White House Lifts Tariffs on Coffee, Bananas and Beef via Four-Nation Latin American Frameworks

Washington has yo-yoed on tariffs before: after the 1930 Smoot-Hawley spike, the 1934 Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act slashed duties in response to voter pain during the Great Depression, and Nixon’s 1971 ‘Phase I’ controls similarly mixed protectionism with later import relief when food costs spiked. The 2025 reversal fits that cyclical pattern—tariffs first deployed for geopolitical leverage, then relaxed when domestic inflation and mid-term politics bite (Republicans lost Virginia & New Jersey governorships just a week earlier). It also underscores two longer arcs: the executive’s expanding unilateral trade power (now under Supreme Court review) and the shift from multilateral WTO rules to ad-hoc “friend-shoring” with ideologically aligned governments like Milei’s Argentina. Over a 100-year horizon, such episodic retreats hint at a fractured but enduring globalisation—one defined less by uniform free trade than by fluid, politically driven carve-outs that can swing prices and alliances far more rapidly than traditional treaty cycles.