On tariffs, Trump moves forward, and back. What does it herald for trade?

Only one tumultuous week elapsed between President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff announcement on the White House lawn and a sudden change of course.

But the question now preoccupying U.S. trading partners worldwide, despite huge relief over the 90-day “pause” announced Wednesday, is whether he has changed his mind.

Not about tariffs, clearly his geopolitical instrument of choice. Nor about America’s main trade nemesis under successive administrations: China. There is to be no pause, it seems, in the looming all-out tariff war between the world’s two largest economies.

Their concern is that Mr. Trump’s intention on “Liberation Day” went far beyond just fixing tariff discrepancies by imposing “reciprocal” rates on trading partners. Instead, it appears he may aim to opt out altogether of the global system of world trade that has operated, with strong U.S. support, since the end of World War II.

Under that system, countries run trade surpluses with some partners and deficits with others, as each maximizes what it can do best. The assumption, proved over eight decades, has been that the size of the world’s economic pie would expand, ultimately to everyone’s mutual benefit.

But as America’s trading partners pored over last Wednesday’s new tariff list, they found that Mr. Trump was seeking to eliminate all U.S. bilateral trade deficits.

In other words, he hoped to stop any country, of any size, anywhere, from selling more things to America than America sells to them – no matter how much American consumers or American producers might want what they are offering.

And that worry remains as the clock begins ticking on what Mr. Trump is portraying as a three-month “dealmaking” respite for countries targeted by the tariffs.

Will these deals focus on equalizing tariff rates – a process that many, if not most, of the affected countries seem ready to undertake?

Or will new, zero-sum U.S. trade rules apply? Will the tariff weapon be sheathed only if “surplus” countries either sell a lot less to America or buy a lot more?

It was the “tariff chart” Mr. Trump brandished at his White House event that ignited this concern.

The breadth of the potential impact became clear in an odd feature of the tariff list: Mr. Trump reserved his steepest rates not for America’s more economically advanced trading partners, but for economic minnows across Africa and Asia.

Siphiwe Sibeko/Reuters

Workers leave the Nien Hsing Textile factory, a global manufacturer of Levi's jeans in Lesotho, a small southern African kingdom that relies heavily on exports to the U.S.

Those nations are developing economies – critically reliant on their exports to the United States, but mostly too poor to buy similar quantities of U.S. goods.

The chart that Mr. Trump produced had little to do with the tariffs that other countries applied to U.S. exports. It was based on the gaps between how much they bought from America and how much they sold.

Countries such as Bangladesh and Botswana were hit with a 37% levy; Sri Lanka, 44%; Vietnam and Madagascar a few percentage points higher.

Stuck with the steepest tariffs were the southeast Asian nation of Cambodia, at 49%, and the tiny, landlocked kingdom of Lesotho in southern Africa, at the maximum 50%.

Until Mr. Trump’s announcement, neither had reason to believe they would be prime targets.

Cambodia had slightly more reason to worry. Like its neighbor Vietnam, Cambodia has attracted many U.S. and other international firms finding China less attractive as a manufacturing base.

Cambodia and Lesotho are both leading producers of textiles and finished clothing items. Much of what they produce goes to America.

These exports make an essential contribution to their economies. They provide jobs for a large chunk of their labor force, including a disproportionate number of women.

The initially advertised aim of “Liberation Day” – “reciprocal tariffs” – is not necessarily difficult to achieve, and many governments will hope to negotiate reciprocal deals with Washington.

But the European Union revealed this week that before Mr. Trump’s tariff announcement, it had proposed a “zero-for-zero” elimination of tariffs on automotive and industrial goods. Washington was not interested.

Lesotho’s government is feeling especially unsettled.

It has benefited from a job creation program called the African Growth and Opportunity Act, launched by U.S. President Bill Clinton, which gives a range of Lesotho’s exports tariff-free access to the U.S. market.

Its days could now be numbered.

The broader question, not just for the minnows but for all U.S. trade partners, is whether the underlying assumption that trade can be of mutual benefit, beyond simple balance-sheet calculations, is an assumption shared by Mr. Trump.

Lesotho provides one example of this “win-win” vision in another commodity it sells to America: raw diamonds.

Americans want diamonds. They are hard to get, and there are no commercially viable diamond mines in the U.S. President Trump wants to punish Lesotho for selling its diamonds to America, unless it spends all the proceeds on buying American goods.

Finding itself in the same boat is Madagascar, a leading producer of vanilla, which does not grow in America.

Mr. Trump may reject the notion that trade as it is now organized can be a “win-win” proposition. But the voices in and outside America that convinced him to back off his tariffs for 90 days will also be warning him of the dangers for consumers and companies at home of a wholesale trade policy shakeup.

It could turn out to be “lose-lose.”