When President Trump announced the main new rates on Wednesday, a great economy he did not add up was Russia.
The secretary of the Treasury, Scott Besent, told Fox News on Wednesday that Moscow was saved because the sanctions imposed to the country after its large-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 means that US-American trade had effectively stopped. North Korea, Cuba and Belarus, which are also subject to difficult sanctions, were also excluded from the new levies.
Commercial data paint a more complicated image. The value of American trade with Russia has fallen to its lowest level in decades after the invasion. But last year, Russia still exported around $ 3 billion in goods to the United States, according to commercial numbers of the United States, mostly fertilizers and platinum.
This figure is significantly greater than the value of American imports from some smaller countries that Trump attacked, such as Laos and Fiji, which caused questions about whether the White House decision to save Russia was a strategic choice.
Trump recently threatened to impose tariffs on Russian oil buyers, an exchange that is the life of the country’s war machine, if President Vladimir V. Putin did not cooperate with the efforts of the United States to negotiate a high fire in Ukraine. Such tariffs would significantly complicate foreign trade in the country.
Trump can be braking new economic restrictions on Russia as leverage in peace conversations, said Alexandra Prokopenko, a member of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia center in Berlin and former official in the Central Bank of Russia.
“I think it’s a political decision,” said Prokopenko. “Trump doesn’t want to climb while his conversations with Putin are ongoing.”
The idea that Trump is using tariffs as a geopolitical negotiation tool seems to be supported by its treatment to Iran, another objective of its ambitions in agreement. He put Iran at the lowest level of the new rates, 10 percent, which is lower than the rate imposed on Israel, an ally of the United States.
The composition of Russia’s exports could also have played a role. Russia is the third largest foreign fertilizer supplier to the United States, and the total amount of fertilizer exports has increased during the past year.
Trump has been weighing how to protect American farmers, a key circumscription, of the effects of their commercial wars. Maintaining the cost of low fertilizer could be part of that strategy.
