[The president’s rhetorical whipsaw came against the backdrop of tense but cordial meetings in Biarritz, France. It injected fresh uncertainty into Mr. Trump’s efforts to try to change Chinese behavior by gambling on the fate of hundreds of billions of dollars in products that flow between the two countries.]
By
Michael D. Shear
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President
Trump at the G7 Summit on Sunday. Credit Erin
Schaff/ The
New York Times
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BIARRITZ,
France — President Trump
offered deeply contradictory signals about his trade war with China on Sunday,
ending the day by escalating his threats of higher tariffs even as he remained
isolated from fellow world leaders on a strategy that has rattled the global
economy.
A day after defending his authority to order
American companies out of China, Mr. Trump started Sunday by conceding that he
was having “second thoughts” about a new round of levies on Chinese goods.
Within hours, he abruptly reversed himself again, saying that he only regretted
not raising tariffs even higher.
The president’s rhetorical whipsaw came
against the backdrop of tense but cordial meetings in Biarritz, France. It
injected fresh uncertainty into Mr. Trump’s efforts to try to change Chinese
behavior by gambling on the fate of hundreds of billions of dollars in products
that flow between the two countries.
“I think they respect the trade war,” Mr.
Trump said of his allies assembled here for the Group of 7 annual gathering. Of
China, he said: “What they’ve done is outrageous, that presidents and
administrations allowed them to get away with taking hundreds of billions of
dollars out every year.”
Allies of the United States have long agreed
that China’s policies are a threat, but there is little consensus behind Mr.
Trump’s approach, and a deep nervousness that the president is going to tip the
global economy into recession, hitting already trembling European economies
particularly hard.
But far from using the gathering here to
assemble a united front against Chinese trade policies, Mr. Trump set himself
apart once again by making it clear he has no intention of backing down.
The heads of state from some of the world’s
leading democracies treated Mr. Trump delicately at the summit in the beach
resort in the south of France, hoping to avoid an angry outburst. But several
challenged Mr. Trump publicly on the issues of trade, North Korea and Russia.
Even Boris Johnson, Britain’s new prime
minister who sees eye to eye with the American leader more than the other
leaders, publicly chided Mr. Trump about the value of free trade and the
dangers of an extended confrontation over trade.
“We’re in favor of trade peace on the whole,”
Mr. Johnson told the president, in a mild-mannered rebuke of Mr. Trump’s
embrace of tariffs as a bludgeon against allies and adversaries alike. “The
U.K. has profited massively in the last 200 years from free trade and that’s
what we want to see.”
Signs of a weakening global economy that has
renewed fears of recession in the United States and Europe have underscored the
dangers inherent in the president’s go-it-alone attempts to confront Chinese
policies that even his critics concede are damaging to American interests.
Back home, Democrats have been critical of
Mr. Trump’s approach, saying American leverage in the trade war is weakened by
the president’s failure to work with allies in a concerted approach to change
China’s course.
So far, China has evaded some of Mr. Trump’s
tariffs by buying more from other countries, though the trade dispute has also
impacted American allies like Germany, where the economy has slumped.
But Mr. Trump appeared to quickly shrug off
any doubts he might have been harboring.
Days before arriving in Biarritz, Mr. Trump
angrily tweeted that he was ratcheting up tariffs on Chinese goods in response
to Chinese retaliation for earlier levies.
By Sunday morning, though, he was wavering
about whether to impose the additional levies and retreated on his threat upon
landing in France to declare an emergency so that he could order American
companies out of China. After having declared Xi Jinping, the leader of China,
an enemy, Mr. Trump said that “we’re getting along very well with China right
now.”
“I have second thoughts about everything,” he
said.
But the rare expression of doubt — from an
American president who almost never admits to being wrong or even of changing
his mind — lasted less than five hours.
After Mr. Trump was briefed by aides on the
coverage of his statements, including headlines describing him as softening on
China, the White House issued a blunt statement saying his answer about having
“second thoughts” had been misinterpreted by reporters covering the summit.
“President Trump responded in the affirmative
— because he regrets not raising the tariffs higher,” Stephanie Grisham, the
White House press secretary, said in a statement. Hours later, Larry Kudlow,
the president’s top economic adviser, and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin
insisted that there should be no doubt about Mr. Trump’s resolve.
