US-China tariff talks may provide clues on a possible Trump-Xi meeting
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng were meeting at the offices of Sweden's prime minister for two days of talks, which Bessent has said will likely lead to an extension of current tariff levels.
But other possible outcomes will be scrutinized by markets and businesses for signs of a rapprochement, after brinkmanship earlier this year.
Analysts say the talks could set the stage for a possible meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping later this year.
Other issues on the agenda include access of American businesses to the Chinese market; Chinese investment in the U.S.; components of fentanyl made in China that reach U.S. consumers; Chinese purchases of Russian and Iranian oil; and American steps to limit exports of Western technology -- like chips that help power artificial intelligence systems.
The talks ended for the day after nearly five hours on Monday, and were set to reconvene on Tuesday morning.
'Large and confident partner'
Wendy Cutler, a former U.S. trade negotiator and now vice president at the Asia Society Policy Institute, said that Trump's team would face challenges from "a large and confident partner that is more than willing to retaliate against U.S. interests."
Rollover of tariff rates "should be the easy part," she said, warning that Beijing has learned lessons since the first Trump administration and "will not buy into a one-sided deal this time around."
"Beijing is more prepared and will insist on movement on U.S. tech export controls at a minimum -- a difficult ask for Washington," she said, adding that many conversations will take place in the lead-up to any Xi-Trump summit.
"Success is far from guaranteed," Cutler said. "There are numerous trip wires that can throw a wrench in this preparatory process."
The U.S.-China trade talks are the third this year, nearly four months after Trump upended global trade with his sweeping tariff proposals, including an import tax that shot up to 145% on Chinese goods. China retaliated with tariffs reaching 125% against U.S. goods, sending global financial markets into a temporary tailspin.
Extending a 90-day pause
The Stockholm meeting, following similar talks in Geneva and London, is set to extend a 90-day pause on those tariffs. During the hiatus, U.S. tariffs have been lowered to 30% on Chinese goods, and China set a 10% tariff on U.S. products.
The Trump administration, which just completed a deal on tariffs with the European Union, wants to reduce a trade deficit of $904 billion overall last year, including a nearly $300 billion trade deficit with China.
China's Commerce Ministry said last week that the "consultations" would raise shared concerns through the principles of "mutual respect, peaceful coexistence and win-win cooperation."
The talks with Beijing are part of a flurry of U.S. trade negotiations set off by Trump's arm-twisting "Liberation Day" tariffs against dozens of countries. Since then, some talks have borne fruit in reaching deals. Others have not.
Without an extension by Aug. 12, the tit-for-tat U.S.-China tariffs could snap back to the triple-digit levels seen before the 90-day pause reached in Geneva. Many other countries -- including some developing ones that depend on exports to the U.S. -- face a deadline of Friday, as the Trump administration has said that letters will go out beforehand with set rates.
Critics say Trump's tariffs penalize Americans by forcing U.S. importers to shoulder the costs or pass them on to consumers through higher prices.
Suggestion of stability
On Friday, Trump told reporters that "we have the confines of a deal with China" -- just two days after Bessent told MSNBC that a "status quo" had been reached between the two sides.
While the Chinese side has offered little guidance about the specifics of its aims in Stockholm, Bessent has suggested that the situation has stabilized to the point that China and the U.S. can start looking toward longer-term balance between their economies.
For years, since China vaulted into the global trading system about two decades ago, the United States has sought to press leaders in Beijing to encourage more consumption in China and wrest greater market access to foreign-made -- including American -- goods.
Other sticking points in the relationship include overcapacity in China -- by far the world's largest manufacturer -- and concerns about whether Beijing is doing enough to control chemicals used to make fentanyl, analysts say.
In Stockholm, the Chinese will likely demand the removal of a 20% fentanyl-related tariff that Trump imposed earlier this year, said Sun Yun, director of the China program at the Washington-based Stimson Center.
Looking long-term
Experts say long-term progress in the U.S.-China trade relationship will hinge on structural changes.
Those include increased manufacturing in the United States, which is part of Trump's ambition. On the Chinese side, that could involve a reduction of excess Chinese production in many industries, including electric vehicles and steel, and increased Chinese consumer spending to ease imbalances in China's export-driven economy.
