President Trump’s tariff regime has been used to negotiate better trade terms with U.S. trading partners while also driving inbound foreign investment. Photo courtesy of Congressman Bennie Thompson.

New tariffs on 60 trading partners took effect at 12:01 a.m. ET on July 24, 2026, under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, the latest expansion of a tariff regime that has coincided with the highest inbound U.S. investment levels since 2021. U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer took final action, at President Trump’s direction, imposing the tariffs on the 60 economies for their failure to impose and effectively enforce a prohibition on the importation of goods produced with forced labor.

Per the USTR’s fact sheet, trading partners that have committed to adopt and enforce forced-labor import bans face a 10% tariff, including Canada, Mexico, India, the United Kingdom, the European Union, and Taiwan, while roughly 41 partners that have not adopted such prohibitions face a 12.5% rate. The fact sheet states the tariffs cover 99.4% of U.S. imports.

The new duties replace the temporary 10% global tariff Trump imposed under Section 122 after the Supreme Court struck down his global IEEPA tariffs on February 20, 2026. The forced-labor investigation began in March 2026, and USTR says the process included two rounds of public hearings and more than 2,100 public comments.

“The United States has had a forced labor import ban for nearly a century and rigorously enforces it. It’s well past time for our trading partners to do the same,” President Trump said. Separately, he signed proclamations imposing new 50% tariffs on some Canadian goods, set to take effect in approximately one month.

The tariff push comes against a backdrop of long-standing imbalance in the U.S.-EU trade relationship, one in which Europe benefits from favorable trade terms and from the security umbrella provided by the U.S. military, while EU officials frequently characterize American tariff policy as isolationist or unfair.

Under the deal reached in 2025, the EU removed duties on U.S. industrial goods and opened preferential access for certain U.S. seafood and farm products, while most EU exports to the United States now face a 15% tariff. EU compliance disputes have continued into 2026, with USTR opening a separate Section 301 investigation into Germany in June over pharmaceutical pricing practices.

The UAE, by contrast, used a July 2026 Washington visit to criticize the EU for stalling its own trade talks with Washington, while reaffirming its commitment to a $1.4 trillion, ten-year U.S. investment pledge.

Trump’s tariff actions against China have run on a separate track from the forced-labor duties, part of a broader effort to pressure Beijing economically. China remains subject to the fentanyl and reciprocal tariffs negotiated over the course of 2025 and 2026, and, as of mid-2026, a final comprehensive U.S.-China trade agreement remained unresolved despite multiple rounds of talks and a face-to-face meeting between Trump and Xi Jinping.

Even as the tariff regime has expanded, it has drawn a parallel wave of foreign investment commitments tied directly to it. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company has committed an additional $100 billion to U.S. semiconductor production, bringing its total American investment to $265 billion, the largest foreign direct investment in U.S. history.

The commitment follows the U.S.-Taiwan trade and investment deal signed in January 2026 and will fund four additional facilities, bringing TSMC’s total U.S. footprint to 12 leading-edge semiconductor and packaging plants, primarily in Arizona. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said the investment would create tens of thousands of American jobs.

The UAE’s $1.4 trillion pledge, first made in 2025, is advancing ahead of schedule across energy, advanced manufacturing, artificial intelligence, and technology. UAE investment vehicles MGX and Mubadala have driven the buildout, including MGX’s participation in multibillion-dollar funding rounds for Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI, and a $40 billion acquisition of AI infrastructure firm Aligned Data Centers through a BlackRock-led consortium.

The UAE ambassador to the U.S. said the country was “not hedging” and was “doubling down” on American technology, even amid the financial strain of the ongoing Iran war on Gulf state finances.

SoftBank pledged $100 billion for U.S. investment in December 2024. That commitment has since evolved into the Stargate Project, a joint venture with OpenAI, Oracle, and the UAE’s MGX fund to build AI infrastructure in the United States.

The project has expanded to nearly 7 gigawatts of planned capacity and more than $400 billion in investment commitments, with a target of reaching the full $500 billion, 10-gigawatt goal. SoftBank’s cumulative investment in OpenAI alone has reached $64.6 billion, including a $41 billion investment closed in December 2025.

Novartis remains on track with its $23 billion, five-year U.S. manufacturing and research investment first announced  in April 2025. The Swiss pharmaceutical company opened its seventh new facility in April 2026, a plant in Morrisville, North Carolina, for active pharmaceutical ingredient manufacturing. The expansion includes a $1.1 billion biomedical research hub in San Diego and new radioligand therapy manufacturing sites in Florida, Texas, and California, positioning Novartis to manufacture all of its advanced technology platforms domestically for the first time in company history.

Automakers have continued shifting production to the United States following the expiration of USMCA. Hyundai Motor Group raised its planned U.S. investment to $26 billion through 2028, up from an initial $21 billion pledge, including a new steel mill in Louisiana and expanded vehicle and robotics production.

Honda moved production of its next-generation Civic Hybrid from Guanajuato, Mexico, to Greensburg, Indiana, and Ohio, citing tariffs directly as the reason. Stellantis announced a $13 billion U.S. investment in October 2025 to expand plants in Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio. Toyota is shifting Tacoma production from Mexico to a $3.6 billion expansion of its San Antonio, Texas plant, a move Trump credited to his tariff policy, after the administration declined to renew USMCA in July 2026.

While the trillion-dollar pledge totals remain disputed and often unreconciled with the White House’s own published lists, confirmed inflows during the period already exceed three of Biden’s four years and are, based on early 2026 data, on pace to surpass even Biden’s peak year.

By the Bureau of Economic Analysis’s measure of actual new foreign direct investment, which tracks expenditures by foreign investors to acquire, establish, or expand U.S. businesses rather than pledges, 2025 totaled $232.2 billion, a 49.5% increase over 2024 and higher than any full Biden year except 2021, when FDI reached $333.6 billion.

Federal Reserve data shows FDI transactions running at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of $434.8 billion in the first quarter of 2026, a pace that, if sustained, would exceed 2021’s total.

The media would have the public believe that President Trump’s tariff regime was a failure. The reality is that while actual cash flows have been lower than the pledged amounts, those cash flows have been substantial, putting the United States on a course for record foreign direct investment (FDI).

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