“His only second thoughts, as I said, was
maybe he should raise tariffs more,” Mr. Mnuchin told reporters. “The deficit
is getting bigger and the president is determined that we have free and fair
and reciprocal trade.”
Mr. Trump, whose efforts to win approval for
a North American trade deal remain mired in congressional limbo, seized an
opportunity to demonstrate some concrete progress on trade by announcing that
the United States and Japan had “agreed in principle” on a deal to avoid a
trade dispute.
The tentative agreement, announced by the
country’s leaders at a meeting on the sidelines of the Group of 7 in France,
would pry open Japan’s notoriously tight agricultural markets. It would allow
American farmers and ranchers to compete on more equal footing with members of
the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a multinational trade agreement concluded under
the Obama administration but abandoned by Mr. Trump.
As part of the agreement, Japan has agreed to
buy “hundreds of millions of dollars of corn” Mr. Trump told reporters, adding
that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan had promised to buy up “excess” corn
that had once gone to China.
But that deal is not yet finalized and Mr.
Trump remains so at odds with many of his counterparts that President Emmanuel
Macron of France said it would be ‘‘pointless’’ for the gathering to try and
issue its usual joint statement.
After signing on to a joint statement
following the Group of 7 in Canada last year, Mr. Trump angrily denounced the
agreement and declared in a tweet that he would not sign it. He lashed out at Prime
Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada, calling him “very dishonest and weak.”
This year, Mr. Trump used Twitter to take
exception to the suggestion by “the Fake and Disgusting news” that his
relations with his counterparts were once again strained, insisting that “we
are having very good meetings, the Leaders are getting along very well.”
But there were clear points of contention,
Russia among them.
Russia was suspended from the club’s meetings
in 2014 after it seized Crimea from Ukraine and supported militias trying to
break parts of eastern Ukraine away from the country. Mr. Trump said last week
that he thought bringing Moscow back into the fold would be “appropriate,”
drawing quick rebuffs from France, Germany and Britain.
Administration officials downplayed the
issue, noting that Russia had not asked to rejoin the club. But on Sunday, Mr.
Trump said the United States, as the host of next year’s meeting, might invite
Russia to participate. He said the question of whether to invite President
Vladimir V. Putin of Russia next year prompted a “lively” discussion behind
closed doors.
Mr. Trump’s suggestion that North Korea’s
recent firing of short-range missiles was not “in violation of an agreement”
prompted a firm rejection from Mr. Abe. He said it “clearly violates the
relevant U.N. Security Council Resolution.”
Even as Mr. Trump focused on economic issues,
Mr. Macron, the host of the summit, tried to forge an unlikely consensus on
Iran after many months of discord between Mr. Trump and European leaders over
the future of the 2015 nuclear agreement.
While Mr. Macron told French television that
the gathered leaders agreed to a joint message to Iran, Mr. Trump later said he
had not discussed that but did not object to French efforts to reach out to
Tehran.
In a dramatic surprise, Iran’s foreign
minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, showed up in Biarritz just a few hours later,
flying in for meetings of his own. Iranian officials said he would not meet
with any Americans. Mr. Mnuchin repeated Mr. Trump’s past assertion that he was
open to negotiating and “he would not set preconditions to those negotiations.”
Mr. Macron, who says that economic inequality
should be the Group of 7’s primary focus, invited the leaders of India, South
Africa, Australia and Chile to take part in the group’s discussions along with
the heads of member nations. On Sunday, Mr. Macron hosted a session focusing on
Africa with the leaders of Burkina Faso, Egypt, Rwanda, Senegal and South
Africa.
But Sunday’s gathering was overshadowed by
the president’s back-and-forth comments about China and the efforts by his top
economic aides to reinforce Mr. Trump’s refusal to back down from the trade war
he started.
If Ms. Grisham’s statement had left any doubt
about where the president stood, Mr. Kudlow and Mr. Mnuchin appeared on several
television programs to declare that Mr. Trump had not had a change of heart.
“The president is bound and determined to
defend the American economy against unfair trading practices that have damaged
certain sectors of our economy,” Mr. Kudlow told reporters in an impromptu news
conference with the Atlantic beaches as a backdrop. “So he’s gonna see it
through. There’s no plans to change that.”
Stephen Miller, the president’s senior
adviser, also made a rare appearance on Fox News to drive the point home.
“The only second thoughts the president is
having,” Mr. Miller said, “is whether to be even tougher and even more
aggressive.”
Peter Baker contributed reporting.
