Katherine Tai Transcript — Sept. 5, 2025

Kevin Johnson, NPF (00:00):

I think it’s fair to say that no one issue has captured or commanded the global attention of nations around the world and the press then the unpredictable trade policy that’s being pursued by this current administration, deadlines have been set and moved. Close allies have become adversaries and the certainty economies crave has been elusive. And few are more familiar with the potential implications of this strategy than Katherine Tai, ambassador. Tai served as the 19th United States trade representative as a member of President Biden’s Cabinet Ambassador Tai was the principal trade advisor, negotiator and spokesperson on the US trade policy from 2021 to 2025. Please welcome Ambassador Tai.

Katherine Tai, former U.S. ambassadord, trade representative (01:00):

Every once in a while, whether it’s from interest from the press or from friends and allies in the political sphere, something will happen and I’ll get a bunch of text messages saying, you got to go out there and say something. You got to publish something, you have to respond to this. And I’ve so far resisted all of that. Part of it is because this administration and this president in particular is a real master of attention. I think that I know, Kevin, you have a puppy at home. We just got a puppy. A lot of things I’m realizing about life is relevant to puppy training.

(01:45):

I was walking my dog the other day. She’s not very good at it. I’m not very good at it. And I thought, you let the leash out, you pull the leash back in. I feel very much like this administration is in complete control of that leash and that we are all on the end of it. The media especially, he says something crazy, bam, it’s all over the place. He puts something out there on social media. It’s a very exciting time. Trump times are exciting times to be in the media. I was told a lot during Biden times, you guys are really boring. You guys are so boring. I get it, I get it. But what’s happening is equally important now as it was in the last four years as it always is in this town. So I think that that’s one aspect is what’s not being reported on.

(02:41):

Tons of stuff isn’t being reported on because we are all trained to go after the bright shiny object and that means we’re not in control. And I’ll say this also for my part in terms of being in the opposition on the other team. Unless we start instilling discipline in ourselves about the message and about how we respond and how we put our message out there, if all we do is react, then we have surrendered all of our autonomy on what we stand for and when we come out to stand for something, and that’s all an introduction to say the US Mexico Canada agreement is up statutorily and in terms of the requirements of the agreement for a review 2026, by July 1st, all three countries have to come back together and either commit to staying in the agreement as partners or saying I’m out.

(03:53):

That’s not really being reported on. And frankly, I haven’t been in good touch with my former colleagues and agency. I try to give them their space and respect that I’m on the outside. Now, I don’t know how much USTR today is working on that review and because when the Trump administration came and they had 18 months to prepare for that very, very consequential, politically consequential, economically consequential, geopolitically consequential moment that’s programmed into this agreement, it is now the beginning of September, which means that they have less than nine months. What kind of progress have they made? I don’t know. And I definitely don’t know based on reporting because I don’t think you guys know either, and I’m not even sure you guys are asking the question. You guys, you guys broadly speaking, right? So you got to hold them to account there are things that they need to be doing instead. I think that it is probably true. I suspect that everybody in that agency is running around chasing those 90 days, 90 deals, right? Which now like 180 days for some of them 120, right?

(05:02):

What is that supposed to accomplish? What’s the impact of any of that on existing structures? I know that those types of things move markets, but also the markets are very fickle and the markets actually are not the entirety of our economy. In fact, for most people what happens on Wall Street is very, very far away and attenuated from their daily existence. But what will happen too, this trade agreement and kind of this bedrock and this kind of renegotiated bedrock for the relationship of the North American economies, that is really, really important. Second issue, I’ll just throw out there, China, there’s a lot of buzz around China. I know there’s a lot of reporting on China. I think that where I’ve with this administration is what is the problem they’re trying to solve with China? At the end of our administration at least, you heard pretty consistently whether or not we were breaking through from Janet Yellen at treasury, from Tony Blinken at state, from me, the trade reps.

