The Fortnight in Brief
US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said on July 16 that Vietnam needs to move further on non-tariff barriers, economic security cooperation, and intellectual property before a trade agreement closes. Speaking on Bloomberg Television from the Aspen Security Forum, he said what economic security means in practice: "If we're going to be shipping them some of our high-tech equipment, they need to align with us on export controls and other things." Vietnam has been working the intellectual property file since April, when Washington designated it a Priority Foreign Country, and an early-May government dispatch ordered a 20% increase in copyright-infringement detections. Greer's point is that this has not been enough. More in Policy Watch.
Commerce published its final anti-dumping determination on Vietnamese hardwood and decorative plywood today, and the number came down hard: 90.12%, against the 196.14% preliminary rate set in March. All 52 companies that qualified for a separate rate receive the same margin, as does the Vietnam-wide entity, so there is no longer a penalty rate for companies that stayed out of the proceeding. The companion countervailing determination sets an all-others subsidy rate of 47.68%. What an importer pays today is the 84.95% anti-dumping cash deposit and nothing else: countervailing provisional measures lapsed on May 22 and are not currently being collected. The roughly 137.8% combined figure applies only if the ITC affirms injury and a countervailing order issues, a vote about six weeks away that can also void the entire case. One exporter moved sharply the other way. Details in the Tracker.
Vietnam posted a $16.65 billion trade deficit for the first half, reversing a $7.95 billion surplus a year earlier, on total turnover of $549.69 billion. Import growth of 33.4% outran export growth of 21%, with the foreign-invested sector accounting for $204.71 billion of the $283.17 billion import bill. Read that as factories buying production inputs ahead of the output they'll ship, rather than as export weakness.
Two steel markets opened proceedings inside a fortnight. Australia's Anti-Dumping Commission is investigating Hoa Sen Group and Nam Kim Steel on galvanized steel after a BlueScope Steel Australia complaint, working from an initiation-stage alleged dumping margin of 56.21% that Hoa Sen has publicly contested, with a report due October 2. In Canada, the CITT must decide by July 31 whether to continue duties on Vietnamese corrosion-resistant steel sheet, currently 2.3% to 71.1%; CBSA determined in February that dumping would likely resume if the finding lapsed.
Policy Watch: The asks Washington has stopped being vague about
Three asks, one of them different in kind
For most of 2026 the US-Vietnam negotiation has been legible as an argument about a number. Greer's July 16 remarks moved it somewhere else. Speaking at the Aspen Security Forum, the Trade Representative said Washington wants more from Hanoi on non-tariff barriers, on economic security cooperation, and on intellectual property after months of talks that have not closed. On the export-control point he was specific: high-tech US equipment flows to Vietnam are conditional on Vietnam aligning its own controls with American ones.
Two of those asks are ordinary trade-negotiation material. Non-tariff barriers are the licensing regimes, product standards, registration requirements, and customs practices that raise the cost of selling into Vietnam without appearing in a tariff schedule; they are negotiated in every bilateral agreement and Vietnam has conceded on them before. Intellectual property enforcement is a known file, running through Vietnam's April 30 designation as a Priority Foreign Country in USTR's Special 301 Report and the Section 301 investigation opened on May 29. Vietnam has already responded: the government, in Official Dispatch 38/CĐ-TTg of May 5 (signed by Deputy Prime Minister Hồ Quốc Dũng), launched a May 7–30 enforcement campaign directing ministries to raise copyright-infringement detections by at least 20%, and a further online-piracy push followed this month. That is a country paying an installment.
Export-control alignment is a different category of ask. It requires Vietnam to restrict what it sells, and to whom, in coordination with a country whose principal target is Vietnam's largest trading partner and northern neighbor. Vietnam's two-way trade with China ran $256.5 billion in 2025, and goods imports from China reached $115 billion by the end of June this year. An export-control regime built to American specifications sits directly across that relationship. (That reading is analysis, not a sourced claim. What is sourced is Greer's statement and the trade figures.)
What happens Friday
Section 122 expires by operation of law at 12:01 AM Eastern on July 24, three days after this issue lands. The 10% surcharge Vietnamese goods have carried since February 24 stops then regardless of what anyone decides, because the statute caps the authority at 150 days. Trade counsel tracking the handoff expect Section 301 to take over at the 12.5% rate USTR proposed for Vietnam, which trades a temporary surcharge for a permanent one: Section 301 carries no rate cap and no expiry, and its rate can be revised by the same office now asking Hanoi for concessions on three fronts. Issue #5 covered the litigation; we will cover what actually replaced it in next week's Mekong Memo, once there is a proclamation to read rather than a forecast to repeat.
What I'd tell a client this week: the tariff line on your landed-cost model is now the smaller half of the problem. If your compliance function is built to track duty rates and country-of-origin documentation, it is built for the negotiation that was happening in April. The asks on the table in July are about conduct: enforcement records, licensing regimes, and customer lists. Those sit in a different part of the business than a customs broker's invoice.
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