I’ve written about the dangers of the new administration’s obsession with tariffs even before it was elected.
In recent days, the situation has grown grim and uncertain, especially for Washington, one of the most trade-dependent and trade-vulnerable states in the union.
For example, copper prices hit a record because of the intention to place a 50% levy on the metal used across the economy, including on automobile manufacturing, electronics, aerospace products, transportation equipment — important to Link light rail — and construction.
According to the U.S. Commerce Department, the United States imported $17 billion worth of copper in 2024, primarily from Chile, Canada and Peru.
Although the United States produces more than half of its copper, mostly in Arizona, its demand is so great that imports are necessary.
Tariffs will fall as extra costs for customers of every Seattle-area company.
Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner alone uses about 57 miles of copper wiring per airplane.
With its Commercial Airplanes division headquartered in Renton, Boeing is among America’s largest exporters, selling to more than 150 nations, and China is its most important overseas customer. The company employed 67,567 people in Washington as of December, the most recent month for which data is available. Its workforce in Washington is far larger than in any other state.
Paccar, headquartered in Bellevue, also depends on the metal for its line of trucks sold around the world.
According to the U.S. International Trade Administration, Washington merchandise exports totaled $24.6 billion so far this year. Our largest trading partners remain China, Canada, South Korea, Japan and Mexico.
All are targets or being threatened with higher levies by President Donald Trump, who campaigned as “Tariff Man.”
The Washington Council on International Trade, an industry group, claims that 40% of jobs in the state are trade-related.
The Northwest Seaport Alliance, comprising the natural deep-water ports of Seattle and Tacoma, is a major logistical asset, dependent on trade.
Given the preponderance of exporters and importers here, from manufacturers and technology firms to agriculture, this isn’t an outsize number. Redmond-based Microsoft has been in China since 1992. Starbucks, headquartered in Seattle, operates about 7,700 stores in China.
China is also a major supplier for Amazon. Because of the tariffs, prices for Amazon customers are rising faster than the overall rate of inflation. And the administration’s shifting and murky stance on tariffs is affecting Amazon Prime Day sellers.
On Wednesday, the administration announced levies on six smaller trading partners, including the Philippines, which accounted for $702 million in Washington merchandise exports last year.
The purported author of “The Art of the Deal,” the 1987 New York Times bestseller written by journalist Tony Schwartz, wants to pressure allies and trade partners into agreements and is being cagey about when the full force of the levies might be felt.
Some deadlines, given to 14 nations in a form letter, were pushed to August, only adding to the uncertainty in the global economy and in the Northwest.
But while many nations are trying to accommodate the other Washington, they are negotiating in their own interests.
“These countries are not folding. They’re not giving him what he wants, so he’s added another threat,” William Reinsch, a former U.S. Commerce Department official who is a senior trade adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Reuters. “He’s put a new number to it and extended the deadline.”
As for China, the administration and Beijing made a truce on tariffs that had risen to triple digits last month, but it was uneasy.
According to Reuters, Beijing warned the administration against reinstating levies and threatened other countries that made agreements with the United States and attempted to leave China out of supply chains.
The average American levy on Chinese exports now stands at 51.1%, while the average Chinese duty on U.S. goods is 32.6%, according to the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
As I write, the United States has concluded fresh trade agreements with only the United Kingdom and Vietnam, but the details are unclear and in the case of the latter country, Hanoi would still face tariffs of 20%.
The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that the delay until August first came because of concerns by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and other advisers, who told the president they might gain better agreements given a few months.
The president has placed the United States and the world into unexplored territory.
The alignment of nations and alliances we enjoyed for 80 years after the end of World War II, when my father fought as a combat U.S. Army infantry lieutenant from D+2 to Czechoslovakia, is fading.
To paraphrase Aldous Huxley, our brave new world entails destroying — in just a few weeks — Pax Americana, which, despite blunders, lifted billions out of poverty by aid and helped maintain the longest period of peace among major powers in modern history.
The United States is no longer part of the Paris Agreement seeking to address human-caused climate change. We’re no longer the nation that stood for gradually opening markets to free, or managed, trade, culminating in the World Trade Organization.
The organization’s 1999 ministerial meetings here were intended to showcase Seattle as a trade superstar with 5,000 delegates and 3,000 journalists, along with then-President Bill Clinton. Instead, as The Times’ Jim Brunner wrote, “What (city officials) hadn’t adequately prepared for — despite warnings — was the determination of 50,000 protesters from across North America to disrupt the international trade-rule enforcer they blamed for trampling environmental standards, worker protections and rights of developing nations.”
Whether the trade policies followed by previous administrations of both parties killed more jobs than they added is still debated. The China Shock, after Beijing joined the WTO in 2001, is blamed for costing or displacing 3.4 million American manufacturing jobs.
As scholars for the Council on Foreign Relations recently wrote, U.S. factory jobs fell from 17 million to 13 million over the past 30 years. But this wasn’t simply because of China’s sometime dodgy ways of bypassing WTO rules.
U.S. manufacturing output rose during those years. With the U.S. still near what economists consider “full employment” (4.1% in Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue as of May, the most recent month for which data is available), the council report stated: “restrictive immigration policies mean there are fewer workers waiting in the wings. Adding more factory jobs would mean pulling employees away from other sectors, and this will be harder than it seems.”
It’s worth remembering that the United States remains among the world’s top exporters, and Seattle has benefited enormously, as have Americans with the world as their marketplace.
Nothing in history since the Great Depression shows that tariffs are beneficial. In fact, that calamity was significantly worsened by the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. The lessons from that — the rise of Hitler and militarists in Imperial Japan, with war as the outcome — led the United States to lead the world into Churchill’s “broad, sunlit uplands,” partly by trade.