President Donald Trump’s plan to impose sweeping tariffs on most of America’s trading partners has governments around the world racing to schedule phone calls, send delegations to Washington and offer up proposals to lower their import taxes in order to escape the levies.

On Monday, European officials offered to drop tariffs to zero on cars and industrial goods imported from the United States, in return for the same treatment. Israel’s prime minister was expected to personally petition Trump on Monday in meetings at the White House. Vietnam’s top leader, in a phone call last week, offered to get rid of tariffs on American goods, while Indonesia prepared to send a high-level delegation to Washington, D.C., to “directly negotiate with the U.S. government.”

Even Lesotho, the tiny landlocked country in Southern Africa, was assembling a delegation to send to Washington to protest the tariffs on its exports to the United States, which include denim for Calvin Klein and Levi’s.

Trump and his advisers have given mixed signals on whether the United States is willing to negotiate. On Sunday, Trump said that the tariffs would remain in place until U.S. trade deficits disappeared, meaning the United States is no longer buying more from these countries than it sells to them. But the administration still appeared to be welcoming offers from foreign nations, which are desperate to try to forestall more levies that go into effect Wednesday.

On Monday, as markets recoiled for a third day and Trump threatened even more punishing tariffs on China, the president said that “negotiations with other countries, which have also requested meetings, will begin taking place immediately.”

“Countries from all over the World are talking to us,” the president wrote on Truth Social Monday morning. “Tough but fair parameters are being set. Spoke to the Japanese Prime Minister this morning. He is sending a top team to negotiate!”

The turmoil in the stock markets since the president announced tariffs Wednesday has prompted speculation that the president might be willing to strike some deals to roll tariffs back. On NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., predicted that tariffs would be “a short-term issue while the negotiations are actually happening.”

“I think once the president starts announcing some negotiations in some different countries we’ll start to see the market calm, and we’ll start to see the rates come down pretty quickly,” Lankford said.

White House digs in

But both Trump and many of his advisers have downplayed the prospect of any immediate changes. On Sunday night, Trump told reporters on Air Force One that he would not reverse tariffs on other nations unless the trade deficits that the United States runs with China, the European Union and other nations disappeared.

“Hundreds of billions of dollars a year we lose with China,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One. “And unless we solve that problem, I’m not going to make a deal.” He added that he was “willing to deal with China, but they have to solve their surplus.”

The tariffs that go into effect Wednesday range from 10% to 40% on nearly 60 countries. They are calculated based on the U.S. trade deficit with each country and will be added to a 10% global levy that went into effect Saturday.

Some countries — like Canada — have threatened to impose retaliatory tariffs on American goods, while others have decided to hold off to avoid Trump’s ire. On Monday, Trump responded angrily to China’s decision to retaliate and said he would impose “additional tariffs on China of 50%, effective April 9.”

Other nations react

Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, reiterated a threat of retaliatory tariffs Monday even as she proposed dropping some tariffs between the United States and Europe to zero. “We are also prepared to respond through countermeasures, and defend our interests,” she said.

Lai Ching-te, Taiwan’s president, said in a video address Sunday night that Taiwan had no plans to retaliate with tariffs. He added that investment commitments made by Taiwanese companies to the United States would not change as long as they remained in the national interest.

Across Asia — where Trump has targeted some of his harshest levies and where factories specialize in making electronics, auto parts and shoes for the United States — leaders have been offering to strike deals and working to set up meetings with Trump. The tariffs are a particular threat to multinational companies that have relocated factories from China to Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand in recent years, after Trump opened a trade war with China in his first presidency.

On Monday, the trade secretary of the Philippines said the country would reduce tariffs on goods coming from the United States and meet “soon” with the U.S. economic team. The leader of Cambodia — which faces the highest tariff rates of any Asian country, at 49% — sent a letter to Trump on Friday, saying it was reducing tariffs on 19 categories of American imports immediately. Thailand, which is facing tariffs of 36% on its exports, expressed its “readiness to engage in dialogue.”

In Vietnam, where many people had been expecting tariffs of around 10%, the announcement of 46% tariffs came as a blow. Vietnam’s deputy prime minister, Ho Duc Phoc, was scheduled to leave Sunday for a trip to the United States with a delegation that included executives with the country’s two main airlines, which have been promising to buy Boeing aircraft.

Vietnam’s Trade Ministry asked the Trump administration to suspend the 46% tariff, and requested a phone call with the U.S. trade representative, Jamieson Greer, “as soon as possible,” according to a statement on the government’s website.

In a call with Trump last week, Vietnam’s top leader, To Lam, promised to slash tariffs to zero on liquefied natural gas, cars and other U.S. goods coming into the country, and suggested his counterpart do the same, according to a statement from the Vietnamese government.

South Korea’s trade minister, Cheong In-kyo, also planned to visit Washington this week to try to lower the blanket 25% tariff Trump imposed on goods from South Korea.