President Trump’s plan to impose sweeping tariffs on most of America’s trading partners has governments across the globe racing to schedule phone calls, send delegations to Washington and offer up proposals to lower their import taxes in order to escape the levies.
On Monday, European officials offered to drop tariffs to zero on cars and industrial goods imported from the United States, in return for the same treatment. Israel’s prime minister was expected to personally petition Mr. Trump on Monday in meetings at the White House. Vietnam’s top leader, in a phone call last week, offered to get rid of tariffs on American goods, while Indonesia prepared to send a high-level delegation to Washington, D.C., to “directly negotiate with the U.S. government.”
Even Lesotho, the tiny landlocked country in Southern Africa, was assembling a delegation to send to Washington to protest the tariffs on its exports to the United States, which include denim for Calvin Klein and Levi’s.
Mr. Trump and his advisers have given mixed signals on whether the United States is willing to negotiate. On Sunday, Mr. Trump said that the tariffs would remain in place until U.S. trade deficits disappeared, meaning the United States is no longer buying more from these countries than it sells to them. But the administration still appeared to be welcoming offers from foreign nations, which are desperate to try to forestall more levies that go into effect on Wednesday.
On Monday, as markets recoiled for a third day and Mr. Trump threatened even more punishing tariffs on China, the president said that “negotiations with other countries, which have also requested meetings, will begin taking place immediately.”
“Countries from all over the World are talking to us,” the president wrote on Truth Social on Monday morning. “Tough but fair parameters are being set. Spoke to the Japanese Prime Minister this morning. He is sending a top team to negotiate!”
The turmoil in the stock markets since the president announced tariffs last Wednesday has prompted speculation that the president might be willing to strike some deals to roll tariffs back. On NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Senator James Lankford, Republican of Oklahoma, predicted that tariffs would be “a short-term issue while the negotiations are actually happening.”
“I think once the president starts announcing some negotiations in some different countries we’ll start to see the market calm, and we’ll start to see the rates come down pretty quickly,” Mr. Lankford said.
But both Mr. Trump and many of his advisers have downplayed the prospect of any immediate changes. On Sunday night, Mr. Trump told reporters on Air Force One that he would not reverse tariffs on other nations unless the trade deficits that the United States runs with China, the European Union and other nations disappeared.
“Hundreds of billions of dollars a year we lose with China,” Mr. Trump told reporters on Air Force One. “And unless we solve that problem, I’m not going to make a deal.” He added that he was “willing to deal with China, but they have to solve their surplus.”
The tariffs that go into effect Wednesday range from 10 percent to 40 percent on nearly 60 countries. They are calculated based on the U.S. trade deficit with each country and will be added to a 10 percent global levy that went into effect on Saturday.
Some countries — like Europe and Canada — have threatened to impose retaliatory tariffs on American goods, while others have decided to hold off to avoid Mr. Trump’s ire. On Monday, Mr. Trump responded angrily to China’s decision to retaliate and said he would impose “additional tariffs on China of 50 percent, effective April 9.”
Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, reiterated a threat of retaliatory tariffs Monday even as she proposed dropping some tariffs between the United States and Europe to zero. “We are also prepared to respond through countermeasures, and defend our interests,” she said.
Lai Ching-te, Taiwan’s president, said in a video address on Sunday night that Taiwan had no plans to retaliate with tariffs. He added that investment commitments made by Taiwanese companies to the United States would not change as long as they remained in the national interest.
Across Asia — where Mr. Trump has targeted some of his harshest levies and where factories specialize in making electronics, auto parts and shoes for the United States — leaders have been offering to strike deals and working to set up meetings with Mr. Trump. The tariffs are a particular threat to multinational companies that have relocated factories from China to Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand in recent years, after Mr. Trump opened a trade war with China in his first presidency.
On Monday, the trade secretary of the Philippines said the country would reduce tariffs on goods coming from the United States and meet “soon” with the U.S. economic team. The leader of Cambodia — which faces the highest tariff rates of any Asian country, at 49 percent — sent a letter to Mr. Trump on Friday, saying it was reducing tariffs on 19 categories of American imports immediately. Thailand, which is facing tariffs of 36 percent on its exports, expressed its “readiness to engage in dialogue.”
In Vietnam, where many people had been expecting tariffs of around 10 percent, the announcement of 46 percent tariffs came as a blow. Vietnam’s deputy prime minister, Ho Duc Phoc, was scheduled to leave Sunday for a trip to the United States with a delegation that included executives with the country’s two main airlines, which have been promising to buy Boeing aircraft.
Vietnam’s trade ministry asked the Trump administration to suspend the 46 percent tariff, and requested a phone call with the U.S. trade representative, Jamieson Greer, “as soon as possible,” according to a statement on the government’s website.
In a call with Mr. Trump last week, Vietnam’s top leader, To Lam, promised to slash tariffs to zero on liquefied natural gas, cars and other U.S. goods coming into the country, and suggested his counterpart do the same, according to a statement from the Vietnamese government.
