How Trump is relaunching a tariff war citing ‘forced labour’ concerns

There was no grand Rose Garden announcement, no aides holding placards with lists of countries and tariffs imposed on them.

But four months after the United States Supreme Court struck down President Donald Trump’s use of an emergency powers law to wage a trade war on the world, his administration has relaunched his tariff agenda using a new approach that analysts say might be harder for courts to strike down.

The US Trade Representative (USTR) announced on June 2 that it was now pursuing Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 to once again impose tariffs on so-called “60 economies”. The list includes the European Union, so in effect, more than 80 countries are affected.

Using that authority, it has proposed tariffs of up to 12.5 percent on imports, arguing that those nations have failed to adequately prevent trade in goods produced with forced labour. Many of these countries are in the Global South. But several developed nations that are US allies – Britain, Canada, the European Union, Japan, Australia and New Zealand – are also among the targets of this new approach.

This renewed tariffs push, say analysts, might push countries further away from the US – and further incentivise them to seek trade deals with each other instead of relying on Washington.

“The US tariffs are … pushing countries to expand trade quicker,” Shantanu Singh and Vikram Naik, two India-based international trade lawyers in partnership, told Al Jazeera in a statement.

“The EU-Mercosur and EU-India trade deals are examples of that …. Though they might not offer the same scale or prices, opening trade with newer markets can help reduce the burden from US tariffs,” they added.

The EU-Mercosur deal that came into effect on May 1 between Europe and the South American bloc of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay creates a trading zone of 700 million people. The EU-India trade agreement is even bigger: signed in January, and described by European leaders as the “mother of all deals”, it creates a free trade zone of two billion people.