Welcome to Trade Secrets. It’s one of those moments when lots of things in the trading system are bad but nothing’s in immediate crisis. The Iran war has reached 100 days and appears to be hotting up again. I can’t be the only one who thinks Tehran is trying to rerun 1980. That is, attempting to keep the stand-off going until a disastrous November election, but with President Donald Trump in place of former US president Jimmy Carter. Meanwhile, fuel shortages have not brought the global economy to a halt and there is not a food crisis as yet.

Today’s newsletter is on what’s going on in the meantime, namely the US putting its tariff wall back together. Charted Waters, where we look at the data behind world trade, is on electric vehicles in Europe.

Earlier this year the US Supreme Court pushed Trump’s international emergency (IEEPA) tariff wall over and it smashed to pieces on the ground. Now all the president’s horses and all the president’s men are trying to put it together again.

To be fair to them, they’re making some progress in what is a fundamentally ridiculous task. Last week, following a “Section 301” (unfair trade) investigation, the administration said it would impose at least 10 per cent tariffs on 60 countries because of their tolerance of forced labour. This from a country that hasn’t ratified the International Labour Organization convention on forced labour because it uses prison labour and might therefore fall foul of it.

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As ever with Trump, there is not much point trying to find logic here. Yes, the forced labour accusations make little sense. But then neither did the original international emergency IEEPA tariffs struck down by the Supreme Court. And nor did the “Section 122” balance-of-payments tariffs that were imposed in February as a temporary replacement until summer. Like the IEEPA ones, they were struck down by the US Court of International Trade, though the federal appeals process will keep them around long enough to hand over the baton to the 301s and fresh “Section 232” national security tariffs on pharmaceuticals and who knows what else.

Monitoring service Global Trade Alert says the Section 301 proposals, which will be enacted following hearings next month, will keep US average tariffs at about 11 per cent. The new duties leave the overall tariff rate 4-5 percentage points lower than before the Supreme Court invalidated IEEPA. A few more 232s and 301s and the administration should be able to rebuild the wall in height, albeit with a different composition.

The US trade representative’s office is clearly more in control now than trade warriors such as the White House’s counsellor for trade and manufacturing, Peter Navarro, whose daft idea the IEEPA tariff wall was. In relative terms, USTR is at least vaguely connected to reality. But it is abusing its technical knowledge in the cause of nonsensical protectionism. Administrative competence does not make a policy any less stupid.

So where do we go from here? Obviously there will be more legal challenges. I’m cautious about making predictions because I was completely wrong last time. But legally Sections 301 and 232 genuinely do give more deference to the president than do IEEPA or Section 122. And politically I’m having a hard time imagining the John Roberts Supreme Court destroying Trump’s ability to implement his number one tool of international economic policy by striking down every type of brick even as he’s putting them up.

As ever, the likely main impact of all this messy construction work is political. Trump’s tariffs remain unpopular and, if anything, will become more so. Voters blame them for inflation, though only partially accurately. The cost of living is the most important issue to the public, even more so than corruption, which is quite impressive given the scale of the latter. Trump himself continues to appear to admit the upward impact of tariffs on prices, last week cutting duties on farm and industrial machinery in a somewhat feeble attempt to offset the vast damage his trade war has done to agriculture and manufacturing. Rushing around trying to reconstruct an illegal tariff wall is not going to make any of this seem better.

A brief aside to make things clear. The US has a long history of legislating against forced labour in considerably more good faith than it is doing so today. The use of import bans against goods made with coerced labour goes back to the 19th century. It was codified in the otherwise notorious Smoot-Hawley Act of 1930 and then over the past decade enforced and toughened up, being directed particularly against goods made by oppressed Uyghurs in the Chinese region of Xinjiang.

The practice of outright bans for goods made with forced labour spread to other governments, which had previously not gone that far. The EU has passed its own legislation, although, in the classic Brussels way, it’s much more case by case, and implementation was delayed for three years to give companies time to prepare. It is this delay which is providing Trump with the excuse to hit the EU with a Section 301, though if it weren’t that it would be something else.

Trump’s abuse of forced labour provisions is one of the many depressing ways in which perfectly reasonable justifications for using loopholes in World Trade Organization rules (national security, labour standards) are being horribly misused. It doesn’t help that the practice became normalised under former US president Joe Biden, whose citation of climate change as a disguise for steel protectionism put trading partners on their guard when pressed to join in. Beware Americans bearing gifts.

You can argue that the exigencies of geoeconomic rivalry and climate change justify more flexibility in WTO rules than hitherto. It’s not wise simply to dismiss all labour standards restrictions as necessarily being hidden protectionism. But thanks to Trump (and Biden), the world isn’t deliberatively moving towards a more systematic use of such exceptions than before. It is simply handing unscrupulous governments an excuse to do what they want.

Whatever else the EU’s calibrated use of anti-subsidy duties on Chinese EVs may have done, it hasn’t appreciably changed the upward trend of EV adoption in Europe.

• As I wrote about in my column last week, there is a referendum in Switzerland this week on whether to cap the country’s population at 10mn, which would restrict immigration. The opinion polls suggest the proponents will lose, but it is pretty close.

• It transpires that whacking up tariffs has not, in fact, ushered in a new golden age of US manufacturing, in a development extremely unsurprising to anyone who knows anything about the subject.

• A paper from the Chatham House think-tank on global governance looks at establishing a third pole beyond the US and China. (Usual disclaimer: I’m an unpaid fellow at Chatham House but did not contribute to this report.)

• Gulf countries are in talks to build oil pipelines to bypass the Strait of Hormuz.

• Academic Richard Baldwin argues that the supposed geopolitical realignment of world trade in 2025 was essentially a rerouting to avoid Trump’s tariffs.

• Another way for China to get round the EU’s restrictions on trade and investment: build a plant in a third country (Morocco). In theory, the EU can use its trade defence instruments against dumped and subsidised imports from third countries; in practice, they’re not that powerful.

Trade Secrets is edited by Harvey Nriapia