Donald Trump has promised an announcement of some kind of schedule of tariffs on Wednesday and promises it will be a “Liberation Day.”
I fully share the sentiments expressed by Oren Cass here:
I am broadly supportive of President Trump’s desire to reshape the global trading system, and especially enthusiastic about the quality of the team he has assembled (VP Vance, Rubio at State, Bessent at Treasury, Miran at CEA, Greer at USTR) and the sharp critiques and frameworks they have developed. But the rubber meets the road in the clarity of the administration’s communication about its plans and goals, and in the coherence of the policy agenda actually implemented, and there the first two months have left much to be desired. We shall see what Wednesday brings, but I’ll be looking in particular for discernible principles, applied consistently, on predictable timelines. Continued failure on those fronts risks discrediting the entire project and diminishing its prospects of success.
What we need is a strategy fitted to our present needs. These include fairer trade with allied democracies, many of whom use activist policy (including their own tariffs) to run a trade surplus with us. It also includes sharing more of the security burden. Oren Cass suggests that our allies should think more like Israel — a country that is friendly but also well able to handle its own security. And it means further decoupling from China.
I’ll also be looking to see if there are any hints in the announcement this week as to the strategy the Trump admin will pursue in the expedited renegotiations of the USMCA (the United States-Mexico-Canada trade agreement).