This is the part nobody wants to admit. The rest of the world **was** fucking us. If the last five presidents had been willing to use even the smallest amount of pressure to keep shit like this from happening for 35 years, we wouldn't have needed Donald Trump to come in with the sledgehammer. This is also why I laugh when people try to use pure tariff rates as a counter-argument to Trump's "reciprocal tariffs." Sure, our allies had relatively low tariff rates against us, but the protectionist measures they employed to favor their industries over ours were rampant and audacious, and until recently, largely unanswered by the United States.