(06:05):

Although I think that various trade reps have been saying this for 15 years, but it was remarkable that we had these other leaders in the administration plus the NEC director plus the National Security Advisor all saying the problem that we see with China, it’s not the only one, but one major one we see economically and strategically is that they, like everybody else, have experienced an economic slump through C, some combination of COVID and their own economic planning, the kind of bust of their real estate market. What we see is that they’re doubling down on manufacturing and export to recover economically given their capacity for manufacturing and their capacity for manufacturing at scale beyond the needs of the Chinese economy, their ability to flood the market. What we are seeing is the danger of a second China shock that everything that they’re producing that doesn’t get consumed inside of China is coming for shores and they are more competitive, they’re more technologically advanced, they’re cutting edge these days in certain areas as opposed to when we experienced the first China shock, what are we going to do about it and how are we going to push them to reform their economy, to create more consumption and consumers inside of China to rebalance the health of their own economy?

(07:38):

That was our diagnosis. And there’s a great New York Times editorial that Brad Seltzer put out in the beginning, beginning weeks, I think January and the New York Times, he does the statistics. China is able to produce I think 40% of world automobile consumption, steel, solar at higher levels. Our industries are at risk because they are price competitive and now they are also quality competitive. What are we going to do about it? I haven’t heard a single person talk about this in the Trump administration. So it’s not to say that they’re not willing to confront China. It’s not to say that they haven’t done the whole song in Dan, we’re going to meet in Geneva, we’re going to meet in London, we’re going to meet later this year. Trump and she and this and that, and the Chinese were just here, right? They were here to negotiate something.

(08:30):

What the heck are they negotiating? What is it other than goofing markets, making people feel like there’s money to be made on trades and hedging against uncertainty and risk and all of that. What is the macro challenge that they are taking on? What’s the strategy? What’s the problem and what is their version of the solution that I’m not hearing either? And I think that’s another one of these aspects of where you have to step outside of and I guess separate yourself from their leash. And I think that in a lot of the formats that you report in, that’s going to be hard. I totally recognize that. But I think that for your own intellectual satisfaction, but also for all the reasons that maybe you wanted to be a journalist, I would encourage you to be asking those questions and to be tracking them even if you are not publishing an article on it every single week.

(09:34):

I would take this from my own experience. There were a lot of initiatives that took us time to roll out. There were a lot of conversations that took us time to get on the same page about, and you would see that our implementation and our rollout would be coming out in piecemeal. And I agree with you. I think that it is in a sense, unfair to assess and to judge the strategy and outcomes before you maybe get to see where it all ends up. But that’s never stopped anybody. That’s never stopped anybody. Certainly not in the talking head crowd increasingly and maybe today in the reporting crowd from opining on or from reporting on people’s opining on the strategy. That’s just part of politics. That’s the reason why if you want to get into the business of being in this town, you want to have a thick skin and that’s no matter which side of the microphone that you’re on. So yes, I think that sure, but I would say that’s probably true for everybody and your jobs are to be fair, I think in reporting the facts, your jobs are to be fair in separating out fact from fiction, fact from spin. But I think that in terms of that judgment, I think that’s for historians. You guys are writing the first draft of history. I understand if that’s the way we think about journalism, I don’t think you should necessarily feel that burden.

(11:13):

I think that there’s a whole other profession and judges too when you get into the outcomes from a legal perspective of whether or not. So that’s my thought in response to your question.

Kevin Johnson, NPF (11:32):

We’ll open it up, but make sure to identify yourself and your news organization for our guests.

Skyler Woodhouse, Bloomberg News (11:37):

Hi, thanks for being here. Skyler Woodhouse with Bloomberg News on the White House team. So I think it was last Friday the appeals court found the global tariffs illegal, unconstitutional. I’m just curious your thoughts on that ruling and then obviously how the Trump administration, they filed the scotus, I think they took it to Supreme Court this week, so they’re taking their next steps. But just curious your thoughts on just sort of that whole storyline and sort of what that means for the tariffs going forward. And obviously there’s still an effect, but they potentially could not be depending on how the case plays out. And then also Trump has made this his main agenda talking point on bringing manufacturing back to the US and wrapping that all together. But do you see this? I feel like when I go on TV sometimes I get asked, well, what’s next? How long is the Trump administration going to obsess over these tariffs? Do you see there being an end or is this just going to keep going for the next three, four years?

Katherine Tai, former U.S. ambassadord, trade representative (12:52):

OK, I’m going to take the third part of your question. Go to the first part and then end with the second part. If I can keep them all in my mind. I didn’t take notes. The third question is basically how long are tariffs going to be front and center for this administration? This president, I guess, have you met the man? I think until he stops breathing for as long as he is alive, there is going to be an active tariff policy. OK, that’s my gut. But again, this is going to lead me to the first question about the court decisions. So I think that there were two court decisions at the district court level. One at the specialized court of international trade and then one in D.C. district court. I think that the appeals court decision that came out was over the CIT decision. Is that right? The one from last week?