“Just had a very productive call with To Lam, who told me that Vietnam wants to cut their Tariffs down to ZERO if they are able to make an agreement with the U.S.,” Mr. Trump wrote in a post on his Truth Social platform on Friday morning.
But speaking on CNBC Monday this morning, White House trade counselor Peter Navarro said Vietnam’s offer to lower tariffs would not be enough to convince Mr. Trump to back off given concerns about other barriers, beyond tariffs, that countries use to block American exports, like taxes or regulations.
“When they come to us and say, we’ll go to zero tariffs, that means nothing to us, because it’s the nontariff cheating that matters,” Mr. Navarro said.
Mr. Navarro also urged the European Union to drop barriers like its value-added taxes, which Trump officials claim discriminate against the United States. “You steal from the American people every which way is possible. So don’t just say we’re going to lower our tariffs,” he said.
But Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who along with Mr. Greer was put in charge of negotiations with Japan, sent a very different message in an interview late Monday, saying that Mr. Trump was ready to negotiate.
“President Trump, as you know, is better than anyone at giving himself maximum leverage,” he said, adding, “And at a point, President Trump will be ready to negotiate.”
In Japan, where stock markets fell by more than 7 percent Monday, Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba said he would be willing to meet with Mr. Trump to discuss the levies and would stress to Mr. Trump that Japan “is not doing anything unfair.”
Japan’s trade minister, Yoji Muto, did not hide his disappointment over the tariffs. He told reporters that he had immediately held “an online meeting” with Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, to tell him the “unilateral tariff steps were extremely regrettable.”
“The Ishiba government would prefer to negotiate rather than escalate,” said Tobias Harris, founder of Japan Foresight, a firm that advises clients on Japanese politics. “It is struggling to determine with whom it can negotiate, if anyone.”
Mr. Muto had traveled to Washington last month as the tariffs loomed for urgent talks with Mr. Lutnick. Mr. Muto argued for Japan to be given an exemption based on the roughly $1 trillion that his nation has invested in the United States, including in huge automobile plants built by Toyota and other Japanese automakers.
South Korea’s trade minister, Cheong In-kyo, also planned to visit Washington this week to try to lower the blanket 25-percent tariff Mr. Trump imposed on goods from South Korea. Mr. Cheong is expected to meet with Trump administration officials, including Mr. Greer, to express concern about the new duties and seek ways to minimize their impact on South Korea’s export-driven economy.
European officials have also been flocking to Washington to try to negotiate. On Friday, the E.U. trade commissioner, Maros Sefcovic, met with his American counterparts via videoconference for what he described as a “frank,” two-hour meeting, and pledged that conversations would continue.
Mr. Sefcovic has traveled to Washington repeatedly in recent weeks, but progress so far has been halting. E.U. officials who met with Mr. Lutnick and Mr. Greer had found that they were not prepared to negotiate before the tariff announcement on April 2.
European leaders have expressed a willingness to lower tariffs in some sectors and have dangled other potential carrots, like buying more American liquid natural gas and ramping up military expenditures. But they are also preparing to retaliate, hoping that hitting back with the power of the European economy will drive the United States to the negotiating table.
E.U. officials have spent the last several weeks refining a list of counter-tariffs that they plan to put into place starting on April 15. They sent the refined list out to member state representatives on Monday, and a vote on the list is expected on Wednesday.
While that initial wave of retaliation is in response to only steel and aluminum tariffs, policymakers have indicated that more is coming if negotiation fails. Some national officials are even open to hitting America’s big technology companies with trade barriers, and E.U. policymakers have signaled that all options are on the table.
European nations export a lot of pharmaceutical products, cars and machinery to the United States, and companies across the continent are bracing for pain as the fresh U.S. tariffs kick in.
Asked on Monday afternoon if Europe’s offer of zero tariffs on American cars or industrial products was enough, Mr. Trump replied: “No, it’s not. The E.U. has been very tough over the years.”
Only a handful of countries — including Mexico, Canada and Russia — have escaped Mr. Trump’s new levies. In an interview Thursday, Luis Rosendo Gutiérrez Romano, the Mexican deputy secretary for international trade, said that Mexico had been working hard to establish a constructive and positive dialogue with the United States over the past five weeks, and that the decision to exclude Mexico and Canada from the tariffs was a signal of the value of the trade agreement between the countries.
Mr. Lutnick had been speaking with Marcelo Ebrard, the Mexican economy secretary, weekly by phone or in meetings at the commerce department in Washington, Mr. Gutiérrez said. Mexican officials assured the Americans that Mexican exports were different than those from Vietnam or China, because Mexican manufacturers use far more parts and raw materials from the United States in their factories.
Reporting was contributed by Martin Fackler, Tung Ngo, Sun Narin, Meaghan Tobin, River Akira Davis and Choe Sang-Hun.