The Tariff as a Deregulatory Export

The U.S. Trade Representative's charge sheet against Brazil reads like a grab-bag. "Illegal deforestation" sits on the same Section 301 schedule as "lax anti-corruption enforcement" and the Pix electronic payment system — a domestic digital infrastructure project with no obvious connection to trade ^[1].

I launched the Section 301 investigation to tackle "longstanding and pervasive U.S. concerns with certain of Brazil's trade policies and practices." — Jamieson Greer

We have identified in our investigation that Brazil provides unfair preferential tariffs to India and Mexico for a number of different tariff lines. — Jamieson Greer

The juxtaposition does the work. A tariff that looks at first glance like environmental enforcement reveals itself, by its own charge sheet, as something else: a lever for coercing changes in sovereign domestic policy across whatever dimension the administration chooses. USTR Greer made the mechanism explicit.

Extensive negotiations with Brazil over the past year have not resolved these issues, but we remain open to continuing negotiations with Brazil to bring about long-needed changes to the problems identified in this investigation. — Jamieson Greer

This is not one case. The redefinition of "trade barrier" to encompass foreign domestic regulatory choices now stretches across continents and policy domains. Australia's pharmaceutical pricing, streaming content quotas, social media age limits, and news media bargaining code were all labeled "significant trade barriers" in the administration's annual trade estimate report ^[2].

The United States has raised serious concerns regarding this issue and continues to monitor it. — Federal government of the United States

The UK's digital services tax drew a direct threat from the president: abolish it or face tariffs ^[3].

If they don't drop the tax, we'll probably put a big tariff on the UK. — Donald Trump

India and South Korea's labor laws were swept into a forced-labor tariff regime covering 60 economies, with rates tiered by how aggressively each nation polices its own supply chains ^[4]. When Canada's prime minister responded by announcing new supply chain legislation, the coercion loop closed — a sovereign government altering its domestic regulatory framework under tariff pressure ^[4].

We don’t want any element of forced labour coming in goods and services, and we want to use our influence to eliminate this practice of forced labour and child labour. — Mark Carney

The legal vehicle for all of this is Section 301 of the Trade Act, to which the administration pivoted after the Supreme Court struck down its earlier IEEPA-based tariff regime in February ^[5]. USTR Greer confirmed the strategy's logic.

In many sectors, the United States has lost substantial domestic production capacity or has fallen worryingly behind foreign competitors. — Jamieson Greer

So far, the pattern is consistent: tariffs are the instrument, foreign domestic policy is the target, and the scope is limited only by what the administration decides to call a trade barrier. But the environmental dimension breaks the pattern — and the break is where the real standard reveals itself. While the USTR was preparing its Brazil investigation, the same administration was dismantling domestic environmental regulation at a pace without modern precedent. Since October 2025, it has completed 752 regulatory rollbacks and proposed eliminating 702 more ^[6].

The federal government has imposed onerous restrictions on everything from the cars that Americans may drive to the appliances that they can use in their homes. — Mark Paoletta

The EPA's 2009 endangerment finding — the legal foundation for regulating greenhouse gas emissions — was repealed in May ^[7].

President Trump will be taking the most significant deregulatory actions in history to further unleash American energy dominance and drive down costs. — Karoline Leavitt

The SEC moved to fully rescind its climate risk disclosure rules. Chairman Paul Atkins offered a rationale that, read against the EPA's simultaneous gutting, lands as something between irony and admission.

We need to stick to our knitting. — United States Securities and Exchange Commission

The agency he was invoking had just been stripped of the very authority to do that job. Three further moves make the selectivity undeniable. First, the U.S. has opposed the European Union's anti-deforestation regulation — the EUDR — because it raises compliance costs for American exporters. The regulation was delayed by two years under pressure from Washington, Brasília, and Jakarta ^[8]. The same administration that tariffs Brazil for "illegal deforestation" lobbies against a multilateral rule that would address it, because the rule costs U.S. firms money. Second, at the International Maritime Organization, the U.S. formally demanded that member states abandon the shipping decarbonization framework entirely and threatened consequences for those who support it ^[9].

The United States submits that the most appropriate path forward is to end consideration of the IMO Net-Zero Framework entirely. — Federal government of the United States

Third, the administration circulated economic analyses at the IMO arguing that a global shipping carbon tax would raise trade costs, lobbying to block it on the same cost grounds it dismisses when other nations raise them against U.S. tariffs ^[10]. The pattern is not complicated. When an environmental standard can be wielded as a cudgel against a competitor — Brazil's deforestation, framed as an unfair trade practice — the tariff machinery activates. When the same standard would bind U.S. firms — the EUDR's compliance costs, the IMO's carbon framework — the administration opposes it, delays it, or threatens to punish its supporters. The environmental concern is real only when it serves as a lever; it vanishes the moment it becomes a constraint. What is actually being exported, then, is not American environmental protection. It is the deregulatory model itself — delivered at tariff-point. The U.S. is not asking Brazil to adopt American climate rules, because Washington is busy repealing its own. It is demanding that Brazil change its domestic policies under threat of economic penalty, while ensuring that no multilateral environmental framework constrains American firms in return. The standard reaching other shores is not the one the tariff's language invokes. It is the one the administration is building at home.