(The Epoch Times)—President Donald Trump’s administration is working to address trade imbalances with a group of 15 top trading partners.
When the president’s trade saga commenced this year, White House officials coined the term “Dirty 15” to describe a group of nations identified as having significant surpluses with the United States.
By grappling with multibillion-dollar trade deficits and various trade barriers, the Trump administration is signaling a broader realignment in international trade.
Ahead of the Aug. 1 reciprocal tariff deadline, many of these countries are scrambling to intensify negotiations, seek exemptions or reductions, and reach trade agreements.
Here is the state of trade with these foreign markets.
China
This month, the White House announced that it reached a limited deal with China, putting together an agreement on tariffs and export controls.
The Chinese regime agreed to resume rare earth exports to the United States, and the current U.S. administration rolled back countermeasures.
Artificial intelligence chipmaker Nvidia stated on July 14 that the U.S. government has agreed to grant the tech titan licenses to sell chips to China.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a July 15 interview with Bloomberg Television: “It was all part of a mosaic. They had things we wanted. We had things they wanted, and we’re in a very good place.”
Global financial markets are closely watching a key date, Aug. 12, which will be the end of a 90-day tariff pause between the world’s two largest economies.
But Bessent said he is unconcerned.
“I tell market participants not to worry about Aug. 12,” he said.
Bessent has plans to meet with Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng in the coming weeks.
According to the U.S. Trade Representative’s Office, the U.S. goods trade deficit with China was $295.4 billion in 2024.
Mexico
Trump will implement a 30 percent tariff on goods imported from Mexico.
“Mexico has been helping me secure the border, but what Mexico has done, is not enough,” Trump wrote in a letter to Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum.
He also said that if Mexico raises tariffs, the United States will add an amount equal to that increase to the 30 percent rate.
Mexican officials confirmed in a statement shortly after the letter was posted to social media platform Truth Social that a delegation had met with U.S. officials to discuss trade and was informed of the new tariff rate.
“We stated at the meeting that this was unfair treatment and that we disagreed,” the statement reads. “It is very significant that starting July 11, we established the necessary pathway and forum to resolve any possibility of new tariffs taking effect on Aug. 1.”
In 2024, U.S.–Mexico trade totaled nearly $840 billion, with the United States running a deficit of $171.8 billion.
On July 14, the Commerce Department announced a 17 percent antidumping duty on most fresh tomato imports from Mexico. The move could cause disruptions because Mexico supplies about two-thirds of the U.S. tomato market.
Vietnam
Earlier this month, Trump confirmed that he reached a trade agreement with Vietnam.
According to the president, Vietnam will pay a 20 percent tariff “on any and all goods sent into” the United States and a 40 percent tax on any transshipping. In exchange, U.S. goods exported to Vietnam will be subject to no tariffs.
“Dealing with General Secretary To Lam, which I did personally, was an absolute pleasure,” Trump said on Truth Social.
Although the deal was centered on Vietnam, the agreement also applies economic pressure on China and the issue of transshipping. This practice involves rerouting Chinese goods to Vietnam, where they are repackaged or relabeled and then exported to the United States.
European Union
In a letter to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Trump said he would impose a 30 percent tariff on goods entering the United States from the European Union.
Economists say member states Germany, Ireland, and Italy would be severely affected.
Last year, the U.S. goods trade deficits with Germany and Ireland were firmly above $80 billion. The trade gap with Italy was close to $44 billion in 2024.
“Donald Trump’s letter to the EU is not a love letter but also not a hate letter,” ING economists said in a July 13 research note. “It’s a letter to increase pressure in the ongoing negotiations. The next days and weeks will tell whether Europe is willing and able to compromise to the U.S. liking.”
EU leaders say 30 percent tariffs on “exports would disrupt essential transatlantic supply chains” and adversely affect businesses and consumers on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.
Although the 27-member bloc is prepared to establish a trade agreement by Aug. 1, Von der Leyen said in a statement, “We will take all necessary steps to safeguard EU interests, including the adoption of proportionate countermeasures if required.”
Taiwan
Taiwan has not received a formal tariff letter from Trump and remains under a temporary blanket 10 percent levy. If a deal is not reached between the two sides, the tariff on Taiwan could climb to 32 percent.
The U.S. goods trade gap with Taiwan was nearly $74 billion last year, up by more than 54 percent from 2023.
Japan
Starting on Aug. 1, the United States will impose a 25 percent tariff on all Japanese imports. This is in addition to the current sector-specific levies, such as 50 percent on steel and aluminum and 25 percent on automobiles and car parts.
Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba said at a Cabinet meeting this month that progress had been made on trade negotiations.
“We have received a proposal from the United States to swiftly proceed with negotiations toward the newly set Aug. 1 deadline, and … depending on Japan’s response, the content of the letter could be revised,” Ishiba stated on July 7.
Trump has been highly critical of Japan’s trade practices, recently pointing to the country’s rice crisis.
