At the heart of President-elect Trump’s threat on Monday to impose new tariffs on China is a recurring issue: the flow into the U.S. of the potent opioid fentanyl, created using Chinese chemicals. Cooperation on fentanyl between the countries has already been happening, making it one of the few issues that the two superpower rivals have been able to make progress on, reports the New York Times. In September, Chinese officials expanded the list of precursor chemicals used in making the drug, imposing more oversight. The move was the result of bilateral talks on narcotics that started after President Biden and China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, met a year ago. It was a rare instance of cooperation from China, which is the main source of chemicals used to make fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that kills tens of thousands of Americans a year. Much of the flow into the U.S. is from drug cartels in Mexico who mix the precursors and smuggle the finished product across the border.
Despite the recent momentum, much still needs to be done. Chinese producers of fentanyl ingredients, which are also used to produce legal pharmaceutical drugs, can circumvent laws by developing new uncontrolled precursor chemicals. Experts say that Chinese and U.S. law enforcement officials need to work together more closely, and that China needs to provide the U.S. more support in anti-money laundering efforts to block the flow of illicit money funding the trade. “An imposition of tariffs is not going to do anything regarding the flow of fentanyl,” said Vanda Felbab-Brown of the Brookings Institution. “In fact, it might undermine the counternarcotics cooperation that the U.S. and China have been doing in 2024 and that came after no cooperation for over two years.” Chinese officials have used the fentanyl issue as leverage over the U.S., cooperating only when they receive something in return. “If the United States wants to get more cooperation from China on the domestic fentanyl issue, it should seek China’s support in a constructive way instead of using unilateral, punitive measures to force China to make concessions,” said Song Guoyou, an American studies expert at Fudan University in Shanghai