March 25, 2025
Who knows what the Trump administration will do as a result of the United States Trade Representative’s public meetings on the tax on Chinese vessels? Who knows how the Trump administration really feels about the Chinese shipping threat?
Will American business interests be enough to persuade him to taper off of the imposition of taxes against Chinese vessels?
We hope so, because the threat of World Trade Organization sanctions cannot deter the world’s most powerful nation to ease off of their trade war against other countries.
While this will hurt the world, and not just the Caribbean, I understand what the Trump administration is trying to do.
You see, for a while now, the Chinese government has been acting as a business entity, subsidizing Chinese companies and using them as an economic threat to Western economic power. So, quite logically, the Trump administration is trying to deal with this in the most overt and hard-nosed way. It will hurt the rest of us, but to Trump, it is collateral damage to the long-term future of the American way of life- and Western life, which includes us in the Caribbean.
Let’s be sober while we are at it, however. We should not be that weakened for a few cheap dollars from the Chinese and allow that to blind us to the long-term strategic vision of our way of life. The Chinese know exactly what they have been doing over the last 30 years or so, it was intentional.
Allow the Trump team to do their work.