Türkiye has landed in the costlier tier of America's newest tariff. The United States is putting a 12.5 percent duty on Turkish goods, the higher of two rates it set this week for 60 trading partners it accuses of failing to keep products made with forced labor out of their markets. The lower rate, 10 percent, went to countries Washington judged to have made a real effort. Türkiye did not make that list.
The duties come from the office of the US Trade Representative, Jamieson Greer, acting under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, the law that lets Washington punish foreign trade practices it considers unfair. They take effect Friday, and they replace a temporary 10 percent tax on foreign goods that is expiring. Between them, the 60 countries account for the vast majority of what the United States imports.
The split is the part worth reading closely. Washington set the lower rate, 10 percent, for the partners it judged to have taken real steps against forced-labor goods, a list that runs from Canada and Mexico to the United Kingdom, Pakistan, Indonesia, and India. It held the higher 12.5 percent rate for the rest, the group it says built no real ban, or built one and let it lapse. Türkiye is in that heavier bracket, alongside China, Vietnam, and Thailand. A few large economies, among them the European Union, Japan, and South Korea, were given adjusted rates that cap their combined duties at one of the two levels.
One point is easy to get wrong, so it is worth stating plainly. The tariff faults Türkiye for what it allows into its own market, not for how it makes its exports. Washington's complaint is that Türkiye, like the other 59, does too little to keep goods made with forced labor abroad from crossing its borders. The United States has banned such imports for close to a century, Greer said, and framed the tariffs as pressure on everyone else to do the same. "Decades of moral suasion have not eradicated forced labor from global supply chains," he said.
There is a back story to why the tool is Section 301 at all. Earlier this year the US Supreme Court found that many of the tariffs Trump had imposed under emergency powers were enacted illegally. That closed one door, and the administration went looking for others that Congress had left open. Section 301, with its long paper trail of investigations and hearings, is one of them. The forced-labor cases opened in March, drew a formal finding of "unreasonable" conduct in June, and ran through public hearings in July before Greer signed off this week.
For Türkiye, the exposure runs through what it sells to Americans. The United States bought about $16.4 billion of Turkish goods last year, which makes it Türkiye's third-largest export market. A 12.5 percent duty does not fall evenly across that. It presses hardest on the things Türkiye actually ships west: machinery, jewelry and worked precious metals, electrical equipment, vehicles and parts, and the carpets and textiles that have gone to America for generations. Each of those now costs an American buyer more, which tends to mean fewer orders, thinner margins, or both.
The timing is unkind. Turkish exporters spent this week absorbing a second blow to the same business, the Houthi blockade in the Red Sea, which has sent cargo the long way around Africa and pushed freight costs up. One shock raises the price of getting goods to a buyer; the other raises the price of the goods once they arrive in America. They land on the same invoice.
Ankara has leaned on exports to hold its economy together through a long stretch of high inflation and a weak lira, and the United States is a market it has worked to grow. A new duty at the top rate, arriving with a label about forced labor, is the kind of thing a government answers. What Ankara can say is limited in any case. The tariff is set in Washington, on grounds Washington defined, and it takes effect at the end of the week whether Ankara likes it or not.