Trump ordered US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer to seek agreements to "address the threatened impairment" of national security from auto imports, stressing that the White House may opt to move forward with tariffs during the potential negotiations with Tokyo and Brussels. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement:
"United States defense and military superiority depend on the competitiveness of our automobile industry and the research and development that industry generates. The negotiation process will be led by US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and, if agreements are not reached within 180 days, the president will determine whether and what further action needs to be taken."
The US and Canada have agreed to remove steel and aluminum tariffs and vowed to align against those, who sell "unfairly subsidized" metals at "dumped prices" as part of a new agreement between neighbors.
The US will lift the 25 percent tariff on steel imports and 10 percent tariff on aluminum President Donald Trump imposed against Canada back in late May 2018 while Canada will, in turn, remove all retaliatory tariffs it levied against the American goods, the statement said, adding that all the tariffs will be gone in two days. ... They also agreed to create a special monitoring mechanism to promptly detect import "surges."
A similar deal was struck with Mexico, President Donald Trump said in a speech on Friday.
Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called the tariffs the biggest obstacle to the ratification of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), which is expected to supersede the previous deal between the three nations known as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). USMCA was signed back in November 2018 but has not yet been ratified.
"The problem is that what happened in Al Hudaydah is not a real step, it is a fake step that we cannot count on. Houthis did not until the final moment withdraw from the ports, the three ports that were mentioned in the Stockholm agreement. Houthis until this moment are escalating [situation] in Al Hudaydah and other cities. They are not convinced with peace until now, and the government of Yemen believes that this step is not a real step, it is just a maneouver that the Houthis did before the meeting of the UN Security Council on May 15."According to Alkamaly, the UN chief's special envoy is trying to picture the Houthi withdrawal from Yemen's Red Sea ports as an important step.
"He [Griffiths] is not balanced anymore, he wants to misinterpret, he wants to make any step prove that [the situation in Yemeni ports] is actually an improvement, which is not right. Until now we did not achieve anything ... despite they claim to withdraw from Al Hudaydah, which is not true."Alkamaly noted that, in his point of view, Griffiths was not facilitating the peace process in the crisis-affected nation and, on the contrary, was "trying to deal with Houthis as if they are really implementing something."
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