Vietnam offers to remove tariffs on US after Trump's action
Published in Political News
Vietnam offered to remove all tariffs on US imports after President Donald Trump announced a 46% levy on the Southeast Asian nation, according to an April 5 letter from Vietnam’s communist party.
The offer was made by party chief To Lam to Trump in a letter seen by Bloomberg. Lam requested that the U.S. not apply any additional tariffs or fees on Vietnamese goods and asked to postpone the implementation of the tariff announced by Trump last week by at least 45 days after April 9.
Peter Navarro, a trade adviser to Trump, suggested Sunday that Vietnam’s initiative didn’t go far enough.
“If you simply lowered our tariffs and they lowered our tariffs to zero, we’d still run about $120 billion trade deficit with Vietnam,” he said on Fox News’ "Sunday Morning Futures." “And the problem is all of the non-tariff cheating that they do.”
That includes export subsidies and allegedly serving as a tariff-evading platform for Chinese exports, Navarro said.
Lam’s letter confirms comments made by Trump on Friday on his Truth Social network, following a call between the two leaders. Vietnam, which has increasingly become a key manufacturing and export alternative to China, was slapped with one of the highest tariff rates worldwide last Wednesday.
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