Over the weekend, Donald Trump made good on his promise to impose trade barriers on key US trading partners. Citing the influx of narcotics and “illegal aliens,” the president announced plans to slap a 25 percent tariff on goods from Mexico and Canada (with a 10 percent carve-out for Canadian energy imports), while Chinese goods received a blanket 10 percent in addition to the levies already in place on imports from that country.
As economic policy tools, these measures are misguided. In addition to heightening the economic stress of domestic households, they will likely fail to permanently alter the trade deficit, the reduction of which is central to Trump’s neoprotectionist ambitions.
The geopolitical logic is as unsound as the economic one is unclear. The discrepancy between the tariffs on the United States’ immediate neighbors and the additional ones on China, which the elites of both parties identify as their main geopolitical rival, raises the question of what this opening salvo of the trade war is supposed to achieve.
It is possible that the consolidation of US power in the Western hemisphere, by tightening influence over resource-rich Canada (and possibly Greenland), is aimed at shoring up the United States’ position relative to China in the long term. But the absence of any sort of ultimatum or concrete demand — such as, say, a demand to reduce trade with China — makes this unlikely. Though initially citing the influx of fentanyl and immigrants as the main concern (neither of which would be stopped by trade barriers), Trump took…
Auteur: Dominik A. Leusder
