Terence Corcoran: Trump plots to replace free trade with central planning
financialpost.comIt could be true, as Conrad Black wrote in his latest National Post column, that United States President Donald Trump’s tariff attacks on Canada and Mexico are nothing more than a game. “Trump is just playing poker,” claimed Black. That view of Trump’s tariff strategy seemed briefly plausible late Monday with the news that imposition of the tariffs would be postponed for a month.
The tariff delay came after Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum agreed to send soldiers to the U.S. border, thereby fulfilling one of Trump’s specific motives as declared in his executive order: stop the flow of immigrants and drugs entering the United States. A few hours later, Trump and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced tariffs would be delayed for a month after Canada agreed to appoint a “fentanyl czar” and launch a strike force on organized crime and money laundering.
The trade war appeared to be coming to an end, or at least a stall, a conclusion reinforced by a White House official who told CNBC that “Canadians appear to have misunderstood the plain language” of Trump’s tariff-imposing executive order. Dumb-dumb Canadian politicians, he implied, were wrongly “interpreting it as a trade war.”
Canada and the world, however, are not that dumb. We are absolutely in a trade war. Trump is the warrior who is charging around, dropping tariff bombs on one country after another, forcing other nations to retaliate or capitulate. On Tuesday, within hours of Trump’s imposition of a 10 per cent tariff, China responded with its own tariffs on U.S. goods and launched an antitrust case against Google. China’s moves were seen as limited, an indication that a negotiated deal is possible.
Whatever trade deals emerge in the aftermath of Trump’s
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