Katherine Tai, former U.S. ambassadord, trade representative (13:47):

Yes. OK. I would say as between those two decisions, I think that you can see where the CIT is the court of subject matter jurisdiction, and I think it was much more nuanced in terms of its approach to tariffs themselves as a tool and how they’ve been applied here. I think the D.C. district court, more general jurisdiction court took maybe a much more black and white kind of approach. So it’ll be interesting to see how these get resolved as they keep going up in the system. I’m very interested to see what the Supreme Court does with this. And in this case where I understand, I did try to foretell the future about President Trump’s administration and the life of tariff policy here. I’m going to hold back and say, I’m watching this as closely as the rest of you. The reporting has been very good on this.

(14:38):

I am following along. I’m curious to see what happens, and I don’t really have much more wisdom to provide on that topic. And then your second question was, the question that you had in the middle was about Oh, manufacturing. Yeah, so there have been a lot of justifications given for the tariffs. So one of them was they will bring manufacturing home. Another one I think is, well, they’re about leverage to get things from other countries. Sometimes what you see is where tariffs might be able to contribute to revitalizing manufacturing in certain sectors. Sometimes you see in these deals, the erosion of that leverage through what the concessions have been in terms of what’s been given away. So I think that this underlies some of the Auto workers union, their frustrations. You’ve put on a 25% tariff, which creates a lot of opportunity around maybe a specific industrial policy here on auto production and auto supply chains and auto jobs.

(15:47):

But then in these deals with some major auto manufacturing economies, you see that being relaxed. And so the question is, well, what is the purpose? They seem to be at cross purposes? Is somebody thinking about this kind of in a consistent kind of way from an industrial policy perspective, which is really an area of overlap with the Biden administration. Another challenge from that perspective on manufacturing is every industry is different. Facts are going to be different. The economics are going to be different. Supply chains are going to be different. When you’re putting down blanket tariffs like this that affect all economies and all goods categories, it’s hard to assess how effective you’re going to be in a manufacturing revitalization program when the tool that you’re using is so indiscriminate, but where the facts and the policy will matter and will need to be tailored. That again, suggests a mismatch maybe between justification implementation or stated justification and actual motivation. Finally, on the manufacturing piece, and this came out even in April with what do you think that you guys are going to accomplish with this? I remember Secretary Lutnick went on CNN, and I know this because I went on first and then he and his entourage came in after me and I got to watch what he had to say and it was really, really interesting. And he said, well, this is so that we can bring manufacturing jobs back.

(17:32):

All this stuff is made in other countries, A lot of it in China, we’re going to bring all this stuff back, and then he had it on at the end and they will be made by robots. It’ll still be super efficient because there’ll be robots making them. So then you’re like, OK, so the point of bringing manufacturing back to the United States and revitalizing American manufacturing is so that you can export more stuff. OK, cool. Alright. But so that you can create jobs for robots. I think that there is a justification for revitalizing American manufacturing that goes to the resilience of our economy, that goes to the adaptability of our economy to respond when a crisis happens, right? When it was the pandemic, the thing that everybody needed at once, there were gloves, masks, gowns, ventilators, the next big crisis. I don’t know what that set of goods is going to be, but if you’ve got a healthy level of manufacturing at the high end ventilators, remember it was the auto producers, I think it was Ford that repurposed one of their production lines to make the ventilators.

(18:46):

We were able to do that because we still manufacture cars and there’s enough overlap in terms of the technology that we could do it on masks and gowns. It was a lot harder because we had much less of that still on shore and it took the textile producers longer to repurpose to fill that gap. If we just had more of that going, we hit a critical level of activity, I think that we would have a more resilient economy, one that could adapt and pivot when crises came up. Alright, so on that, I’m actually with the Let’s revitalize American manufacturing, but I also think that part of the reason you do that is because when you’re making the good close to where you’re designing the good, you’ve got the entire feedback loop for manufacturing. That’s actually really important to innovation.

