Trump Says His Tariffs Will Address Unfair Global Trade. Is He Right?

President Trump has accused America’s trading partners of undermining the United States for decades, saying they have engaged in unfair trade practices to steal the country’s wealth and enrich their own economies.

He has set his sights on not only adversaries like China, but also traditional allies like Canada and Europe. And he has complained about a number of factors, including high tariffs that other countries charge American products, and persistent trade deficits the United States has with foreign countries. Mr. Trump has promised to correct this situation on Wednesday, when he announces expansive tariffs on foreign products that he says will level the playing field.

In some cases, there’s truth to the president’s claim that the United States offers its trading partners more favorable terms than it often gets in return. As a proponent of free markets, the United States has long been more open to trade than many countries globally.

That has encouraged the United States to rely on imports of many critical goods, like semiconductors and pharmaceuticals, instead of manufacturing them itself. And some countries do have tough trade barriers to U.S. exports, or economic policies that distort global markets — particularly China, which has flooded the world with manufactured goods.

Still, trade experts say that Mr. Trump’s claims include a heavy dose of exaggeration, as well as hypocrisy.

For example, Mr. Trump has singled out high tariff rates that countries charge on certain U.S. exports including Europe’s tax on cars and India’s levy on motorcycles. But the United States also has high tariff rates that it charges on certain imports, such as a 25 percent fee on light trucks. And Mr. Trump has lumped in friendly allies like Canada, which have some limits to U.S. exports outside a few sectors, with nations like China, which have extensive trade barriers.

The tariffs that Mr. Trump is rolling out now are also drastically raising trade barriers, potentially to a level beyond what other countries impose on the United States.

According to calculations by The New York Times, the trade measures that Mr. Trump has introduced so far have more than tripled the estimated dollar value of tariffs that importers must pay to bring products into the United States compared with last year. And that’s before his new reciprocal tariffs and 25 percent auto levies go into effect this week.

In his first term, Mr. Trump’s collective tariff actions on foreign metals, China and other products ended up doubling U.S. tariffs, but those changes took roughly two years to unfold, according to Daniel Anthony, the president of Trade Partnership Worldwide, a research firm.

The president has dismissed any concerns about his approach, referring to his plan to impose reciprocal tariffs as “Liberation Day.”

“They’re reciprocal — so whatever they charge us, we charge them, but we’re being nicer than they were,” he said on Monday.

William Reinsch, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, called the president’s claims about trade “a huge exaggeration.”

Mr. Reinsch said that Mr. Trump’s idea that the United States gave the world a gift by opening its markets after World War II and was now locked in a permanent disparity on tariffs was “wrong historically” and “wrong factually.”

“The unfairness that he rails on is not what he says it is,” he said.

U.S. tariff rates are low, but not that low

America’s tariffs are, on average, lower than many countries. But they are pretty comparable to other rich nations, which also tend to have low barriers to imports.

Data from the World Trade Organization showed the United States had a trade-weighted average tariff rate of 2.2 percent in 2023, compared with 2.7 percent for the European Union, 1.9 percent in Japan, 3.4 percent for Canada, 3 percent for China and 1.7 percent for Switzerland.

Some poorer countries do have higher rates. India’s trade-weighted average tariff rate is 12 percent, while Mexico’s is 3.9 percent and Vietnam’s is 5.1 percent.

“U.S. tariff rates are somewhat lower than tariff rates in other countries,” said Ed Gresser, the vice president and director for trade and global markets at the Progressive Policy Institute, a think tank. “But vis-a-vis other rich countries, it’s not a lot.”

Tariffs for specific products vary widely. The United States levies individual tariff rates on about 13,000 foreign products, according to Doug Irwin, a trade historian. The U.S. trades with almost 200 countries, each of which have set their own rates for different products.

These rates were negotiated at the World Trade Organization or its predecessor, a treaty called the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade….