VIETNAM offered to remove all tariffs on US imports after President Donald Trump announced a 46 per cent levy on the Southeast Asian nation, according to an April 5 letter from Vietnam's Communist Party, reports Bloomberg.

The offer was made by party chief To Lam to Trump in a letter seen by Bloomberg. Mr Lam requested that the US not apply any additional tariffs or fees on Vietnamese goods and asked to postpone the implementation of the tariff announced by Trump last week by at least 45 days after April 9.

Peter Navarro, a trade adviser to Trump, suggested that Vietnam's initiative didn't go far enough.

"If you simply lowered our tariffs and they lowered our tariffs to zero, we'd still run about $120 billion trade deficit with Vietnam," he said on Fox News. "And the problem is all of the non-tariff cheating that they do."