(19:35):

As you are designing something, you’re testing it in the production, and then as you’re producing it, you’re realizing, oh wait, this could be designed better differently. We could be doing this differently. That gets fed back into the closer those activities are together and the more overlap you have in the teams and the more connectivity you have there, the more innovation you have. So that’s another reason why I think that manufacturing is important. Third reason, manufacturing jobs. We want to have more jobs, but not just any jobs. We should have more good jobs here in America, more diversity of jobs. I hear this argument a lot. Well, we’re a high cost country. That’s high labor costs. That’s high cost across the board. We’ve got a lot of regulations, so we’ve become a services economy and a lot of these old type jobs, old industries, manual labor, other countries can have that.

(20:38):

That’s low end. That’s not us. Well, I would ask each of you, if you think about your network of friends and family, you all have white collar jobs, services, jobs. Do you know people who are as talented and smart as you are, but just in a different way? Do you know people who are really good with their hands, who are really, really good at making things and designing things who are really not that good at say, software coding, which I don’t know anything about, but they’re commanding very high prices are in our economy, we’re a nation of 350 million people with lots of different dispositions and talents. I think it is fundamental policy and governance malpractice. If you think that the outcome of correct economic policy is that 350 million people should be AI software engineers, so good different kinds of jobs including in the manufacturing sector here in America, and I think that that is something that I would really put the spotlight on for this administration.

(21:49):

Why is manufacturing important to you? Is it because it’s, it’s a cultural totem that it feels good for a part of America that has lost touch with those types of jobs, but where you actually don’t feel the responsibility to create those types of jobs and that the manufacturing that you are looking to bring back is just about America’s role on a macro level in the world economy that you just want us to export more and it actually doesn’t matter how we’re producing. So on that manufacturing piece, I think that there are multiple layers there, some of which I’m willing to give the Trump administration credit for to say we also believed in that. But other parts where I really want to kick the tires and say, if you’re interested in creating good manufacturing jobs here in America, what are you doing other than putting tariffs on? Why are you gutting the labor department? Why are you taking collective bargaining rights away from huge swaths of America all at the same time because those things don’t match up. And if in fact your vision for manufacturing in America is dark factories operated entirely by robots, then I guess Dr. Lutnick has been super honest about it. I think more people need to hear that.

Lia DeGroot, CQ Roll Call (23:22):

Hi, thank you for coming to speak with us. I’m Lia. I’m a health reporter at CQ Roll Call. I wanted to follow up on what you were saying about Trump really being able to command everybody’s attention and people just kind of following with that. Do you think that at this point Democrats are still in that mode when it comes to working on tariffs? And then if so, how do they get out of that

Katherine Tai, former U.S. ambassadord, trade representative (23:50):

Where they’re just responsive and they’re not taking command of the

Lia DeGroot, CQ Roll Call (23:53):

Message pitching anything else other than just saying these tariffs are bad for working people?

Katherine Tai, former U.S. ambassadord, trade representative (24:02):

I think you have a couple different messages out there. One of them is that the tariffs are really bad for consumers and small businesses and we’re all consumers and rising costs something that we’ve seen continue and accelerate in this administration. So there could be, especially with these blanket, this blanket application of tariffs, you have people who are really focused on messaging to American consumers. You also have a set of Democrats that want to make sure that the American worker, especially the industrial worker, the worker in some of these communities that have been really, really hard hit by the era of free trade also know that their members care about them. So one example is Chris Dio from Western Pennsylvania. He published, I support Port the Tariff as a tool with a lot of potential to reinforce American industrial and worker interests, but it does depend on how you use them.

(25:17):

And he was then very clear, this type of kind of chest thumping, sort of waving it around like a club. This isn’t accomplishing the types of goals that I stand for, the people I care about. So of the response, you are getting different responses depending on the audience that the particular say member of Congress is focused on and maybe the profile of their particular constituency at home. But I agree, I’ve been told, I’ve been out there to say a tariff is a tool. My analogy is it’s like a two by four. You could take a bunch of two by fours and you could build a house with it. You could take a bunch of two by fours, you could just go out in the street and beat people with it. You could break windows with it. It in itself is neither inherently good nor bad.

