The Trump administration is only considering a new round of proposed tariffs, White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow said Friday morning, and hasn’t decided to implement them yet.
At the same time, Kudlow acknowledged that trade negotiations between the two countries haven’t even really begun.
“Perhaps, perhaps there will be some fruitful negotiations,” Kudlow said, but so far China’s response has been unsatisfactory. “No timetable. There’s no timetable,” he added.
Kudlow, the new director of the National Economic Council, was speaking on Bloomberg News the morning after the White House announced that President Trump had asked his trade representative to consider tariffs on additional $100 billion of Chinese products. The tariffs would be a response to China’s reaction to Trump’s initial proposal for tariffs.
Kudlow defended Trump’s moves as necessary to counter China’s theft of U.S. intellectual property, but also tried to play the good cop in suggesting that they wouldn’t lead to a trade war.
“It is moderate, temperate and proportional,” he said. “This is not a trade war, there is no war here.”
In the next two days, he predicted in a separate interview on Fox Business, there would be a “trade coalition of the willing” of other countries also eager to put pressure on China.
Kudlow, a long-time economic commentator known as an advocate of free trade, maintained that he and Trump favor free trade and want China to lower its trade barriers.
None of the tariffs proposed or floated by the White House would go into effect immediately. Instead, it could be months before the latest round of tariffs were enacted, Kudlow said, leaving time for negotiations.