Sean Stein, president of the U.S.-China Business Council, said the the talks in Stockholm offer an opportunity for the two governments to address structural reform issues. Businesses will watch for clues about a possible Trump-Xi summit, because any real deal will depend on a meeting between the pair, he said.
A deal is possible because "a lot of the things that the U.S. wants, the Chinese want as well," Stein said.
China, for example, is interested in buying U.S. soybeans, and aircraft and parts, and Chinese businesses are interested in investing in U.S. manufacturing -- which would help meet Trump's goal of reindustrialization.
Bessent has also said the Stockholm talks could address Chinese purchases of Russian and Iranian oil.
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Yomiuri Shimbun
38 minutes ago
- Yomiuri Shimbun
He Left Iran 40 Years Ago. He May Be Deported to Romania. Or Australia.
Sharp knocks on the front door interrupted Firouzeh Firouzabadi's Saturday morning coffee. On the porch of her suburban Maryland home were two law enforcement agents and a very familiar pit bull mix named Duke. 'Can you take this dog?' Firouzabadi recalled one of the men saying. 'I said, 'This is my son's dog. Where is he?' They wouldn't say.' At that moment, her adult son, Reza Zavvar, was handcuffed in the back of an SUV parked two houses down in the Gaithersburg neighborhood where the Iranian-born family has lived since 2009 – apprehended, he later said, that late June day by at least five federal immigration agents in tactical gear who told Zavvar they had been waiting for him to take Duke out for his regular morning walk. More than a month later, Zavvar, 52, remains in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody in Texas, part of a surge of arrests of immigrants with standing court orders barring their deportation to their native countries. The Trump administration has increasingly turned to sending people to third countries. In court papers, ICE said it plans to send Zavvar to Australia or Romania. He has no ties to either place. Zavvar left Tehran alone when he was 12, arriving in Virginia in 1985 on a student visa secured by his parents as a way to escape eventual conscription into the Iranian army. He eventually received U.S. asylum, and then a green card. His family joined him and they settled in Maryland, but in his 20s, Zavvar's guilty pleas in two misdemeanor marijuana possession cases jeopardized his immigration status. In 2007, an immigration judge issued a withholding of removal order, determining it was unsafe for Zavvar to return to Iran. He built a life, went to college and has been working as a white-collar recruiter for a consulting firm. But now, President Donald Trump's ramped-up immigration enforcement has left families like Zavvar's with what feels like a random and sudden disappearance, facing an unpredictable road ahead as the administration deploys tactics in ways immigration lawyers say they haven't seen before. Vanessa Dojaquez-Torres, counsel at the nonprofit American Immigration Lawyers Association, said the organization's 18,000 members have reported a rapid expansion of clients being similarly detained, shifting the role of such withholding of removal orders from a protection against deportation into a tool for delivering one. The federal statute that created those withholding orders, passed by Congress in the 1990s under the international Convention Against Torture, allows deportation to a third country, but it has rarely happened. On paper, 'it had always been a possibility' the government could use such orders to deport someone to a third country, Dojaquez-Torres said. 'But this is the first time it's happened on such a large scale.' Shortly after the U.S. bombed Iranian nuclear facilities on June 22, the Trump administration began publicizing enforcement against Iranian nationals – people with and without criminal convictions. The Department of Homeland Security highlighted the arrests of 11 Iranian nationals whose records included drug charges, convictions of child abuse or gun crimes, along with allegations that one was a former Iranian Army sniper and that another had ties to the terrorist group Hezbollah. The agency also detained a married Iranian couple who are Louisiana State University students with pending U.S. asylum applications, arrested in June after a ruse led them to waiting ICE agents. An Iranian father in Oregon, accused of overstaying his visa, was detained outside his son's preschool in July. In response to questions about Zavvar's case, DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin described him as 'a criminal illegal alien from Iran' and offered no explanation for his detainment beyond enforcing the 2007 order. The agency did not respond when asked whether Zavvar fit the characterization it used for other Iranian nationals detained under an effort of 'keeping known and suspected terrorists out of American communities.' In the habeas corpus case filed in Maryland's U.S. district court that Zavvar's lawyer filed to seek his release, the U.S. government has not made any allegations against him besides the marijuana possession charges. 