Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro said Monday that an offer by Vietnam to eliminate tariffs on U.S. imports would not be enough for the administration to lift its new levies announced last week.
“Let’s take Vietnam. When they come to us and say ‘we’ll go to zero tariffs,’ that means nothing to us because it’s the non-tariff cheating that matters,” Navarro said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
The examples of non-tariff “cheating” cited by Navarro included Chinese products routed through Vietnam, intellectual property theft and a value added tax.
The comments from Navarro come after President Donald Trump said in a Truth Social post on Friday that To Lam, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam, had offered to cut tariffs on U.S. products to zero. Later in the Monday interview, Navarro revised his statement to say that the offer of zero tariffs would be a “small first start.”
A value added tax is a system used by many countries around the world and is in some ways similar to sales taxes in the U.S. The Trump administration’s argument that the tax should count as a trade barrier is not widely accepted.
“We have tried at the World Trade Organization since the 1970s to get VAT-tax relief, and they’ve told us no every single time,” Navarro said Monday.
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