Some experts say Trump’s « Liberation Day » tariffs, which extended even to remote islands, were meant to cut China from the global supply chain with whatever means necessary.
President Donald Trump’s so-called « Liberation Day » tariffs, which imposed levies even on obscure and remote territories like the Heard and McDonald Islands and its population of penguins — were not designed for economic precision.
Instead, some experts argue, they are meant to block every conceivable route for Chinese goods to reach the United States—boxing China out of the global supply chain and reordering the world’s trading system.
« The formula has been widely mocked, but that misses the point », trade expert Henry Gao, professor at Singapore Management University, wrote on X, formerly Twitter. « The numbers aren’t meant to hold up in a PhD defense—they’re meant to shock, to create leverage. The more extreme the figure, the stronger the incentive for other countries to come to the negotiating table with the U.S. »
In a series of posts, Gao described the strategy as « intentionally chaotic », but with a focused aim: isolating China by any means necessary, even if it causes friction with long-standing U.S. trade partners. « All countries have become collateral damage in the U.S.-China economic standoff », he said.
That theory, while not explicitly backed by the White House, was eluded by U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick during a bombastic appearance on CBS’s « Face the Nation » on Sunday, where he defended the tariffs that have dragged U.S. stocks lower, marking one of the most volatile weeks for Wall Street in recent memory.
« What China started doing was they started going through other countries to America », Lutnick told CBS’s Margaret Brennan. « So basically he [Trump] said, look, I can’t let any part of the world be a place where China or other countries can ship through them. He’s going to fix that. »A Global Tariff Net Aimed at One Target?
While the list of « reciprocal » tariffs may seem scattershot—targeting American allies and critical trading partners in Europe and Asia—some analysts have warmed to the theory that the president’s underlying goal is to close every possible backdoor China could use to preserve its export dominance.
That logic helps explain why the administration included countries like Cambodia and Vietnam in its latest round of tariffs—nations often viewed as extensions of China’s supply chain.
