Why President Trump's Trade War Is Stalling
As the July 9 deadline set by the White House tenant to lift his so-called "reciprocal" customs duties approaches, only the United Kingdom, China, and Vietnam have found common ground. And when it comes to Japan, the American strong-arm tactics appear to be failing, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Having failed to reach a trade agreement with Japan after weeks of talks, Howard Lutnick and Jamieson Greer chose to up the pressure. As soon as the Japanese delegation arrived in Washington in late May, the U.S. Commerce Secretary and Trade Representative made it clear that if the two sides failed to reach an agreement quickly, President Trump's recently imposed tariff easing could give way to a new round of punitive measures, people familiar with the matter said. Washington threatened to cap the number of vehicles Japan would be allowed to export to the United States—a policy known as "voluntary export restraint."
But the Japanese did not give in: they immediately announced that they would reject any agreement that would maintain the 25% tariffs on automobiles decreed by Trump, according to authorized sources. The situation therefore remains at a standstill.
On June 30, the American president seemed ready to break off dialogue with Tokyo. Japan “doesn't want our rice, even though it's facing a serious shortage,” he posted on his Truth Social network, while the archipelago imports hundreds of thousands of rice each year.
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The Wall Street Journal (New York)It's the bible of the business world. But it must be handled with caution: on the one hand, high-quality investigations and reports, with a concern for neutrality. On the other, highly partisan editorial pages. The columnists and the editorial board defend, often virulently, conservative points of view, even if the publication has always maintained a certain distance from Donald Trump.
Winner of 39 Pulitzer Prizes, The WSJ is best known for its financial market analysis and its coverage of management and business trends. Since its acquisition in July 2007 by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., the daily has evolved into a more general format to rival The New York Times. A luxury lifestyle supplement, called WSJ Magazine, was launched in September 2008.
Based in New York's financial district since its founding in 1889, the newsroom moved from Wall Street in 2008 to News Corp., a little further north, to Midtown. It has a total of 1,800 journalists in nearly fifty countries.
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