World trade is a complicated issue because each country has different interests, products, needs and objectives. In a perfect world, if one country has a surplus of a product, makes a better product or can make a product more efficiently (cheaply) they will want to sell that product to other counties by ‘exporting’ it. On the other hand, if a country has a shortage of some product, can't make or doesn’t have a product, or the product is too expensive or is only made of poor quality, that country might want to buy that product from another country, or ‘import’ it.  Seems simple enough.

But, when a country wants to export something that competes with products made in another country, that other country may want to try to restrict importing that product by adding tariffs to make the exporting countries product ‘effective’ price higher and protect the product made in their country.  That happens to the US all of the time particularly on agricultural and food products, or on automobiles, electronics, etc. The US has placed import tariffs on cars from many countries, so our automakers could compete with them, but that then induced the foreign automakers to add tariffs on US car much higher than the ones we put on their cars.  That happens with almost every country on almost all products, steel, Aluminum, sugar, etc.

Then there is one other issue that affects international trade, subsidies to companies, industries, products, and resources to help make those more competitive on the world market. They may be direct subsidies of money from the government, land from the government, tax incentives, changing regulations to favor one product or the other, etc. These have the same ‘unbalancing’ of free trade.

I believe that our President and his Team, however awkward it seems, is trying to force our trading partners, allies, and other wise, to reduce or eliminate their tariffs on our products and reduce or eliminate their internal subsidies that make their products cheaper.  But, then we would have to do the same! And, yes, for a while our world would be turned ‘upside down’ for better or worse. We get into these ‘traps’ by tiny tweaking of this tariff or that subsidy and over a period of the last 70 years, we get to where we are now. Steel and aluminum is much more cheaply imported to the US and that is part of the reason the US steel and aluminum and auto industries have suffered in the US to varying degrees.

I applaud the President and his Team for trying to get the world trade tariffs and subsidies greatly reduced to a level playing field, particularly with our allies. As the President says, they know what they have been doing and are just shocked anyone is calling them out. Thank God we don’t have a politician as President !