BEIJING, April 16. /TASS/. The tariff war initiated by the United States has undermined the global trade system that had been established after World War II, which is now transforming into regional and bilateral cooperation mechanisms, expert from the Institute for International Security and Strategy at Tsinghua University Gao Jian told TASS.
"The [US President Donald] Trump administration launched an all-encompassing tariff war, which dealt a devastating blow to the global trading system. Such actions directly led to the functional paralysis of the WTO, and global multilateral economic and trade relations will gradually be transformed into regional and bilateral mechanisms for economic and trade cooperation," the expert said.
According to him, the current US administration is attempting to reshape the global trade structure to suit its own interests. "This means that the era of the global free trade system, which the US led after World War II, is completely over. Regardless of the outcome of negotiations between the parties, US actions have fundamentally undermined global investors’ trust and shaken the special status of the US dollar," Gao Jian noted, pointing out that a clear signal of this was the recent spike in gold prices and the increase in US bond yields.
"Building a new global trade system for the future requires a prolonged negotiation process. On a global scale, many versions of trade standards will emerge on key technical issues, such as tax standards, investment principles, product access, and technical standards. This will have a profound impact on the development of global economic integration," the expert concluded.
On April 2, Trump announced the imposition of tariffs on products from 185 countries and territories. Russia is not included in this list. Universal tariffs of 10% came into effect on April 5, while individual tariffs were implemented on April 9. On April 9, Trump announced that he would suspend the additional import tariffs, introduced on a reciprocity basis, for a 90-day period on a number of countries and territories. The White House explained that the pause was due to ongoing trade negotiations, and during this period, a "universal 10% tariff" would apply.