'Under President Trump and Secretary [Kristi L.] Noem, if you break the law, you will face the consequences,' McLaughlin said in a statement. 'Criminal illegal aliens are not welcome in the U.S.' An upended life Everyone else in the family, besides Zavvar, became U.S. citizens threedecades ago, his mother said. Firouzabadi, 73, stays at home most days, strategizing how to deal with an upended life. 'Just, why?' she asked from her living room recently, Duke at her feet. 'I just hope no mother experiences this. The unknown is killing me.' In a plain manila folder, she keeps everything Zavvar's family and friends gathered as their evidence he belongs in the United States. She flips through photos as if auditioning which best demonstrates his worthiness to strangers: a smiling boy in Tehran or on the high school football team one town over from where they now live? Maybe with her, pinning something to his chest at the eighth-grade graduation from the military boarding school in Virginia that sponsored his first visa back in 1985? Firouzabadi said her son's sudden absence awoke a grief she hasn't known since her husband, Zavvar's father, died of an aggressive pancreatic cancer in 1997. Zavvar was 24. 'He became the man of the house,' she said. 'I don't want to compare that situation to this, but I am going through the same thing: devastation,' she said. She shuffled through letters that supporters dropped off to help his case. One neighbor explains Zavvar was to kind to animals. Another points out he brings the newspaper to the porch of a woman unable to leave her house. In May, Zavvar and Duke left behind a nearby apartment and moved into the family home to help his mom and uncle care for his grandmother who, at 94, has dementia. Zavvar insisted on the move, his mother says, after she called him to quickly come over and lift up the older woman after a fall. Firouzabadi smiled as she said he also calms her down when the frustrations of dealing with dementia boil over. 'That's why he's my backbone,' she said. When Israel launched strikes on Iran on June 12 and then the U.S. bombed her home country's nuclear facilities 10 days later, Firouzabadi braced herself for the impact on extended family in Iran. 'We were worried about them, mostly, not about us,' she said. The worry shifted to Zavvar, as his friends and extended family reach for anything that could help. Someone hired a dog walker to handle all 60 pounds of Duke a few times a day. An uncle drove an hour each way to the ICE holding facility in Baltimore to deliver warmer clothes, which were turned away. A family friend arranged an interview with a local television station. Food keeps coming. 'We need to convince the authorities that, hey, he's a pure American boy,' said his older sister, Maryam Zavar, who spells her Americanized last name differently than her brother. 'He's been here since he was 12 – the past 40 years,' his sister continued. 'All his family's here. We're all here. We're not going anywhere.' 'They were trying to save him' Zavvar was the first person in his immediate family to move to the U.S. In 1985, his parents secured a student visa and enrolled him at Linton Hall Military School in Northern Virginia. The family said it paid $28,000 for Zavvar's seventh- and eighth-grade schooling, a way to spare him from being conscripted into the Iranian army during the height of the conservative Islamic regime's eight-year war with Iraq. 'They were trying to save him,' his sister said. Zavvar spoke only Farsi, but he knew the English word 'car' and already had a love of the Washington area's football team. His father fallen for the team, now called the Commanders, when he was a student in the U.S. in the late 1960s, and he exported the fandom to Tehran when he returned there, Maryam Zavar said. Firouzabadi immigrated from Iran two years after Zavvar, leaving her daughter and husband behind for a few years. She enrolled her son at Walter Johnson High School in Bethesda, Maryland, and applied for his green card. She got her first job ever, in a department store, learned English and became a U.S. citizen in the mid-1990s. After graduation, in his 20s, Zavvar faced legal trouble a few times. In 1994, he pleaded guilty to possession of a controlled substance in Maryland, paid a $100 fine for the marijuana-related charge and served a year's probation, according to court records. In 1998, he pleaded guilty to attempted possession of marijuana in D.C. and paid a $50 fine. Separately, in 1996, a female acquaintance asked a judge for a civil protective order against him. The court, which classified the request as a domestic violence dispute, denied it. No criminal charges were filed. In 2004, Zavvar spent five months in Iran trying to sell the Tehran home in which he grew up, his family said. When he returned to the U.S., immigration agents at Dulles International Airport noticed that the FBI had flagged the cannabis charges, which ultimately triggered deportation proceedings that stretched for three years, according to court records. Unlike now, Zavvar during that time had been granted bail and was free to live and work in the U.S. until the case was resolved in 2007, with a judge issuing an order barring his removal to Iran. Now, that same order is the basis of the Trump administration's claim that Zavvar should be deported – just not to Iran – and its argument that he should have chosen to settle in another country. 