President Donald Trump is employing the bludgeon of the tariff weapon to realize goals (stanching the flow of illegal migrants and deadly drugs) that are political rather than economic. Mr. Trump speaks to reporters as he signs executive orders in the Oval Office of the White House, on Jan. 31.Evan Vucci/The Associated Press
Now, to 1775, 1812 and 1930, add the year 2025.
The first two refer to American invasions of Canada, 1930 to the devastating and disastrous Depression-era U.S. tariff – three instances of American aggression, both military and economic. This year will be remembered as the fourth such attack.
The tariffs that U.S. President Donald Trump will implement Saturday have five significant, defining, groundbreaking qualities – all departures from American history and all carrying a signal of the course of the next four years under Mr. Trump, an accomplished but not altogether respected New York real estate negotiator whose holdings have included the properties, and ethos, of gambling houses.
The Trump tariffs are not, like almost all other tariffs in U.S. history, designed to protect American industries. They are not, like all tariffs from the early days of the republic through the 19th century, created in some measure to raise revenue. They are not, unlike the Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930, a broad and general imposition of import duties, but instead specifically aimed at Canada and Mexico. They employ the bludgeon of the tariff weapon to realize goals (stanching the flow of illegal migrants and deadly drugs) that are political rather than economic.
And they are pure Donald Trump: unconventional and daring, unafraid of challenging established relationships and ways of conducting business and diplomacy, contemptuous of history and, in this case, even geography. In one announcement, he has upended John F. Kennedy’s often-quoted 1961 remark in Ottawa: “Geography has made us neighbors. History has made us friends.”
The next five words of the Kennedy speech on Parliament Hill are seldom remembered and almost never quoted, and Mr. Trump has taken full, frontal aim at them: “Economics has made us partners.”
By a 2-to-1 margin, Americans oppose tariffs on Canadian goods, according to a mid-January survey by Canada’s Angus Reid Institute, which found that 53 per cent of Trump voters support the levies. By a slim 48-42 plurality, U.S. voters expect tariffs on goods made in other countries to hurt the U.S. economy, according to a poll released Thursday by Connecticut’s Quinnipiac University.
“To the extent that Americans focus on Canada, the general public doesn’t want to punish Canada,” said Christopher Kirkey, the director of the Center for the Study of Canada at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh. “This is a result of Trump’s affection for tariffs, not a broad push by Americans for tariffs in general, and certainly not against Canada.”
Saturday’s tariff decision was foreshadowed earlier in the week when the President threatened Colombia, like Canada a close ally, with a 25-per-cent tariff if it did not accept the return of migrants his administration had deported. His strong-arm tactics forced President Gustavo Petro to capitulate, but not before the Colombian leader registered troubling human-rights protests about the treatment of the deportees.
“We saw with Colombia what we are seeing with Canada,” said Patrice Franko, a Colby College expert on Latin American economics. “Trump doesn’t operate in a way that takes into consideration the long game. It’s all about the quick transactional game. As a result, he may open up even more co-operation between Canada and Latin America.”
Several scholars have examined Mr. Trump in the context of the “madman theory,” which was popularized during the Nixon administration. Amid the Vietnam War, the 37th president – taking a page from Niccolò Machiavelli’s 1517 thesis that “at times it is a very wise thing to simulate madness” – employed the notion that he was out of control as part of his strategy to intimidate Moscow and Hanoi.
“Trump is a man of few moves, and this is one of them,” wrote Daniel Drezner, of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, in the journal Foreign Policy last month. “Trump’s improbable journey from convicted felon to second-term president could convince him to take even more risks.”
American leaders have turned to tariffs since the very beginning of an independent United States. Alexander Hamilton, the first treasury secretary, advocated them to pay off the debt from the Revolutionary War. Indeed, the second law passed by the newly constituted Congress was the 1789 Act for Laying a Duty on Goods, Wares and Merchandises Imported into the United States. One of the targets, ironic for a people who in 1773 had tossed tea into the sea in protest of British taxes, was tea from China, India and Europe.
The Trump tariff, like all such duties, is being proposed for domestic purposes and, like all tariffs, creates waves abroad that shape the politics of other countries – a quality that is on vivid display in Canada right now – and has strong historical antecedents.
President Donald Trump’s favorite economic tool is the tariff. In his first day in office, he said he planned to slap a 25% tariff on imports from Canada and Mexico -- and more are probably coming.
The Associated Press
The Smoot-Hawley tariff threat in the early days of the Great Depression, for example, prompted Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King to propose a 1930 budget that increased the preference given to 270 British products and imposed countervailing duties on 16 American products representing about a third of all U.S. imports into Canada. “We are resolved, in the interests of the Canadian people, that our commercial relations must not be one-sided,” Mr. King said in an election campaign speech in Brantford, Ont.
In his diary, the Prime Minister wrote of his strategy: “It will be a real crack at the States … Switch trade from U.S. to Britain, that will be the cry and it will sweep this country.” He added, in a reference to his rival, R.B. Bennett, the leader of the Conservative Party, “What will Bennett have left to talk on when trade with Great Britain [is] being increased by our proposals and trade with the U.S. [is being] reduced?”
Instead, in a campaign speech in Nova Scotia, Mr. Bennett – whose party eventually won the election, in part because of the trade issue – railed against Mr. King’s view: “Imagine a country sunk so low that the Prime Minister says he will not do his duty by his country because, if he did, he might provoke someone. Is that the way your forefathers built up this province?”
This debate may well be reprised in the next Canadian election.
“Every election in Canada has a foreign component,” said Patrice Dutil, a professor of politics and public administration at Toronto Metropolitan University. “What was happening in the States in 1930 was definitely on the mind of Canadians. We can deny it, but what happens in the U.S. always affects us, and these tariffs will, too. The next election will very much be about the American tariffs and the American threat.”