“They and others are so spoiled from having ripped us off for 30, 40 years that it’s really hard for them to make a deal. You know, it’s very hard,” he said to reporters aboard Air Force One. “As an example, with Japan, they won’t take rice, and yet they desperately need rice. They won’t take any cars, but they’ll sell millions. So we told them, ‘Sorry, you can’t do that.’”
The U.S. goods trade deficit with Japan was $68.5 billion in 2024, down by more than 4 percent from 2023.
South Korea
South Korea will also face a 25 percent tariff if it cannot put together a deal with the U.S. administration. Officials in Seoul stated that they plan to bolster trade negotiations, noting that talks must include exemptions or reductions in auto and steel tariffs.
Speaking to reporters in Maryland on July 13, Trump said that the country “wants to make a deal right now.”
The U.S. trade deficit with South Korea totaled $66 billion in 2024, up by more than 29 percent from 2023.
South Korea was late to the negotiating table because the government was going through an election.
Canada
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney received a letter from Trump and was informed that a 35 percent tariff would be imposed on goods coming from Canada.
The president alluded to the fentanyl crisis and protectionist measures such as Canada’s dairy import rules.
Officials north of the border have said they need to ensure that Canadian businesses and workers are shielded from the adverse effects of Trump’s levies.
“In the face of President Trump’s latest threat, we need to come together. We need a plan on how Canada will respond and how we’ll protect our workers, businesses and communities,” Ontario Premier Doug Ford said on social media platform X.
On his way to a Cabinet meeting in Ottawa, Carney told reporters that most countries will likely face baseline tariff rates. Still, according to the prime minister, U.S.–Canada trade discussions will intensify ahead of next month’s deadline.
“At the same time, we need to recognize that the commercial landscape globally has changed,” he said. “It has changed in a fundamental manner, and we will continue to focus on what we can most control, which is building a strong Canadian economy.”
This comes after Statistics Canada reported that the annual inflation rate rose to 1.9 percent in June from 1.7 percent in May. Core inflation, which strips the volatile energy and food components, climbed to 2.7 percent from 2.5 percent.
“Core inflation has remained stubbornly above target, driven in part by supply chain pressures tied to ongoing tariffs,” David-Alexandre Brassard, CPA Canada’s chief economist, said in a note emailed to The Epoch Times.
In 2024, the U.S. goods trade deficit with Canada exceeded $63 billion.
India
India was notably excluded from this month’s batch of letters.
Officials have been involved in active bilateral trade talks, and both sides have signaled optimism that an agreement could be finalized.
In April, India was facing a 26 percent reciprocal tariff.
Trump announced at a Cabinet meeting that he plans to install a 10 percent tariff on imports from “any country aligning themselves with the Anti-American policies of BRICS.”
BRICS is a coalition of emerging market countries led by Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. Other countries recently joined the group, including Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates.
In 2024, the U.S. goods trade deficit with India was $45.7 billion, up by 5.4 percent from 2023.
Thailand
Thailand, which enjoys a $46 billion trade surplus with the United States, could face a 36 percent tariff in August if the two sides cannot reach a deal.
The U.S. economy is a significant market for Thailand, accounting for nearly one-fifth of its exports in 2024.
Bangkok has proposed lowering its import duties on many U.S. products to zero.
Malaysia
Malaysia, a major exporter of electronics and semiconductors, will be slapped with a 25 percent tariff on its exports next month, slightly higher than the 24 percent levy announced in April.
Malaysian trade officials say they do not plan to retaliate and intend to continue negotiating.
Data from the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative show that the U.S. goods trade deficit with Malaysia was $24.8 billion in 2024, a 7.6 percent decline from the previous year.
Indonesia
Indonesia became the fourth country to reach a new trade deal following Trump’s sweeping global tariff plans announced in April.
According to the president, products imported from Indonesia would be hit with a 19 percent tariff.
U.S. goods would have full access to the Indonesian economy without any levies.
Without a bilateral trade agreement, Indonesia would have faced a 32 percent tariff.
The U.S. goods trade deficit with Indonesia was shy of $18 billion in 2024.
Brazil
Trump stated in a July 9 letter that he will impose a 50 percent tariff on Brazil next month, citing Brazil’s nontariff trade barriers and treatment of former President Jair Bolsonaro, who is on trial.
In a formal letter to Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Trump said the country was engaged in a “witch hunt that should end immediately.”
Bolsonaro is accused of trying to stage a coup against Lula.
Lula threatened tit-for-tat retaliatory tariffs if Trump follows through.
“Brazil is a sovereign nation with independent institutions and will not accept any form of tutelage,” Lula said in a post on X. “Any measure to increase tariffs unilaterally will be responded to in light of Brazil’s Law of Economic Reciprocity.”
Last year, the United States registered a goods trade surplus with Brazil of $7.4 billion, up by 32 percent from 2023.
Brazil exported goods worth a total of more than $42 billion to the United States in 2024, driven by crude oil, industrial metals, airplanes, and coffee.
Reuters contributed to this story.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.