Sari Arho Havrén
It's correct that unilateral tariffs corrode trust, but the reality is more contradictory still: Washington is not building an anti-China bloc only badly, it is not building one at all. Allies are being asked to lock in a posture the US refuses to lock in. The national security strategy does not even name China as a competitor, let alone anything else, but allies should, and Greer said in April that the President seeks stability, not a confrontation, while the two sides agreed in May to set up boards identifying tariffs to be lifted and possible areas for PRC investment in the US. That last item is the opposite of perimeter-building. The Agreements on Reciprocal Trade bind signatories into anti-China supply-chain constraints, enforced by the standing threat of new US tariffs, a threat actually made concrete when USTR opened Section 301 investigations into the very countries that signed. Canada, which followed Washington into a trade war with Beijing in 2024, and still maintains tariffs against Chinese steel transshipment, has been hit with 50% tariffs anyway. The result is a hub-and-spoke structure in which allies are asked to lock in a posture the US itself keeps transactional and reversible. But going back to unilateral tariffs; Xi does not need to split the West; the tariff regime is doing it for him.
Velina Tchakarova
The US wants a more unified anti-China economic perimeter, but its unilateral use of tariffs against Canada weakens the trust required to build one. The dispute is thus a preview of the broader Cold War 2 problem: the US can pressure allies to decouple from China, but it cannot reliably build a durable unified bloc if participation depends on permanent vulnerability to US unilateral economic coercion.