Determined to foreign to Venezuela economically, Donald Trump announced on Monday that any country buying Venezuelan gas or oil would be struck from April 2 customs duties of 25 % on all its goods entering the United States.
The American president, who has already ended the license allowing the American oil giant Chevron to operate in Venezuela and who multiplies the expulsions of migrants from this country, justified the establishment of these customs rights by writing on his social social network that Caracas was “very hostile” in the United States.
These punitive taxes must come into force on the same day as the “reciprocal” customs duties that Donald Trump has promised to inflict all-out on the United States business partners. According to him, they aim to tax products entering the United States and coming from another country at the same level as are the American products entering the country. The American president even speaks of April 2 as the “Liberation Day”.
The tenant of the White House has made customs duties the cornerstone of its economic, social and even diplomatic policy. In the mind of the former real estate promoter, customs taxes are a universal weapon allowing both to reindustrialize the United States, to reduce the trade deficit, to absorb the budget deficit, to boost employment, and to establish a more favorable balance of power for Washington on the international scene.
After having used them briefly against Colombia to force the South American country to accept the return of migrants illegally entered in the United States, he employed them against Canada and Mexico to encourage them to fight more effectively against fentanyl traffic, a powerful opioid cause of a serious health crisis in the United States. He had finally suspended a large part of the 25 % applied to Canadian and Mexican products, while exchanges with the two countries theoretically benefits from the Canada-St.-Mexico Free Trade Agreement (ACEUM) that the American president had negotiated and signed during his first mandate.
Customs duties less important than announced?
Donald Trump, on the other hand, imposed, for the same reasons, 20 % of percentage points on Chinese products, which are added to those who were already in force before his return to the White House. The American president also imposed 25 % on all imports of steel and aluminum entering the country, this time to protect the American steel industry of foreign competition, in particular Asian.
These new customs duties targeting Venezuelan oil buyers could in particular touch India and China, already in the viewfinder of the US government. Donald Trump’s next step should be the implementation of reciprocal customs duties, which could become effective on April 2. But the markets expect them to be less important than announced, focusing on the main trade partners of the United States, with potential exemptions in certain sectors.
Donald Trump has never hidden his desire to apply them on the automobile, pharmaceutical products or semiconductors. New sectoral customs rights “could, or not, enter into force on April 2,” an American official told AFP, for whom the situation remains “very volatile”.
With more particularly Venezuela, the American president has undertaken to expel a large number of migrants accused of belonging to the Gang Tren in Aragua, going so far as to invoke an old exceptional law, used until then only in wartime, which makes it possible to arrest and send foreigners considered as “enemies” of the United States. Donald Trump’s national security advisor Mike Waltz recently considered that this gang, now classified as a “terrorist organization”, acted “on behalf of the regime (from Venezuelan President Nicolas) Maduro”.