'Zavvar had almost 20 years to self-deport and leave the U.S.,' said McLaughlin, the DHS spokeswoman. Until recently, the U.S. government rarely tried to deport people to countries where they were not citizens or recent residents. An American Immigration Council analysis of data from the 2017 fiscal year, for example, found that 1.6 percent of the 1,274 people granted withholding of removal orders that year were deported to third countries. 'They weren't going to just roll up on some guy walking his dog in the suburbs,' Zavvar's lawyer, Ava Benach, said about how ICE previously treated such orders. 'The idea that I may have to go to Texas about the deportation of an Iranian man to Romania is something I have never contemplated in 30 years of immigration law,' she said. 'It's just so far outside the bounds of anticipated reality that it's hard to get your head around.' The embassies of Romania and Australia did not respond to requests for comment on whether they have agreed to accept Zavvar. 'I miss silence' Firouzabadi has tried to visualize her son's experience, but all the images she conjured were just scenes from the 'Orange is the New Black' TV show he used to tease her for watching, she said. Every day of his detention in Texas, Zavvar calls briefly from the dorms. He brushes off his mom's questions about conditions there. She hasn't mentioned she's lost 10 pounds. She cajoles him to meditate, warns him to conduct himself safely and threatens to put Duke up for adoption if he doesn't listen to her advice. 'I keep telling Reza maybe something good comes out of it, and you use this quiet time for you,' she said. He and his sister didn't tell their mother he once abruptly ended a call when a fight broke out, telling his sister: 'I have to go sit in a corner and not get caught up in it.' He urges his mom to rejoin the Persian singing groups she's been skipping. He tells her to find a way to have fun. Firouzabadi's been turning down her friends' offers to get out of the house, she said. 'I feel like if I leave home, I'm losing control,' she said. 'What if he calls?' As she spoke, a robotic voice on her cellphone announced, 'unknown caller.' 'That's him!' she said. Duke perked up when she put Zavvar on speaker phone. 'My only fear is that they will wrongfully deport me at any second without letting my lawyer know, or anybody else, and send me to a third country that I don't know,' Zavvar said in a pay-by-the-minute call from Texas. He said he noticed a beige sedan with tinted windows parked on his block that June morning a few seconds before a man wearing 'ICE POLICE' body armor stepped out of it, asking if his dog was friendly. As more agents surrounded him, he said, 'I kept asking him, 'Why are you guys doing this?' And they wouldn't answer me.' He said he wished he'd applied for citizenship when he was younger, but it seemed like something he would get to eventually. He said he didn't know 27 years ago that pleading guilty to cannabis charges could trigger a deportation and make him ineligible for citizenship; the judge didn't tell him, and he didn't have a lawyer then, he said. In the detention dorm, he plays cards or chess with a handful of other Iranian men. He tries to walk around and watches the news. He said he talks with as many people as possible about the circumstances, taking notes and writing about his experiences. 'I get a little bit of what they're trying to do,' he said of the Trump administration, 'but I think how they're going about it is wrong. It's kind of like going out to sea and trying to fish for a certain type of fish and throwing a wide net into it and just gathering up every kind of fish. And then, in time, sorting through them to see what fish they can find.' He said he sleeps during the early half of the day, when it's slightly quieter. 'I miss silence. I haven't had any silence in three weeks. It's constant noise in this place,' he said. After he hung up, Firouzabadi cried. She said she tries to visualize his return. She sees him dropping to the living room carpet to play with Duke, the hug she'll give him, the party she'll throw in the driveway, the slap she'll deliver for all the trouble he caused. His bare-bones studio apartment in the basement is how he left it. Every night, Duke sleeps on his bed. Every morning, she goes down and remakes it, just in case.
