It kind of makes you wonder about the stuff that these countries trade that they aren't talking about. Most notably weapons and things like that. I'm sure the US produces and supplies a lot of those (just guessing anyway), they probably don't want to rock the boat too much because of stuff like that. Unfortunately that just leaves the stuff that impacts the citizens.
And this is definitely another place that the RoW should stop purchasing for at least the time being. 450B worth a year.
The thing is, the US has very good weapons and in many cases the best, but the others aren't that far behind, and are likely cheaper. If there is no trade benefit to buy from the US, why buy?
I'm guessing there are back room deals that we can only guess on. So much for transparency!
Oh for sure. I reckon there is a whole lot of stuff that isn't spoken about, because it is "inconvenient" to expose it.