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There's no way Vietnam is paying a 20% tariff on their exports to the US. Trump has been lying about how tariffs work the whole time. This is the same language he has used throughout, where he claims tariffs are paid by other countries when in reality they're paid by the importer in the US (and passed on to consumers).

Let’s not pretend like China didn’t open up its market to the Americans in order to kill the Soviet Union, whom they perceive as attempting to encircle China through Vietnam. Both Mao and Deng were fully on board with it.

We only didn’t criticize China because it ends up becoming very successful and reaping quite a lot of benefit out of it (and part of the reason why China isn’t going to give up the status quo anytime soon), but when other countries try to play the same game, they get labeled as compradors.

While true, bear in mind the Vietnamese petite-bourgeois mindset is almost identical to the Chinese one, i.e. F-150/Jeep Wrangler pilled. There is definitely a market for the assault trucks and child killing SUVs in Vietnam, just smaller.

It went from 46% to 20%.

As I have explained before, America has been running a permanent trade deficit for the past 40 years (last year, it was $900+ billion) to absorb the global surplus capacity of the exporting countries. This ensures that the world is always running in an over-supply mode, keeping prices of the goods cheap while the workers in the exporting countries employed.

When Trump suddenly threatens to slash this massive trade deficit, while many people focus on Americans having to pay higher prices and consume less, the corresponding effect is that the exporting countries in the Global South also faces a slump in consumption demand, which will inevitably lead to production downscale, unemployment and finally recession.

This is what some of those pro-BRICS commentators who confidently said “American imports only comprised a small fraction of world trade! Nobody cares!” don’t understand about international trade, especially since the world is no longer running in a fixed exchange rate regime in the past. Well, turns out the Global South exporting countries care.

The export goods have to go somewhere, and if not, assuming constant global demand, you’re going to be competing with the other exporting countries to dump them somewhere else, and how are you going to compete with the Chinese goods? If you can’t compete with China, then you will go into recession, and maybe looking for an IMF bailout in the near future. So, they still have to sell to America, and what Trump is doing is simply waiting to see what concessions these countries would give. And those exporting countries now compete with one another to see who can be the first to sell their goods to the US to maintain their competitive advantage.

Re-industrialization is a scam. The real goal is to reshape the global supply chain to America’s interest.

This is also why I always say that the only way to counter-attack is for China to ramp up its import to absorb all these exports from the Global South. This means China will have to give up its export industries and transition into a domestic consumption economy (should have done that like 10 years ago). This will automatically render the dollar hegemony useless because those countries will no longer have to sell their goods to the US.

It's the only offer on the table. Trump has changed the game, every country is getting tariffs. Vietnam is not willing to play hardball with their largest export market.

What products can the United States sell in Vietnam that will displace Vietnamese industries? Virtually nothing. Everything the United States makes is far too expensive or useless to be of any benefit to Vietnamese consumers, nor is American manufacturing at all a threat to Vietnamese manufacturing. The United States exports mostly agricultural products like soybeans and cotton to Vietnam, as well as some cameras and probably some computer chips. Total exports are around $10 billion (compared to Vietnamese exports to the US, ~$115 billion). So even if that doubles, that's not really doing much.

How about they write a strongly worded letter instead ?