RENOWNED international trade expert Steven Okun has played down the veracity of President Donald Trump’s deadline for reciprocal tariffs levied against about 90 countries, among them Fiji, that export to the United States, as the deadline for the activation of these tariffs — August 1, 2025 — looms in the skyline of an already heavily uncertain global trade.
Fiji was slapped with 32 percent when President Trump signed the executive order on April 2, now known as Liberation Day.
Since then, the Fiji trade camp has not been able to secure negotiations with the Americans on attempts to reduce that number to two per cent or less.
“These are meaningless deadlines,” Mr Okun, chief executive officer of APAC Advisors and former Clinton Administration official, said in an interview with The Fiji Times during his visit to Fiji last week.
“I mean actually, there was a deadline that Congress set for the President to follow when it came to TikTok, so Congress gave a hard deadline, that if ByteDance (parent company of Tik Tok) did not divest its ownership from TikTok, TikTok could not operate in the United States. “That deadline has come and gone, and Donald Trump’s ignored it. And he has no Constitutional authority to ignore that deadline, but no one is holding him to it.
“These deadlines, the latest of which is August 1 when it comes to the reciprocal tariffs announced on Liberation Day, that’s a made-up deadline.
“So if he’s ignored a real deadline, he may meet the August 1 deadline or he may not.”
The waiting is only adding to uncertainty already plaguing international trade as President Trump’s tariff measures indiscriminately target friends and foes of the US.
“We’re in an era of total uncertainty and that’s because the Trump administration’s approach to trade and the America-first trade policy is very different from what we’ve ever seen, a shift away from the global rules-based trading system,” Mr Okun said.
He said businesses in the US were responding to the uncertain trading environment by holding back on investments while globally, trade dynamics will be shifting significantly if the reciprocal tariffs come into effect.
“Because when you don’t know what the tariffs are, when you don’t know what the rules are, you don’t know whether you can invest so if you have an ongoing business, of course you keep that running, you’re keeping everything in place but you’re not expanding nearly as much as you would have because you don’t know what the rules are going to be going forward.”
