• By John Sharma
• Comments 3
• 01 May 2025

If they don’t give us: US warns China of 200% tariff over rare-earth magnets export

US China tariff dispute, US China trade war 2025: Earlier this month, Trump signed an order to extend a tariff truce with China by 90 days, just hours before higher tariffs were due to take effect.

US China trade war 2025: Amid a trade dispute between the United States and China, President Donald Trump warned Beijing that it would impose a 200 per cent tariff if it refused to provide the US with rare-earth magnets. “They will have to give us magnets, if they don’t give us magnets, we will have to charge them a 200 per cent tariff… or something,” Trump said, speaking to reporters in the Oval Office ahead of a bilateral meeting with South Korean President Lee Jae Myung.

In another warning, Trump said the US and China “are going to have a great relationship”; however, if he chose to destroy China, he would use those “incredible cards” at his disposal. “They [China] have some cards. We have incredible cards, but I don’t want to play those cards. If I play those cards, that would destroy China. I am not going to play those cards,” he told reporters.

He said China intelligently went in and they sort of took a monopoly of the world’s magnets. “Nobody needed magnets until they convinced everybody 20 years ago, ‘let’s all do magnets.’ There were many other ways that the world could have gone. It will probably take us a year to have them… we’re heavily into the world of magnets now,” he added further.