Donald Trump hit dozens of US trading partners with tariffs while formalising recent deals with others including the UK and EU, as he plunged the global economy into a new era of mercantile competition.

Crucial exporters to the US such as Taiwan, the world’s most important semiconductor exporter, will incur steep new levies. Trump also raised tariffs on Canada, an ally and major trading partner, to 35 per cent. India was hit with a rate of 25 per cent and Switzerland with 39 per cent.

The US president’s executive order on Thursday evening announcing the tariffs said they were designed to lower America’s trade deficit with many countries, which it described as an “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and economy of the United States”.

The tariffs would also raise US revenue, the order said, reflecting Trump’s plan to use duties on imports to pay for deep domestic tax cuts.

The new regime marks a softening of the aggressive levies the president announced on “liberation day” on April 2, but still leaves the US’s effective tariff rate at its highest level in decades, underscoring Trump’s drive to reshape the global economic order.

“This is a new system of trade,” said a senior administration official on Thursday night. “We’re moving from a system where the core principle was kind of efficiency at all costs . . . to one where the core principle is fair and balanced trade, where we can protect our economic interests while achieving market liberalisation abroad.”

The order followed months of mixed messages from Trump and frantic efforts by US trading partners to avert a full-blown trade war with the world’s most powerful economy.

Some US partners, including the UK, EU and Japan, secured deals in time — though critics in those countries have questioned the details of the agreements with Trump. The orders issued on Thursday formalised the tariff rates associated with the deals.

Canada, whose Prime Minister Mark Carney won an election earlier this year pledging to resist Trump’s “economic force”, failed to find a resolution despite an eleventh-hour lobbying effort in Washington.

Howard Lutnick, the US commerce secretary who has been central to the negotiations, told Fox News on Thursday that Carney was “tone deaf” for saying this week that Canada would recognise Palestinian statehood — a move that angered Trump in the middle of the trade negotiations.

Doug Ford, premier of Canada’s most populous province Ontario — a significant exporter of vehicle parts to the US — called on Ottawa to retaliate with a 50 per cent tariff on American steel and aluminium.

“Now is not the time to roll over. We need to stand our ground,” Ford wrote on X.

The 35 per cent duty on Canadian goods, announced in a separate order, will begin on Friday. Goods that comply with the terms of the 2020 North America trade deal will still be exempt from the higher tariffs, however. The levies on other countries will start in seven days, giving US customs time to implement them.