“It’s very dangerous,” Trump warns Britain against deepening ties with China
President of the United States, Donald Trump, has cautioned Britain against deepening ties with China as UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer hailed the economic benefits of resetting relations with Beijing.
Starmer held three-hour talks with President Xi Jinping on Thursday where he called for a “more sophisticated relationship” with improved market access, lower tariffs and investment deals.
Answering questions about the ties, Trump, who himself plans to travel to China in April, said, “Well, it’s very dangerous for them to do that”, without elaborating.
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Around the time of Trump’s remarks, Starmer said at a meeting of the UK-China Business Forum in the Chinese capital on Friday that his “very warm” meetings with Xi had provided “just the level of engagement that we hoped for”.
“We warmly engaged and made some real progress, actually, because the UK has got a huge amount to offer,” he added.
Starmer hailed deals on visa-free travel and lower tariffs on certain goods as “really important access, symbolic of what we’re doing with the relationship.
“That is the way that we build the mutual trust and respect that is so important,” he emphasised.
Starmer is the latest Western leader to head to China, and his visit comes amid Trump’s on-and-off threats of trade tariffs and pledges to take over Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark.
Last month, French President Emmanuel Macron visited China and Xi accompanied him on a rare trip outside the capital.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz is also expected to travel to China soon.
Trump has threatened to impose tariffs on Canada after Prime Minister Mark Carney struck economic deals with Beijing on a recent visit.
Trump on Thursday said the US was decertifying Bombardier Global Express business jets and threatened 50% import tariffs on all aircraft made in Canada until the country’s regulator certifies several of the planes produced by US rival Gulfstream.
READ ALSO: Tariffs: Trump approves 90-day pause for countries, increases China rate to 125%
“If, for any reason, this situation is not immediately corrected, I am going to charge Canada a 50% Tariff on any and all aircraft sold into the United States of America,” Trump said of the Gulfstream certification process in a post on Truth Social.
His declaration came after Carney last week also called on nations to accept the end of the rules-based global order that Washington had once championed, citing US trade policy
The threat of decertification, if carried out, would have a drastic impact on US carriers such as American Airlines and Delta Air Lines, which rely on Canadian-made planes for many of their regional services.
“Mixing safety issues with politics and grievances is an incredibly bad idea,” Richard Aboulafia, managing director of US aerospace management consulting firm AeroDynamic Advisory, said.
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IAM, a union representing more than 600,000 workers in North America and thousands of workers in the air transportation and aerospace sector, warned that Trump’s threats “would cause serious disruption to the North American aerospace industry and put thousands of jobs at risk on both sides of the border.”
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