(26:19):

It is all about the intention behind it and how you use it. And I’ve been told by people, well, I mean that’s good, but it’s not like a pithy message. I’m going to put that on a bumper sticker, although maybe I will, I will Tariffs, I think the tariffs will a lifetime that might make its way to a bumper sticker. But I think that in these times it is really hard because not only is President Trump very good at commanding attention, he now has the biggest microphone in the entire world, and that’s a lot to have to contend with.

Audrey Decker, Defense One (27:09):

Hi, I’m Audrey Decker. I’m a reporter with Defense one and I cover the DOD. And this is more of, I guess possibly a philosophical question, but it does. I think most people agree that the way that our global capitalist trade system works is very flawed with inequity and environmental concerns and outsourcing labor to poor countries and stuff. And so it does seem like the push to move some of that back to the states is valid, as you were saying, but how do you go about reforming the global capitalism when there are so many entrenched, entrenched, I guess people pushing to keep it the way that it is and is that even possible and are some of the Trump ideas if executed, could it actually bring reform? Yeah, just curious on your opinion on

Katherine Tai, former U.S. ambassadord, trade representative (28:03):

That. OK. Really great question. Really, really great question answer is, I don’t know, but you have that question. I think that that is underlying everything that’s going on right now, the entrenched interests, those who maybe want to go back to the way things were before or the entrenched interests that are actually doing really well right now under this administration. And then I do think that we have levels of inequality in America that we have not seen in 120 years since the first gilded age. This is the coming of the second gilded age actually. It’s not just coming, it’s here. We are living it every single day. So what’s going to happen?

(28:53):

I guess my guess is I think that there are probably economists and sociologists and historians who will have a lot more data and nuance to this. Maybe there’s a way to reform it. Definitely our antitrust enforcement agenda and the Biden administration was about corrective forces to take on these incredibly powerful, over concentrated, dominant entrenched interests and saying, Hey, you’ve got to share. We’re only in a forest and you have grown so big that you are blotting out the sun for everybody else. In this smaller large companies, medium companies, small companies, people, even as consumers, when there’s only one or two players in the market, they get to decide what the price is going to be, how much you’re going to get and what your options are going to be. So there have been a lot of reform-minded attempts to economic governance and regulation, and you saw actually a lot of them on display during the Biden administration.

(30:00):

There was some question about whether or not that would continue in the Trump administration. There is a contingency in this ruling coalition that was very antitrust enforcement. I think that you are seeing that they’re having challenges breaking out and being allowed to be empowered. I think that recently there was a DOJ antitrust official who was pushed out that was a bad sign for everybody who thought that antitrust could be a tool for this type of reform. What I’m seeing right now is an incredible ability for this administration across the board to talk about the working class and how much they love the working class and to stoke this feeling for struggling working people in America. The people who are really struggling in the gilded age, second gilded age to say, we see you. That’s great. What are they actually doing for them? All I see are the benefits going to the top.

(31:02):

This feels a lot like trickle down economics, but maybe this time on even more steroids, right though when the OBBB, right, massive redistribution of wealth in what direction to the top. So under these circumstances, it kind of feels like what this administration is testing is how far can we go before the system breaks? And I think that when these types of systems break, when we have seen them in the past, in history in other countries, it has been really, really painful. It’s been transformative and sometimes in really negative ways. So I think that this is actually the most consequential aspect of what’s going on, whether you’re reporting on defense and you’re seeing it play out according to this fact pattern or in health or in trade, which frankly touches everything, right? It’s sort of very intersectional. I don’t know how it’s going to turn out, but I think that that is the story.

Cady Stanton, Tax Notes (32:04):

Hi, my name’s Katie Stanton. I’m a Capital Hill reporter for tax notes. I have been trying to follow pretty closely the US involvement with the OECD and global tax negotiations and something that I’ve also been trying to follow is what’s going on with tariffs also to determine how those relationships might change for the OECD negotiations. Obviously there’s aspects like digital services taxes which disproportionately impact the US and is part of the reason there’s been so much back and forth. And so I guess I wanted to ask if you either have worries, concerns, or just thoughts on the impacts of the diplomacy and back and forth between the US and other countries on tariffs and how it might impact negotiations either at the OECD or just other diplomatic relations and concerns about that. If you think it has any general crossover,

Katherine Tai, former U.S. ambassadord, trade representative (32:58):

I think that there’s an enormous amount of crossover. Maybe for purposes of your question, just while I’m on the record, I’ll just point this out. The digital services taxes were introduced actually during the first Trump administration, during the Biden administration. And I think that we held off their application and implementation on the promise that there would be a pillar one, pillar two agreement at the OECD kind of a global resolution because you kind of need that type of collective response. And I think that was something the Trump administration was never particularly interested in. And so that structure, as I understand it, has really kind of fallen apart since the beginning of the year.

