. in Cortland, N.Y. “The demand elsewhere is just not absorbing what China is dropping.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/its-a-crisis-lumber-mills-slash-jobs-as-trade-war-cuts-deep-11569490206

In what Seoul views as economic retaliation over a previous dispute over wartime forced labour, Tokyo from July 4 started imposing export restrictions on three chemicals crucial to South Korea's booming semiconductor industry - fluorine polyimide, resists and etching gas.

Japan, which controls up to 90 per cent of the global supply of these materials, cited a breach of trust and national security concerns for the measures.

https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/south-korea-japan-trade-spat-us-will-do-what-it-can-to-help-but-hopes-both-sides-can

Brazil, which overtook the U.S. as the world’s biggest soybean exporter several years ago, stands to gain ground. The U.S. share of world soybean exports is expected to drop to 31% this season, the lowest on record, while Brazil’s portion is forecast to swell to 52%, which would be its largest ever.



At an agricultural forum in Beijing last fall, according to Mr. Schickler, China’s deputy agriculture minister said China would not easily forget the current standoff, and China is building alternatives for soybean imports so it will never again be so dependent on a single source.

According to Mr. Sutter, the CEO of the Soybean Export Council, Chinese companies are working to develop soybean production in Russia, where soybeans haven’t yet become a major crop.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/farmers-built-a-soybean-export-empire-around-china-now-theyre-fighting-to-save-it-11562260248

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trumps-broken-nafta-promise-11545870369

When President Trump signed his new Nafta accord last month with the leaders of Mexico and Canada, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau almost didn’t show up. The reason: Mr. Trump still hasn’t lifted the steel and aluminum tariffs as he promised he’d do if America’s two neighbors signed a revised trade deal.

A month later they’re still waiting. The delay is damaging the U.S. economy and America’s credibility as a trading partner. Though Mr. Trump likes to use tariff threats as a negotiating tactic, his Administration also promised relief from the levies he imposed under Section 232 of U.S. trade law.

In July U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer told a Senate hearing that “resolving the NAFTA issue—we would expect, or hope, that we would resolve the steel and the aluminum issues with both Mexico and Canada.”

Last March no less than the President himself tweeted that “tariffs on Steel and Aluminum will only come off if new & fair NAFTA agreement is signed.”