Tariffs as an Instrument of Statecraft: Andrew Hale

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This is the 30 minute TV version of Jan Jekielek’s interview with Andrew Hale. The longer-form version was released on Epoch TV on February 20. 2025.

🔴 Watch the extended version of this episode: https://ept.ms/Y0220AndrewHale

Andrew Hale is a senior trade policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation. In this episode, Andrew Hale discusses how Trump is using various trade tools to strengthen alliances and weaken adversaries.

“I look upon what he’s trying to do as a negotiating tactic. He’s using tariffs as an instrument of statecraft, and also for economic coercion, to achieve matters that sometimes go well beyond trade policy,” Hale says.

According to Hale, tariffs should be used against America’s foreign adversaries, but not necessarily against its allies: “Among [those on] the protection side, there’s a knee jerk reaction saying a tariff is the panacea to all of our problems. And actually, a lot of these problems we created right here in Washington. And we can fix them right here in Washington, by dealing with some of the stupid and foolish regulations that we have. What we cannot go back to is what we had during the Clinton years, what we had during the Bush years, the Obama years—which was this seamless trade with China, where we treat them as a market economy. They’re a non-market economy. They’re a foreign adversary.”

CHAPTER TITLES
0:00:00 – Trump’s Use of Tariffs as a Negotiating Tactic
0:00:25 – Criticisms of Protectionist Policies and the Need for Domestic Reforms
0:01:15 – China’s Response to Trump’s Initial Tariffs
0:02:28 – Concerns Over Empowering China and the Need to Decouple
0:04:20 – Issues with the WTO and the Appellate Body
0:06:51 – The Purpose Behind the 10% Tariffs on China
0:10:07 – Section 232 Tariffs on Steel and Aluminum
0:14:59 – Offshoring of Emissions and Environmental Regulations
0:17:50 – Risks of China’s Control Over U.S. Pork Production
0:20:54 – Achieving Reciprocity in Trade with Canada

About decoupling from China: “We’re now sort of inextricably linked with the economy of the people’s work with China, and we do need to decouple from them. And as we decouple, I’m not suggesting that the transition will not be difficult. We obviously have to mitigate the damage from that, but there will be harsh medicine to take as much as I believe in free trade, we should not have free trade with foreign adversaries.”

“If you operate a business in China, as all businesses in China, if you’re a medium sized business, if you employ more than three Communist Party members, you must have a Communist Party cell that is a national security threat to us. This is not a free market. That’s a blurring of the lines between politics, government and the private sector that we shouldn’t be tolerating, and we shouldn’t be operating in that system. American companies should not be operating and saying, Okay, fine, we’ll just allow a Communist Party cell to exist within our company.”

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