(33:46):

What I will say is during our time in, I was pressed quite often on why aren’t you unleashing those tariffs on the digital services taxes, on the digital markets act, on the DSA? What is that Digital Services Act? Is that right? Something like that. OK. Those are discriminatory because the companies being affected are disproportionately, sometimes they are all American. This is anti-American. This is classic illegal unfair trade treatment. And the problem at the time was, well, we’re kind of unique in that these are all our companies, whatever that means, they were founded here. They’re product of our economic innovation system are incredibly generous and forgiving system of finance and capital, but they’re used around the world and even we know that they grew up real fast and they were given a lot of room to run and grow and now they’re really big. What they’re doing is really consequential.

(35:16):

Some of it is quite scary, and we didn’t have hardly any regulations or kind of governance structure to guide their further development to police when they’re doing something right and wrong, that good for society and bad for society. And you’ve got other jurisdictions who are just as affected by their operations, their services who are trying to regulate. But because there are companies, any attempt to regulate is going to look discriminatory. Now I’m not saying that all of those types of regulations necessarily are pure of intention. Even the Europeans, they did themselves no favors by calling it the gaff attacks. That’s Google, apple, what does the F stand for? Facebook? And then the other A was Amazon. So that kind of made the whole thing feel kind of sketchy and very targeted. But I think that there is space to assess what their legitimate regulatory interests are in something that we are struggling with and have been uniquely unable to respond to.

(36:34):

So I think that it’s complicated, but in this moment, again, because of the intertwining of interest, and I think today is another day where all of those billionaire tech CEOs were just here at dinner last night, was it just last night that it’s really present in my mind, where is the space for there to be respect for other jurisdiction sovereignty to try to regulate this, and where is the space for the American domestic conversation around how we regulate the power of these companies? I feel like that space has gotten real small here. I’m not even sure how big that square footage is, but over the course of the last six months, I think that that is another really important question.

Grant Schwab, Detroit News (37:29):

Thanks Ambassador Tai for being here. My name is Grant Schwab. I’m an autos reporter for the Detroit News, but I’m based here in D.C. so I have an autos question. Good. The question is, will Chinese autos ever really make it to the US industry? People tell me it’s only a matter of time and when they do get here, they’re going to kick our butts. But I know that the Biden administration with the 200% EV tariff, there was the rose garden ceremony celebrating it. They were concerned about this and in congress kind of on both sides of the aisle. I see every time there’s an election chest thumping over China will never come and take, especially in Michigan, your auto manufacturing jobs. But those are two different things. Are they never going to come here or are they banging down the door?

Katherine Tai, former U.S. ambassadord, trade representative (38:16):

Yeah. OK. So what do you mean by a Chinese auto? Do you mean an auto that’s built in China and that’s exported directly to the US? Because I would argue that some of them are already here, right?

Grant Schwab, Detroit News (38:27):

Right. Yeah, Ford builds some there and then you have Gilly, but I guess Chinese nameplate vehicles is maybe one way to say it, or even if they’re US nameplates coming in a big way more than just, I don’t know, five models.

Katherine Tai, former U.S. ambassadord, trade representative (38:44):

2. Another definition of a Chinese auto is a Chinese auto that is assembled in Mexico and is sold through either U-S-M-C-A or through the 2.5%, which is very a tariff that comes in from somewhere else. But your question for these purposes is a Chinese badged car that is coming from China to here, insignificant numbers

Grant Schwab, Detroit News (39:11):

Or A BYD built in Mexico that comes up here either

Katherine Tai, former U.S. ambassadord, trade representative (39:15):

Way, but something that’s identifiably Chinese in terms of branding and technology, right? Yes. OK. It’s a great question because I agree with you the politics of this, I’d say that driving around in the US, we are probably a bit unique now in terms of how few of those cars we see. You go to a lot of other places in the world, Latin America, increasingly in Europe. I have been told, I think it’s been a couple months since I’ve been in Europe, you are seeing those Chinese badge cars in increasing numbers, right? The Europe piece is really interesting because they see it coming and they’ve been unable to, they’ve got a 30% tariff that they’re trying to right time will tell. I might have guessed at the beginning of this administration that the Trump administration, because there were indications that the Trump administration was going to take the Biden semiconductor chip export controls and actually make them more strict and actually talk about and celebrate how much stricter they were.

