The United States has imposed new tariffs on 60 trading partners, citing their failure to prevent the import of goods produced with forced labor. The response from most of those partners has been a shrug.
The Supreme Court Closed One Door; Trump Found Another
The legal scaffolding behind this latest tariff round deserves scrutiny. In April 2025, the Trump administration launched sweeping "reciprocal tariffs" under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. That authority was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court on February 20 this year, forcing the White House to find alternative legal footing. It pivoted to Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 — a statute with a built-in 150-day limit.
The clock was ticking. In March 2026, the administration launched a Section 301 investigation into forced labor, framing it as a human rights initiative. The investigation concluded last week. Under its findings, the European Union, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and Switzerland were assigned tariff rates of 10% or 12.5%. The remaining 38 economies subject to the new measures — China among them — face a stacked rate of 12.5% on top of existing tariffs.
U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer offered the official rationale: "Today's actions will begin to correct practices that are both human rights violations and trade distorting, to improve the welfare of workers everywhere."
Few are taking the justification at face value. The timeline tells a different story: the administration needed a new legal vehicle to keep tariffs in place, and forced labor provided the pretext.
The 2.5% Gap That Gives the Game Away
The clearest indication that this is tariff politics dressed up as labor rights policy is the arithmetic. Among the economies targeted, 17 — including Canada, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico, and the United Kingdom — have already enacted import bans on forced-labor goods or formally committed to doing so. According to Washington's own assessment, they have at least partially met U.S. standards. Their reward: a 10% tariff surcharge instead of 12.5%.
The gap between full compliance and non-compliance is 2.5 percentage points. China, which the U.S. has consistently accused of operating some of the world's most extensive forced-labor networks, receives essentially the same tariff treatment as countries Washington just acknowledged are making genuine progress.
The broader target list is equally revealing. This round did not single out the authoritarian developing economies one might expect from a genuine human rights initiative. Its scope encompasses the EU, Japan, South Korea, Canada, Taiwan, and the UK — the full roster of advanced economies and close U.S. allies. Trump has long described tariffs as his most versatile policy instrument: a tool for correcting trade deficits, attracting manufacturing investment, extracting geopolitical concessions, and penalizing governments that fall out of favor. The forced-labor framing is simply the latest chapter in that strategy.
Taiwan's Relative Relief Comes With a Long-Term Warning
For Taiwan, the immediate news is not entirely bad. The island's tariff rate — 10%, and not stacked on top of existing levies — compares favorably to the treatment extended to Japan and South Korea, both of which face higher effective rates. Taiwanese officials will be expected to make visible gestures toward restricting forced-labor imports, but those gestures are unlikely to secure any durable relief. The goalposts will move. They always do.
If there is a more reliable path to better treatment, it runs through investment, not compliance. Additional commitments from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. — which has already pledged hundreds of billions of dollars in U.S. fabrication capacity — would do more for the bilateral economic relationship than any policy adjustment on forced-labor imports.
The deeper concern for Taiwan lies further out. Across Asia and Europe, governments are quietly recalibrating their trade relationships to reduce dependence on the U.S. market. Even China, typically quick to retaliate against American trade actions, has absorbed this latest round without a formal response — a sign, perhaps, that countries have begun to treat a 10% to 15% U.S. surcharge as the cost of doing business, a new normal to be planned around rather than contested.
Taiwan has been moving in the opposite direction. Its export dependence on the United States has grown, not shrunk. The short-term advantage of a lower tariff rate should not obscure that structural vulnerability. Trump's tariff machine will keep running, the legal justifications will keep changing, and Taiwan's exposure will remain considerable for as long as its trade portfolio stays so heavily weighted toward a single, increasingly unpredictable market. （Related： No Escaping History's Pull on Cross-Strait Relations, Pegatron Chair Warns ｜ Latest ）
