The 180 Days Ran Out, and Now We Wait

By Siam Sukkhee Trading Co., Ltd — 2026-07-14 — zinc trading Southeast Asia

I was checking the calendar yesterday. The 180 days the Trump administration gave themselves to negotiate critical minerals agreements had just finished.

The clock stopped on July 13, 2026.

Back on January 15, Trump signed Proclamation 11001. The Commerce Department had decided that imports of processed critical minerals—zinc was on the list—threatened national security, or at least that's the wording they used. So the President's negotiators got exactly 180 days to cut deals with supplier countries before he'd decide on tariffs or import restrictions. That window is closed now. If you're trading zinc or galvanized steel out of this region into the US market, you're reading everything coming out of Washington. The margins on these products were already compressed by January's 25% duties. A Section 232 layer on top of that would hurt.

Actually, that's not quite right. The 25% tariffs wouldn't hurt. They're hurting. It's present tense.

The thing about Proclamation 11001 is that it covers 50 critical minerals in total, and the legal framing gives the White House a lot of room to manoeuvre. Unlike the direct steel and aluminum actions from before—those were flat tariffs, immediate, no negotiation—this one said: talk first, decide later. The tariffs are conditional. Not guaranteed. But whether the negotiations have been "sufficient" is entirely up to the President's judgement. Which means it could go either way.

For Southeast Asia, that ambiguity is everything.

ASEAN Economic Ministers have made formal complaints about what they call American unilateralism. They've warned that this kind of thing erodes WTO legitimacy, disrupts trade flows that have been stable for years, all of that. Whether anyone in Washington is actually listening—that's another conversation. The US accounts for roughly 3.6 percent of global cobalt consumption. For rare earths it's 1.7 percent. By those numbers, unilateral action doesn't pack much weight. But if you're a zinc oxide producer in Thailand or a galvanized steel manufacturer in Vietnam or Malaysia, the maths works differently. Your market is specific. Your customer base is local.

The regional response has been fractured, more or less. ASEAN drew up this Minerals Cooperation Action Plan with ambitious language about cooperation. Implementation has been uneven. Indonesia does its own thing. Vietnam does its own thing. When you're dealing with Washington's approach to trade—transactional, bilateral, point-by-point—a unified ASEAN position might carry some weight. A collection of individual complaints? Much less.

Vietnam seems better positioned than most, as far as I can tell. Lynas Rare Earths and LS Eco Energy got preliminary agreement on rare earth oxide supply through a processing facility they're planning. That signals something like alignment with US supply chain priorities rather than resistance to them. For zinc specifically. There's no comparable alignment yet.

The honest answer is nobody knows. Not outside the White House, anyway.

No one can tell you whether tariff rates are coming in days or weeks, or whether the administration will decide the negotiations went well enough and hold off entirely. What's certain is the 180-day breathing room is finished. Southeast Asian zinc traders have been waiting for clarity. Now the uncertainty gets narrower. The next signal from Washington won't be a deadline—it'll be a decision, and we'll all find out at the same time.

Tags: zinc trading, Section 232, Southeast Asia, Section 232 zinc tariffs 2026, ASEAN critical minerals trade pressure, US critical minerals negotiation deadline