(40:32):

I was surprised by the Nvidia deal, right? I’m not dealing with all of the, I dunno what’s cooking these days, but that outcome looks very different from what you might’ve thought. And that outcome is a little bit counterintuitive to what we think the politics are. So with this administration feature a bug for better or worse, it’s really going to be hard to say. And I’ll say, I really am worried about the auto industry, the world auto industry, and I think the industry itself knows that the technology is advancing to a place where they need to adapt to different sources of fuel and energy. And yet from this administration, there is a big kind of cultural and political push, again, moving on from, what do we call them? The ice, the internal combustion engine. So you see those types of tensions and you just think, well, if that’s what is deciding what the market looks like today, at what point does the technology and the advancement of this entire industry catch up to us all of a sudden and then realize, oh my gosh, we’re not producing enough of what we need and it has to come from somewhere else.

(41:53):

Great question is a long way of my saying. I’m also interested, and I know some facts here and there, but I also don’t know the answer.

Kevin Johnson, NPF (42:03):

I think we have time for one more. Yeah, sure.

Shrai Popat, The Guardian (42:07):

Thanks so much for doing this. I’m, I’m with the Guardian. I wanted to ask a little bit a question about tariffs, but particularly foreign diplomacy right now and particularly about the punitive tariffs on India for purchasing Russian oil and at least optically that’s driving Modi into Putin’s arms. Do you kind of see this as a sort of futile attempt to apply pressure to Russia or more generally than what concerns you about this move specifically, particularly given the context of the war in Ukraine?

Katherine Tai, former U.S. ambassadord, trade representative (42:37):

OK, alright. I’m still on the record, but I think that the muddiness and the UN of my answer will probably shelter me a little bit. I don’t know what’s going on, but I suspect that this tune is different from the tune everybody was singing at the beginning of the year. I think the Biden administration left office with the US India relationship at kind of modern heights, and then I think that President Trump and Prime Minister Modi from everything I’d seen before got along quite well. And so there were great expectations and I think some concerns about what exactly was going to happen here. I’m a bit surprised, but I think that something happened, and I don’t know that it’s about Russia. I don’t know that it’s about what they say it’s about. I don’t know if it was deeply personal or it was over policy or some kind of politics.

(43:37):

I will say this, and this is not that insightful, I’m just going to say that right now. I recognize that self-awareness. But what I found very, very interesting during our time in office was that of the original bricks, Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, that India was the one member of bricks that was most successfully threading the needle in its relationship with the United States. It had tension with China, which was helpful to alignment in certain areas. It has a very close relationship with Russia, has always had just like South Africa, but didn’t manage to inflame the tensions with the United States as happened with South Africa. And so that US India relationship during the Biden administration I thought was really quite remarkable given that the relationship with the other members of the bricks, China and Russia being at one extreme, but even Lula coming in immediately wanting to navigate the US China and maybe not anyway, dampening a little bit of that kind of mind meld that he had with President Biden at the beginning. I’m really interested by the optics from earlier India, Russia, China, celebrating the end of World War II when we were all on the side of guys, but they’re the ones who are taking the mantle of that legacy in this particular moment.

(45:25):

I mean, I think that that was made for media and the photographers and I too am curious about what happened. And my suspicion is that if you work your sources, you build those relationships. There’s a story there that’s not obvious, but I bet is very interesting.

Kevin Johnson, NPF (45:50):

Unfortunately we have to leave it there. One thing I neglected to mention in my introduction is that Ambassador Ty was unanimously confirmed by the Senate 98. Nothing. That’s a number that you, I’m sure will not see for a very, very long time. But there’s reason for that and I think it was demonstrated here today. But thank you so much for your time, ambassador.

Katherine Tai, former U.S. ambassadord, trade representative (46:19):

Thank you so much, Kevin. It was really nice to meet all of you and thanks for what you’re doing.

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