How do you put a tariff on a country with which your country does virtually no trade? Ask Trump. From Simplicius at simplicius76.substack.com:
In the last report we had the first inklings of Trump’s now-revealed approach to “ending the Ukraine war”, but now he has finally clarified it in full in a series of new statements, which included first and foremost this Tweet:
There are many things to be said here, but first let’s lay out all the statements on the table to see them as a whole. Here Trump begins to get even more belligerent and threatening than the post above—he very seriously threatens Russia with all kinds of “massive” taxes, tariffs, and sanctions if they don’t end the war “immediately”:
[see linked article for video]
So the big question becomes: how does Trump intend to put such devastating economic pressure on Russia, exactly? He mentions tariffs and taxes on imports, but this is almost an intentional joke: Russia and the US have virtually no trade turnover whatsoever; there is very little of any consequence from Russia that Trump could tax or tariff. The few things there are, like Uranium, are critical to the US which the US can’t get from anywhere else in the same quantity and timelines, and thus would be shooting himself in the foot.
