You wouldn't know it from the news or from the talking heads, but the countries Trump is putting tariffs on are countries that have tariffs on the importation of goods from the United States. He offered to remove all tariffs from Canadian goods if Canada would remove all tariffs on US goods, and Trudeau refused.
We have very biased reporting here. The point of the entire exercise is to renegotiate bad trade deals.
Tariffs have always been a two-edged-sword. That's why is seems questionable if there is a clear winner in the long run and whether "trade wars can be won easily" as Trump put it. It may also be too early to talk about a "victory" as this headline (in the link) suggests. It's no secret that Germany and European car manufacturers don't want tariffs imposed on their cars. So why the tendentious headline "cave in to"? Tariffs can also backfire as history shows. If it is crystal clear that Harley Davidson's (HD) decision to shift part of its manufacturing out of the US was planned and made months ago and, thus, has got nothing to do with Trump's imposing tariffs on EU goods and getting an EU-reaction which allegedly triggered HD's decision now, why is he being so annoyed at their decision and relates it to the introduction of tariffs? It's hard to imagine that he was really surprised when HD made their decision public now. Referring to biased media here and in other threads, the way Harley Davidson's decision was covered in yesterday's main media in GER is a shining example of one-sided reporting as the fact that HD had made that decision months ago was not mentioned at all. Very sad and underlining that you cannot rely on one source of information only as I said elsewhere.
Yeah, the problem with Harley-Davidson is that the new generations in the United States aren't into motorcycles. Most of the people you see on a Harley today are sixty years old or older, so their market is outside of the United States. The tariffs probably had something to do with it but they had already announced that they were building a facility in Asia to serve that market. That they are doing the same in Europe isn't surprising.
I believe that the German's agreed to drop the automobile tariffs if we agreed to drop the imports on light trucks. This will open up BMW, Mercedes, etc to compete vs. Ford, Chevy, Jeep, etc. Not saying it is a bad thing, saying it needs to be analyzed.