chapotraphouse

They want countries to buy American and equalise on exports and imports. In other words, the USA must not have a trade deficit with other countries, the USA wants to reduce it's trade deficit and the USA wants to start manufacturing and exporting goods themselves, and they want to use tarrifs to create the market conditions to enable this. Cambodia only exports $321 million in goods to the USA, but the USA imports $12.7 billion in goods from Cambodia. Thus a trade deficit of $12.3 billion. Thus the tarrif of 97%. 12.3/12.7=97%. If Cambodia imported more US goods/the US exports more to Cambodia, or if Cambodia exported less goods to be USA/the USA imported less Cambodian goods, or a combination of both, the tarrif would be lower. The only way to get the tarrif to 0 would be to equalise on exports and imports/get trade deficit to zero, or the US having a trade surplus with Cambodia.

It's a crazy plan to try force the US to start manufacturing things itself again, on paper.