The United States will place a lower-than-promised 20% tariff on many Vietnamese exports, Donald Trump said on Wednesday, cooling tensions with its tenth-biggest trading partner days before the U.S. president could raise levies on most imports.

President Donald Trump said he had reached a trade deal with Vietnam following weeks of intense diplomacy between the nations and ahead of a deadline next week that would have seen higher tariffs imposed on the country’s imports.

The inclusion of a 40 per cent tariff on transshipped goods could ‘open up a can of worms’ for the whole region, analysts said.