Boost Trade With Other Nations To Mitigate Trump S Tariff Says Dr M

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 The former prime minister maintains that the tariffs will hurt the US more than its trading partners.
Former prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad said only nations exporting to the US will be badly affected by Donald Trump’s tariffs.PETALING JAYA: Former prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad says Malaysia should increase its trade with the rest of the world, including China, to mitigate the impact of the tariff imposed by the US government
In an interview with Bloomberg, Mahathir said the tariff policy adopted by Donald Trump’s administration was “wrong” and maintained that it would be more damaging to the US.
“The rest of the world will suffer, but America will suffer more because [of] all those industries which were set up by Americans outside of America to take advantage of low costs,” he said.
To a suggestion that Trump would take negotiations to reduce the tariffs as evidence that the levies would impact the nations in question, Mahathir said only those exporting to the US would be badly affected.
He said the rest of the world was not imposing high tariffs.
“So we should increase our trade with the rest of the world. With China, for example. To a certain extent, we can mitigate the effect of Trump’s high tariffs by avoiding America,” he said.
US president Trump announced a 25% tariff on Malaysian goods this week, following a 90-day delay in implementation of the initial 24% rate.
Mahathir told FMT in April that the wide-ranging tariffs imposed by the US would backfire and hurt the US economy more than its trading partners.
The tariffs, ranging from 10% to 49% on about 60 countries, would trigger price increases for goods in the US, leading to higher living costs for its people, he said.
Moving on from Japan’s WWII atrocities
Separately, Mahathir said Malaysia had to move on from the atrocities committed by the Japanese during World War II.
Mahathir, who was 16 when the Japanese occupation began, said he had not forgotten the “wrong things that they did”, adding however that Japan had changed completely after the war.
“We cannot hold their past against them,” he added.
He said Japan was a good model of how a country devastated by war could recover in a short period.
“And not only recover – at one time, they were number two in the world. We thought that we should learn about it, we should copy, and we should be able to achieve what they achieved,” he said. - FMT

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