At the stroke of midnight on 7 August, the tariff hammer came down on Switzerland. The Bundesrat was not able to fend off the 39 percent US tariffs. Did it make mistakes during the negotiations? "No," says ZHAW expert Dominique Ursprung from the Center for Geopolitics and Competitiveness, and explains in an interview with Nau.ch why he considers Switzerland to be a random victim of Trump’s arbitrary economic policy.

At the same time, Ursprung warns Swiss companies in a second article against considering a "transshipment" strategy—that is, rerouting goods through neighbouring countries such as Liechtenstein, which are subject to lower tariffs, in an attempt to bypass the high US duties: "For companies, such an approach is clearly not advisable, as it would constitute a high-risk strategy," he says. If the practice were discovered, companies could face even higher punitive tariffs.

In a third article, Nau.ch quotes Ursprung’s scepticism regarding the economic rationale of the tariffs from a US perspective, even though President Trump is celebrating the measure: "Trump was elected because many people were dissatisfied with the economy. Now he’s well on his way to imposing significant additional costs on those very voters in their everyday lives."