Yes­ter­day, in a tele­vised pre­sen­ta­tion that was close­ly watched glob­al­ly, US Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump un­veiled his much an­tic­i­pat­ed ‘Lib­er­a­tion Day’ tar­iffs on most of the coun­tries in the world.

Mr Trump in­tro­duced these tar­iffs be­cause of his be­lief that “large and per­sis­tent an­nu­al US goods trade deficits have led to the hol­low­ing out of our man­u­fac­tur­ing base; re­sult­ed in a lack of in­cen­tive to in­crease ad­vanced do­mes­tic man­u­fac­tur­ing ca­pac­i­ty; un­der­mined crit­i­cal sup­ply chains; and ren­dered our de­fence-in­dus­tri­al base de­pen­dent on for­eign ad­ver­saries.”

It is note­wor­thy that Pres­i­dent Trump in­voked his au­thor­i­ty un­der the In­ter­na­tion­al Emer­gency Eco­nom­ic Pow­ers Act of 1977 (IEEPA), to ad­dress what he de­scribed as a “na­tion­al emer­gency” posed by the large and per­sis­tent trade deficits that are dri­ven by the ab­sence of reci­procity in the trade re­la­tion­ships of the US with oth­er coun­tries around the world.

While the US leader claims his coun­try is dis­ad­van­taged by trade deficits, Amer­i­cans live in the largest and rich­est econ­o­my in the world, with its GDP to­talling an es­ti­mat­ed US$30.34 tril­lion as of 2025 and its GDP per capi­ta in 2025 es­ti­mat­ed at US$81,000.

It is true that the US is no longer the man­u­fac­tur­ing be­he­moth it used to be. But that is be­cause there are coun­tries in the world, such as Chi­na, that use their avail­abil­i­ty of labour re­sources to man­u­fac­ture goods much more cheap­ly than in the US. That fac­tor, of course, has al­lowed the US to ben­e­fit from cheap man­u­fac­tured im­ports that have fa­cil­i­tat­ed the high stan­dard of liv­ing many Amer­i­cans en­joy.

Yes­ter­day’s an­nounce­ment of rec­i­p­ro­cal trade tar­iffs by Mr Trump ef­fec­tive­ly ends the era of cheap man­u­fac­tured im­ports for the US, and with it the pe­ri­od of trade lib­er­al­i­sa­tion that has ben­e­fit­ed mil­lions of peo­ple around the world.

These tar­iffs are ex­pect­ed to do per­ma­nent dam­age to the trade and oth­er re­la­tion­ships that the US has with its al­lies and part­ners glob­al­ly. The fall­out from the rup­tured re­la­tion­ships is some­thing that needs to be close­ly mon­i­tored in the re­gion, so that coun­tries are alert to the op­por­tu­ni­ties that the re­order­ing of the world or­der can bring.

Most of the coun­tries of the Caribbean have been levied at the ten per cent tar­iff base­line, pri­mar­i­ly be­cause the 15-mem­ber states of Cari­com, as a whole, im­port much more from the US than those coun­tries ex­port to the US.

T&T, though, ex­ports a large amount of oil, LNG, petro­chem­i­cals and iron and steel to the US. There­fore, the big ques­tion for the pop­u­la­tion of T&T, is the ex­tent to which the coun­try’s en­er­gy ex­ports will be hurt by the im­po­si­tion of the ten per cent tar­iff.

A fact sheet is­sued by the White House yes­ter­day, in­di­cates some goods will not be sub­ject to rec­i­p­ro­cal tar­iffs, in­clud­ing “en­er­gy and oth­er cer­tain min­er­als that are not avail­able in the US.” T&T will, there­fore, have to wait to es­tab­lish whether the US de­f­i­n­i­tion of en­er­gy in­cludes oil, LNG and the petro­chem­i­cals pro­duced in this coun­try.

T&T must act, along with the oth­er mem­bers of Cari­com, to try to per­suade the US ad­min­is­tra­tion to re­duce or elim­i­nate the ten per cent tar­iff. The need for a re­gion­al ap­proach to re­solv­ing this is­sue is para­mount be­cause it is in T&T’s in­ter­est that its Cari­com neigh­bours main­tain their sta­ble and grow­ing economies.