Donald Trump has finally found a way to make enemies of the mail. Not just the U.S. Postal Service, which he’s periodically threatened with privatization, but the entire global postal network. This week, countries from Germany to India to the United Kingdom are suspending or restricting package deliveries to the United States in response to Trump’s decision to end the long-standing de minimis tariff exemption. For nearly a century, this rule allowed small packages worth under $800 to slip through customs duty-free. It was a pragmatic recognition that neither U.S. officials nor international carriers should be buried in paperwork for every trinket ordered off Alibaba, Etsy, or Shein.
That exception vanishes Friday. And with it, nearly 1.36 billion packages worth $64.6 billion in 2024 trade are now poised to become bureaucratic hostages. The move is being sold by Trump as a crackdown on drugs and counterfeit goods, but to the rest of the world it looks like one more example of Washington weaponizing red tape. Postal systems in Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Italy, and the Nordic carrier PostNord stopped shipments effective August 23. France and Austria follow on Monday. Britain’s Royal Mail is halting packages on Tuesday to ensure whatever’s already in the system gets through before the deadline. Even India has pulled back, limiting service to letters, documents, and gifts under $100.
The irony is as thick as a customs declaration form. The very countries Trump has spent months courting for new trade “frameworks”, the UK, France, Germany, are now forced to cut off postal links with the U.S. not because they want to, but because they can’t decipher the rules he’s dropped on their desks at the last possible moment. DHL, Europe’s largest shipper, flatly declared it could no longer accept parcels for the U.S. from business customers, citing unanswered questions about who collects the duties, what data must be transmitted to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and how the process is supposed to work. In the Netherlands, PostNL’s spokesman offered the bluntest advice: “If you have something to send to America, you should do it today.”
Families in London or Paris mailing birthday gifts now face customs bills of ten percent or more, even when the gift is nothing more than a $120 sweater. Etsy sellers in Berlin or Florence who once relied on American buyers may find their businesses cut off altogether. Consumers in Ohio or Oregon who thought they scored a deal on Temu will either see the price triple or watch their package vanish into a suspended-service void. The de minimis exemption wasn’t some esoteric trade perk for China; it was the invisible plumbing that kept everyday global commerce flowing. Its elimination creates not just costs but chaos, because the U.S. has not provided its partners with clear procedures, timelines, or even functioning computer systems to collect the money.
The Washington Post described European carriers as facing “critical unresolved issues,” including whether duties must be prepaid, who shoulders the liability if they aren’t, and how customs can process the mountain of new data. The Financial Times warned that the fallout could devastate platforms like Shein and Temu, which built their empires on shipping vast quantities of low-value parcels. The Associated Press hammered home the sheer scale of what’s at stake: 1.36 billion packages in a single year, suddenly dumped into a regulatory black hole.
The Trump administration, characteristically, has chosen to spin this as a victory for American manufacturing, a blow against Chinese imports, and even a tool in the “war on drugs.” In practice it’s none of those things. China’s exemption already ended in May. Drug traffickers do not ship fentanyl disguised as birthday presents from Manchester. And U.S. manufacturers don’t benefit when the price of everything from Swedish paperbacks to Danish baby clothes to Italian ceramics goes up because the shipping network itself has seized. What this really does is wall Americans off from the rest of the world’s ordinary, low-value trade, and do it in a way that antagonizes allies who are already skeptical of Trump’s tariffs and erratic economic brinkmanship.
The tragedy here is not just the inconvenience of longer waits or higher prices. It’s the corrosion of trust. Postal networks operate on predictability, on the assurance that when you hand over a parcel in Lyon or Liverpool, there is a clear and reliable path to get it to Los Angeles. By yanking out the foundation stone of the system with just two weeks’ notice and no workable replacement, Trump has made that trust impossible. Instead of a world bound by simple cross-border exchange, Americans are being pushed into a world where grandma’s package from Glasgow is a contraband item, where Etsy dreams die at customs, and where the President congratulates himself for fighting foreign freeloaders while his own citizens wonder why the mail stopped coming.
This is nothing more than a tariff tantrum, an embargo by accident, that leaves Americans cut off, small businesses cut down, and the rest of the world wondering how long they can afford to keep playing along with a country that no longer knows how to send or receive a package.
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