Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., agreed to support legislation that would impose sanctions on Turkey unless the Trump administration certifies every 90 days that Turkey is not operating in Syria, according to a framework of the sanctions released Oct. 9. The legislation would sanction all U.S. assets belonging to Turkey’s top officials, including its president, vice president and ministers of defense, foreign affairs, treasury, trade and energy. It would also block U.S. defense exports to Turkey's military and impose sanctions on any foreign person or entity that sells to Turkey’s military or energy sector.
The Trump administration plans to soon issue export licenses to allow a “select few” U.S. companies to supply nonsensitive goods to Huawei, an Oct. 9 report in The New York Times said. Trump approved the step in a meeting last week, the report said, a little more than a month after the Commerce Department renewed the temporary general license for Huawei until Nov. 18 (see 1908190039).
The Commerce Department’s Oct. 9 blacklisting of several Chinese technology companies may not impact trade negotiations this week but could lead to significant retaliation against U.S. companies, trade experts said. And while the Trump administration insisted the Entity List decisions were unrelated to trade talks with China, the move unnerved U.S. companies impacted by the trade war that fear Commerce’s announcement could expedite the release of China’s so-called "unreliable entity list."
President Donald Trump said the U.S. and China “could do something very substantial” when Chinese officials travel to Washington for trade talks this week, but he dismissed the idea of a partial deal.
Chinese technology companies and the country’s foreign ministry criticized the U.S.’s decision to add 28 Chinese entities to the Commerce Department’s Entity List, a move that could lead to countermeasures, China said. China denied the allegations in Commerce’s announcement that it was involved in human rights violations of the country's Uighur population and urged the U.S. to “immediately” withdraw the Entity List additions, which it called “serious violation[s]” of international norms. “China will continue to take firm and powerful measures to resolutely safeguard national sovereignty, security and development interests,” a foreign ministry spokesperson said during an Oct. 8 press conference, according to an unofficial translation of a transcript.
The Congressional Research Service released a report Oct. 3 on the U.S.-Japan trade agreement, detailing the scope of the two sides’ initial agreement and potential topics of future talks. The report also explains the increased U.S. market access for agriculture exports and issues Congress may consider in the coming weeks -- in light of the Trump administration's "decision to pursue a limited scope trade agreement with Japan in stages," while also considering tariff actions under Section 232 -- such as which industry sectors the U.S. trade representative should prioritize in future talks and what role, if any, Congress should have in the negotiations.
The U.S. and Japan officially signed their initial trade deal during a brief signing ceremony at the White House on Oct. 7, setting up a potential Jan. 1 effective date. The text of the new deal is now posted to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative's website. So is the text of a concurrent deal on digital trade.
Brazil added another 147 items to its list of foreign capital, information technology and telecommunications goods exempt from import tariffs under its Ex-Tarifario regime, according to an Oct. 3 report from the Hong Kong Trade Development Council. Tariffs will be reduced to zero, from 16 percent or 14 percent, the report said, and many of the additional goods “could potentially be imported” from China and Hong Kong. The additions include 136 capital goods and 11 IT and telecom goods and will be exempt from tariffs through Dec. 31, 2021, the HKTDC said. Brazil added 281 products to its Ex-Tarifario regime in August (see 1908120042).
Uncertainty over trade policy and African swine fever continue to overtake agricultural markets, causing “volatility across the industry,” CoBank said in its quarterly U.S. rural economic review, released this month. But there were two bright spots for U.S. exporters, CoBank said: the renewed Chinese purchases of U.S. agricultural products and the initial trade agreement between the U.S. and Japan, which will allow the U.S. ag industry to regain competitiveness in a “key export destination.”
Sanctions officials are sometimes unable to judge the effectiveness of the Trump administration's sanctions regimes, the Government Accountability Office said, pointing to the difficulty of tracing the effects of sanctions and the administration's constantly changing foreign policy goals. Officials said it is sometimes impossible to determine whether U.S. sanctions are the only or even the “most significant” reason for a foreign country changing its behavior, the report said. They also said U.S. policy goals can change while a sanctions regime is still active, “making it difficult to measure sanctions’ effectiveness in achieving any ultimate policy objective.”