The Diplomat
2 hours ago
- The Diplomat
Cambodia to Nominate President Trump for Nobel Peace Prize, Official Says
Cambodia's government will officially nominate U.S. President Donald Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize, following his efforts to broker a ceasefire in the country's border conflict with Thailand. Speaking to reporters in the capital Phnom Penh on Friday, Deputy Prime Minister Sun Chanthol thanked Trump for bringing peace and said he deserved to be nominated for the prize. Later, a journalist from Reuters asked him via text message whether this meant Cambodia would nominate the U.S. leader, to which he responded, 'Yes.' Similar calls have since echoed across Cambodian social media. Chanthol's comments came shortly after Trump's updated tariff announcement, which saw Cambodia's import duty dropped to 19 percent, down from the 36 percent threatened in July and the 49 percent initially announced in April. Chanthol headed the negotiation team that engaged in economic talks with the Trump administration. In Malaysia on July 28, Cambodia and Thailand agreed to a ceasefire to end a fierce, five-day border conflict that killed at least 43 people and displaced more than 300,000 people in both countries. According to a report by Reuters that interviewed numerous officials on both sides, a phone call from Trump was crucial in breaking the 'deadlock' between the two nations and getting them to agree to the meeting in Malaysia. In particular, Trump reportedly threatened to cut off trade talks with both nations if they did not cease hostilities. Cambodia is not the first nation to suggest that Trump should be awarded the illustrious prize. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said last month that he had nominated Trump for the award for helping bring his nation's war with Iran to an end. Pakistan also said that it would recommend Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in helping to resolve its short conflict with India in May. Trump has a seeming obsession with winning the Nobel Peace Prize, which may have something to do with his long-standing rivalry with former President Barack Obama, who was infamously awarded the prize in 2009, in the first year of his first term in office, seemingly in advance payment for achievements that never eventuated. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said last week that 'it is well past time that President Trump was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.' Since his inauguration, Trump 'has brokered, on average, one peace deal or ceasefire per month,' Leavitt said. In addition to the Cambodia-Thailand conflict, she mentioned conflicts between 'Israel and Iran, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, India and Pakistan, Serbia and Kosovo, and Egypt and Ethiopia.' While it is hard to see the Norwegian Nobel Committee taking seriously a Trump nomination, even if he has arguably done more to deserve it than Obama, the prize has a decidedly ambiguous history. In a classic article from 2009, Christopher Hitchens noted the prize's long history of being awarded 'for service to cynicism, opportunism, and hypocrisy.' Under this roll of names, he wrote, could be found those of Yasir Arafat and Henry Kissinger, and their Israeli and North Vietnamese counterparts, who were 'garlanded for 'peace' agreements that were not intended to hold and that led to later outbreaks of lethal violence.' The absurdity of Trump being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize is seemingly not an insuperable bar. In any event, whether the peace between Cambodia and Thailand is a lasting one remains to be seen. For now, the ceasefire appears to be holding, but the situation remains far from settled, with both nations making claims and counterclaims that have kept the temperature elevated. Thailand continues to hold 18 Cambodian prisoners that it reportedly captured on Tuesday morning, shortly after the ceasefire came into effect. Meanwhile, Cambodia's Ministry of National Defense yesterday claimed that Thailand was preparing to launch an 'imminent' attack along the border last night, and urged the world 'to act swiftly to prevent any escalation.' No attacks took place, and the situation along the border remained calm as of this morning, as officials from both nations gathered in Malaysia for a four-day meeting of the General Border Committee, aimed at de-escalating tensions.
Yomiuri Shimbun
3 hours ago
- Yomiuri Shimbun
Top Trump Aide Accuses India of Financing Russia's War in Ukraine
WASHINGTON, Aug 3 (Reuters) – A top aide to President Donald Trump on Sunday accused India of effectively financing Russia's war in Ukraine by purchasing oil from Moscow, after the U.S. leader escalated pressure on New Delhi to stop buying Russian oil. 'What he (Trump) said very clearly is that it is not acceptable for India to continue financing this war by purchasing the oil from Russia,' said Stephen Miller, deputy chief of staff at the White House and one of Trump's most influential aides. Miller's criticism was some of the strongest yet by the Trump administration about one of the United States' major partners in the Indo-Pacific. 'People will be shocked to learn that India is basically tied with China in purchasing Russian oil. That's an astonishing fact,' Miller said on Fox News' 'Sunday Morning Futures.' The Indian Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Indian government sources told Reuters on Saturday that New Delhi will keep purchasing oil from Moscow despite U.S. threats. A 25% tariff on Indian products went into effect on Friday as a result of its purchase of military equipment and energy from Russia. Trump has also threatened 100% tariffs on U.S. imports from countries that buy Russian oil unless Moscow reaches a major peace deal with Ukraine. Miller tempered his criticism by noting Trump's relationship with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which he described as 'tremendous.'
