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| President Donald Trump addresses a joint session of Congress as Vice President JD Vance and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) applaud in the Capitol building's House chamber on Tuesday. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post) |
| Canada’s prime minister Justin Trudeau summed up the moment best. “Today, the United States launched a trade war against Canada, their closest partner and ally,” Trudeau said at a Tuesday news conference in Ottawa. “At the same time, they’re talking about working positively with Russia and appeasing Vladimir Putin, a lying, murderous dictator. Make it make sense.” The Trump administration’s flurry of actions in recent days has bewildered and irked its partners. Western officials were still reeling from the U.S.’s suspension of military assistance to Ukraine, which followed President Donald Trump’s rancorous confrontation in the Oval Office last week with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. By Tuesday morning, the White House acted on its weeks of threats, putting in force sweeping 25 percent tariffs on all Canadian and Mexican goods imported into the United States, and also slapping additional tariffs on a slate of Chinese exports.
The moves prompted immediate or threatened retaliatory measures from all three countries, rattled U.S. markets and cratered relations between the United States and its neighbors. Doug Ford, the conservative premier of Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, was so incensed by Trump’s hostility that he told reporters he would go to the United States to campaign against the Republicans in the midterm elections. In his incendiary Tuesday evening address to a joint session of Congress, Trump said “we’ve been ripped off for decades by every country on earth and we will not let that happen any longer.” He complained about the “large deficits” in trade with the U.S.'s neighbors and waved away widespread fears of an economic downturn as a “little disturbance.” Often with Trump, the assumption is there’s a method to the seeming madness. Once, there was a belief among analysts that Trump was bluffing with his tariff threats, putting them on the table to win concessions out of other countries and political victories for his base. But Trump showed little sign Tuesday of backing down, vowing further tariffs on the retaliatory measures taken by his neighbors. (Trump officials, though, suggested new announcements regarding compromises over tariffs could come as early as Wednesday.) The U.S. president has for years railed against perceived imbalances in the international trade system and wants to compel companies to locate their businesses and manufacturing operations on U.S. soil. But that’s a complicated task in a global economy marked by border-crossing supply chains, as well as sprawling trade pacts with neighbors and partners farther afield. The moves in recent days speak to a broader campaign of “shock therapy” Trump has unleashed at home and abroad. He and his allies are bent on slashing the federal government and purging it of bureaucrats who aren’t loyalists to Trump’s right-wing agenda. They have already embraced a protectionist, illiberal foreign policy, launching trade wars that have stoked rival Canadian and Mexican nationalisms while sending signals to Europe that have left E.U. diplomats preparing for the collapse of the transatlantic alliance. Few analysts or politicians elsewhere buy the White House’s complaints about illicit drug and human trafficking across its borders as legitimate grounds for the punitive tariffs. Trudeau even suggested that Trump was earnest about his repeated insistence that Canada should become the U.S.'s 51st state, and believed wrecking Canada’s economy could be a prelude to annexation.
For now, signs point to a spike in prices for U.S. consumers. From promising a “golden age” for the country, Trump allies took turns in television appearances to argue that short-term pain for Americans might be required for future fiscal stability. Faced with a precipitous decline in projected U.S. GDP growth, the Trump administration is considering revamping how it officially measures GDP, excising public spending from the metric in defiance of the decades-old scholarly consensus. Trump’s combative approach has had tangible effects on some fronts. His hectoring over Chinese influence in the Panama Canal preceded a Hong Kong-based firm selling its stake in a company that operates facilities along the strategic passage. The dustup with Zelensky, as shocking as it was, was followed on Tuesday with a statement from the Ukrainian leader, in which he reiterated his commitment to sign a deal with the Trump administration over Ukraine’s mineral wealth — without the clear security guarantees officials in Kyiv want from the U.S. and its NATO allies. And European leaders are trying to muster what resources they can to boost defense spending and come up with plans to defend Ukraine in the absence of U.S. commitments. Even then, analysts warn of lasting damage. “There is a serious argument for jolting Europe out of its torpor, but Trump is mistaken if he thinks only the allies will suffer from a transatlantic split,” wrote Hal Brands, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “America’s alliances give it great leverage on many issues, from maintaining the international primacy of the dollar to confronting the Iranian nuclear program. A superpower without friends won’t be so super anymore.” Michel Duclos, a resident fellow at the Institut Montaigne, a leading French think tank, noted on social media that the intensity of coverage on the Trump administration and the overwhelming scale and speed of the headlines it generates has a distorting effect on the international conversation — and obscures greater political shifts on the world stage. “Focusing on the dramatic events in Washington can let the people believe that the U.S. are the super-master of the World,” Duclos wrote. “It is not true anymore and Trump’s policies make U.S. alone and weaker.” Trump had put the entire “postwar order” on “life support,” argued Richard Haass, a veteran of multiple Republican administrations and president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations. “I’m used to empires or orders crumbling,” he said on NPR. “I’m used to them being overwhelmed. I’ve never seen … the country that created it and maintained it dismantling it. And that is exactly what we are doing.” | ||||||||||||||||||