Do you really think Donald Trump will honour any ‘deal’ he makes?

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Kevin Yin is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail and an economics doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley.

U.S. President Donald Trump announced his trade agreement with the United Kingdom a few weeks ago, paused his Chinese trade war and opened up the possibility of further deals around the world, giving rise to a temptation to clamour for negotiations.

For the U.K. deal, especially, pundits in Canada and abroad are already scouring the negotiations for clues about how to reduce levies on their own goods. It is understandable that countries battered by these job-destroying taxes are looking hopefully at the possibility of relief. But Mr. Trump’s famous fickleness and the limited content of the agreement means no one should get too excited about it – or any other deals he cuts.

It is not so much that the U.S. President negotiates with the intent to deceive, as that he cannot even decide what he wants. Mr. Trump’s love of tariffs is famous, but so is his willingness to occasionally kowtow to markets, and each force seems to dominate his psyche at random moments.

He announces trade policies ad hoc on Truth Social, offers arbitrary grace periods and then strikes again by announcing tariffs on the entire world. After sufficient pain, his Treasury officials seem to rein him in to some extent, and the cycle repeats.

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It‘s also not entirely possible to rely on the quality of his personal relationships with world leaders, which are themselves subject to wild mood swings. Leaders who have worked with him argue that Mr. Trump responds more to strength and has a history of taking a mile in negotiations where one gives him an inch. It is simply impossible to trust his sincerity or commitment to formal trade agreements. A deal with the Trump administration is often no deal at all.

Canadians should understand this better than anyone. In his first term, the Trump administration forced us to renegotiate the North American free-trade agreement, which he called “the worst trade deal ever made.” We fought tooth and nail to protect our interests in the renegotiations and the outcome was the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, a relatively benign alteration to NAFTA which left much of the original agreement intact. At the time this was celebrated by his administration as a great step forward in trade policy. Then, in the run-up to the 2024 election, he slammed his own deal, asking “who would ever sign a thing like this?” Who indeed?

Take the British deal as an example. The actual content of the U.K.-U.S. agreement serves as scant relief for the British economy, and a poor blueprint for countries such as Canada to carve out their own concessions. Depending on who you ask, it can sound as if there are two entirely different agreements floating around.

Government websites in the U.S. and U.K. hailed it as “historic” and a “landmark economic deal” respectively, but the Brookings Institute, a think tank, described it as “limited and selective,” while the BBC described it as not appearing to “meaningfully alter the terms of trade.” It will come as little surprise that the external analysis is a bit more accurate.

Nothing has actually been signed yet, as Congress still needs to approve the agreement, and even if implemented, the agreement leaves substantial tariffs untouched. If the current agreement does get turned into policy, the 10-per-cent blanket tariffs on U.K. imports will remain in place (with an exemption for Britain’s steel industry), which is a significantly higher levy than the pre-Trump rate of 2.5 per cent.

Moreover, the U.S. does not run a bilateral trade deficit with the U.K., which is not the case for many other countries hoping to reduce their tariff burdens. Mr. Trump has suggested that these countries should not expect such favourable treatment.

It is not to say that countries should not pursue negotiations, but that deals with Mr. Trump should neither be a priority nor prematurely lauded. A trade agreement is still an accomplishment – the new tariff regime, if implemented, will save jobs that would have otherwise been destroyed by Mr. Trump’s original policy. And British Prime Minister Keir Starmer is of course heavily constrained, both by his duty to negotiate relief for British steel and autoworkers, and by the basic norms of foreign policy for anyone who is not Donald Trump.

But the benefits are so restricted, and the baseline policy so ridiculous, that it is an open question whether risking the loss of respect is worth the temporary relief from high tariffs to reduced-but-still-high tariffs. At the very least, the agreement is nothing to kvell over. Canadians should think twice before getting in line.