Trump threatens to force US companies to break with China

WASHINGTON.- Guillermo Moreno's supply law was not dusted during the Kirchner, and has reappeared in recent days with President Mauricio Macri's decision to freeze fuel prices. But it was approved in the same decade, barely three years later, and, as in Argentina,

United States

President

Donald Trump

He wants to use it to force companies to do something against their will: breaking ties with

China

.

In the middle of one
new escalation in the trade war with Beijing,

Trump

"He ordered" Friday on Twitter to the country's companies to seek "immediately an enterprise" alternative to China and re-produce in the United States.

The country reacted with puzzlement to the unusual order. Quickly, he asked a recurring question in recent years: Can Trump do that? In the media and social networks, the first answer was that the president did not have authority. There were even those who were ironic or joked with "order" and who described the whole movement as ridiculous, a new maneuver from the White House to distract attention.

But from France, where he is attending the G7 leaders summit, Trump has threatened to use a 1977 law that allows the president to regulate international trade in response to an "unusual and extraordinary threat" to the country. "For all False News reporters who have no idea what the law is with regard to presidential powers, China, etc., are trying to review the Emergency Economic Powers Act. of 1977. The case is closed! ", tweeted the president.

This law would, for example, allow Trump to block the transfer of funds with China or freeze the badets of the company, and could bring the trade war between Washington and Beijing to an unthinkable level of confrontation until it a few weeks ago and tighten the links between the two. The world's great powers, more than ever, since Richard Nixon "opened China" in the early 1970s.

Trump has been characterized by pushing the authority of the presidency to new limits. He used an emergency declaration to reallocate funds from the budget to the construction of his promised wall with Mexico, a maneuver that has yet to be authorized by the judiciary and which has been strongly rejected by Congress. Several Republicans were worried about this decision: a future Democratic president, they warned, could use the same resource to impose initiatives without bipartite support.

But beyond the flirtation between Trump and the limits of power, his latest threat against China and the country's businesses puts him at odds with the spirit of the Republican Party, a powerful defender of market freedom and fierce opponent of l & # 39; interference. of the state in the economy.

Several legal experts questioned the feasibility of using the law for the purposes Trump sought and predicted that if the president acted with his threat, there would be opposition to Congress and justice.

The escalation between Washington and Beijing has stopped over the weekend, but threatens to continue next week. China said it was strongly opposed to Trump's decision to raise tariffs it had announced on Chinese products of some $ 550,000 million – all US purchases to the Asian giant – and warned that there would be consequences if it did not end with these "bad actions." Beijing's reaction came after Trump announced that Washington would raise the announced tariffs of 5% after Beijing introduced new $ 75 billion worth of retaliation for US goods.

"Such unilateral and intimidating trade protectionism violates the consensus reached by Chinese and US leaders, violates the principle of mutual respect and mutual benefit and seriously undermines the multilateral trading system and the international trade order. ", said the Ministry of Commerce of China in a statement.