On March 2, 2018, at 5:50 a.m., President Donald Trump tweeted, “When a country (USA) is losing many billions of dollars on trade with virtually every country it does business with, trade wars are good, and easy to win. Example, when we are down $100 billion with a certain country and they get cute, don’t trade anymore-we win big. It’s easy!”

Well, this belief is now going to be put to the test. Complacent markets that were sure that cooler heads would prevail in the discussions between the US and China have been rocked by the rapid-fire deterioration that has occurred in the space of just 10 days. With less than a week’s warning, on May 10, the US raised tariffs from 10 percent to 25 percent on a multitude of Chinese products, totaling $200 billion in value. In return, the Chinese responded relatively moderately on May 13 with retaliatory tariffs on $60 billion of goods, scheduled to take effect at the beginning of June.

Where does it go from here? President Trump has threatened to raise tariffs on the remaining $325 billion in Chinese goods that are currently unaffected. What will the effects be on transport?

In the short run, it looks like a mixed bag. Importers of goods currently falling under the 25 percent tariff regimen will hold off on orders as long as possible in hopes that things return to normal, and when they do order from China, it will be for the minimum quantity needed to stay afloat.

But a larger quantity of goods lies under a new tariff threat with indefinite implementation timing. These importers will be racing to get product to the US before the threatened next round of tariffs takes effect. The result will be more turbulence and likely more congestion and flow imbalances throughout the international freight transport supply chain.

It is the longer-run effects that are more serious, however, and the damage has likely already been inflicted regardless of whether and when the dispute gets settled.

When the import surge from China first began, importers brought cargo to the US by the obvious and expedient route, direct into the West Coast (concentrating on Los Angeles and Long Beach) with rail beyond. The dangers of this lack of route diversification were later made clear when disruptions and congestion on the West Coast put a crimp in supply chains.

In response, importers pivoted to four and even five-corner import strategies, diversifying their inbound ports to deal with this risk.

Now, history will repeat itself regarding the huge reliance on China as a primary (sole) source of imported goods. The risks of such sole-sourcing have been made obvious. The response will inevitably be the same — a diversification of sourcing locations to reduce the national risk to manageable proportions. Sourcing will shift from full reliance on China to other locations. Asian locales might include other Asian Tigers, such as Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand, as well as India and Taiwan. The infant reshoring trend will be accelerated, with Mexico and the US benefiting.

This implies that the current fire hose of volume flowing out of China will become fragmented. One effect will be the premature obsolescence of mega-ships that will be too large for the new reality. It will not be possible to employ these high-capacity monsters on the new, growing but still-smaller trade routes.

It also seems likely that trade growth, already slowing, will be further impeded. The difficulties of offshoring will be compounded by freight now originating in secondary sourcing locations that lack the well-developed transport infrastructure of China. Compounding the problem will be IMO 2020, with its attendant higher costs and slower steaming. This will aggravate the already-inadequate service variability of the steamship lines, which will have to deal with greater complexity in their networks.

It all makes one wonder when the tipping point will be reached where importers decide that offshore sourcing is simply not worth the trouble. Could we be approaching the time when “near-shoring” and “reshoring” move from concept to a more concrete reality?

The transport implications are vast. Projections of continued growth in international cargo volumes are thrown into question. Port investments that require years of growth to pay off will become more difficult, if not impossible to justify. The intermodal network, currently overwhelmingly east-west, will take on a much more significant north-south flavor.

Where all this leads is impossible to say at this early stage. But one thing seems clear — it will not be “easy.”

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