New Trump Tariffs Target Kazakhstan With 25% Rate

In a July 7 executive order, U.S. President Donald Trump effectively kicked back his deadline to review the early April “reciprocal tariffs” to August 1, while also announcing that new tariff rates had been set for an initial group of 14 countries – with more announcements to come.

Kazakhstan, which was targeted in the initial “Liberation Day” tariff announcement with a rate of 27 percent, was hit instead with a 25 percent tariff that will go into effect on August 1.

Trump sent – and of course, posted to social media immediately – letters to the leaders of the affected countries. The letters are nearly identical in substance and if it wasn’t 2025, a reasonable person might assume they were a joke based on the absurd phrasing and capitalization quirks.

“It is a Great Honor for me to send you this letter in that it demonstrates the strength and commitment of our Trading Relationship, and the fact that the United States of America has agreed to continue working with Kazakhstan, despite having a significant Trade Deficit with your great Country,” the letter to Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev begins.

“We have had years to discuss our Trading Relationship with Kazakhstan, and have concluded that we must move away from these longterm, and very persistent, Trade Deficits engendered by Kazakhstan's Tariff, and Non Tariff, Policies and Trade Barriers.”

Where the actual trade balance rests is a matter of whose statistics are referenced. As I wrote in April:

According to the U.S. Trade Representative, total goods trade with Kazakhstan amounted to $3.4 billion in 2024 – $1.1 billion in U.S. exports to Kazakhstan and $2.3 billion in U.S. imports from Kazakhstan, for a trade deficit of $1.3 billion.

Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Trade and Integration said in an April 3 statement that trade turnover in 2024 amounted to $4.2 billion – with $2.2 billion in imports from the U.S. and nearly $2 billion in exports from Kazakhstan to the U.S.

These figures not only do not match up, but they suggest conflicting trade deficits. Both the U.S. and Kazakhstan cannot simultaneously be in a trade deficit with the other.

The bulk of Kazakhstan’s exports to the United States are crude petroleum, silver, and radioactive chemicals (i.e. uranium). Kazakhstan is a major oil-exporting country and is the world leader in uranium production.

The original April tariff announcement outlined a range of exceptions. The new rates would not supersede tariffs set out in various other orders mandating sectoral tariffs -- on aluminum, steel, automobiles -- and would not apply to a wide range of goods listed in an annex that included copper, pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, critical minerals, and energy and energy products.

The new executive order and a fact sheet posted by the White House do not mention those exceptions beyond the sectoral tariffs. (This doesn’t mean they aren’t in play, but that the official communication is not clear on this point.)

In fact, the letter to Tokayev stated: “Starting on August 1, 2025, we will charge Kazakhstan a Tariff of only 25% on any and all Kazakh products sent into the United States, separate from all Sectoral Tariffs” (emphasis added).

Nevertheless, in a July 8 statement, Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Trade and Integration stated that “the measures taken will not affect about 95 percent of Kazakhstan's exports to the United States.” The ministry said that “most of Kazakhstan's exports will continue to be supplied without new duties due to the exemption from the new tariffs.”

Astana, the statement noted, had sent specific proposals to Washington and was awaiting a date for negotiations. Kazakhstan, the ministry said, was not considering retaliatory tariffs.

The ministry said that trade turnover between Kazakhstan and the U.S. for January-May 2025 amounted to $1.2 billion, with exports from Kazakhstan to the U.S. accounting for $418.2 million, suggesting that imports from the U.S. to Kazakhstan were around $847 million – meaning, as noted above, that the two sides effectively both believe they are the one in the trade deficit.

Whatever the actual data is, this illuminates the larger reality that trade is not a simple mathematical exercise. And a trade deficit, regardless of which side it falls on, isn’t easily solved with tariffs.

Trump continues to erroneously phrase his tariffs as taxes that partner countries importing goods into the U.S. “pay.” That’s just not how tariffs work. In most cases, businesses – that is, American businesses – will pay tariffs to import goods from abroad. Those costs, economists argue, are typically passed onto customers. The foreign country doesn’t pay them directly. A foreign country may “pay” by seeing less demand from the U.S.

And while that may be a serious problem for some countries that have deeply integrated themselves in the U.S. economy, it’s hard to envision Kazakhstan being one of them. Astana has a large number of trade partners, broadly spread across Europe and Asia. According to OEC data from 2023, the top destinations of Kazakhstan’s exports were China (15.8 percent, $15.2 billion), the U.K. (14.9 percent, $14.3 billion), and Russia (10.2 percent, $9.78 billion). The U.S., in that data set, imported $2.27 billion in goods from Kazakhstan in 2023, amounting to just 2.3 percent of Kazakhstan’s exports.

One more note has to be made: While Trump’s tariffs are packaged in the language of fairness – accusing Kazakhstan and other countries of treating the U.S. unfairly by exporting more to the U.S. than they buy from Americans and imposing various non-tariff barriers – Astana has complaints of its own to make, namely about the Jackson-Vanik amendment to the Trade Act of 1974, which rendered certain countries ineligible for normal trade relations with the United States due to restrictions on emigration, specifically that of Soviet Jews seeking to leave the USSR.

Although the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Jackson-Vanik lived on and to this day applies to most of Central Asia. Although several bills over the years have been proposed in Congress to exempt Kazakhstan (as well as Uzbekistan and Tajikistan – but not Turkmenistan) from the amendment, none have ever made it out of committee. In practice, Kazakhstan has been granted conditional normal trade relations on an annual basis, after review, every year for decades – allowing trade to operate and grow, mostly as normal.

But the amendment remains a sore point for Astana. One cannot hear a Kazakh diplomat speak in Washington without Jackson-Vanik being mentioned. It is a lingering remnant of Cold War policy, which U.S. lawmakers have not cared about enough to repeal, and that says something about how seriously the U.S. takes its relationship with Kazakhstan.

Trump’s 25 percent tariffs – whether they apply to all Kazakh exports to the U.S. or just 5 percent – say something similar.