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The government also errs when claiming that IEEPA tariffs are an essential part of U.S. foreign policy. As we show, the U.S. government has negotiated and ratified hundreds of real treaties (538, to be exact) since 1977 and never once used IEEPA tariffs to do it. Nor were the tariffs involved in any other pre-2025 diplomatic successes, including the Abraham Accords that normalized relations between Israel and several Arab nations, and that Trump himself considers one of his crowning foreign policy achievements. If anything, there are emerging signs that the IEEPA tariffs are pushing allies away from the United States, including and especially with respect to China. See, for example, this brand new dispatch from Southeast Asia on how former U.S. friends are playing nice with Trump but “rapidly seeking to reduce trade with the U.S. after [he] saddled them with sky-high tariffs earlier this year—a surrender of influence in the region to America’s number one adversary.” Also this week, these same nations deepened their free trade agreement with China, which was already each economy’s biggest trading partner.
