Gustavo Petro, the president of Colombia addresses the 'Summit of the Future' in the General Assembly Hall of the United Nations Headquarters in New York City, U.S., Sept. 23, 2024.Caitlin Ochs/Reuters
President Donald Trump just wielded tariffs as a weapon. Against an ally. The ally buckled to his demand. The White House said America was back.
This may not be how the United States has comported itself before. Nor may the one-day fight with Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro be an isolated incident. If anything, the hours-long showdown has demonstrated that this is how Mr. Trump likely will proceed in coming weeks and months.
This week, Colombia, perhaps the United States’s strongest ally in South America, discovered that when it comes to tariffs and immigration, Mr. Trump is one part Theodore Roosevelt (“carry a big stick”) and one part Tina Turner (“What’s love but a secondhand emotion?”).
No one in the Western Hemisphere – including in Canada, which is facing a potential 25-per-cent tariff on its exports to the United States – missed the meaning of this episode.
“Canada is taking this seriously,” said Maxwell Cameron, a University of British Columbia expert on political economy and Latin America. “Colombia has had an incredibly close friendship with the United States. Trump is ignoring all of that. History doesn’t seem to matter to him, and neither does the idea that we have this long, close relationship. We should be watching this very carefully.”
The United States signed a trade agreement with Colombia, its third-largest trade partner in Latin America, more than 18 years ago. It has a balance-of-trade surplus with Bogota of US$3.9-billion, according to 2022 government figures, with large American investments there in mining, manufacturing, finance and insurance. American exports of agricultural products have more than tripled in the past decade, and the State Department credits Colombia with working to disrupt the cocaine trade and to fight criminal organizations and terrorist groups.
No matter. Mr. Trump’s administration dispatched to Colombia two planeloads of migrants who it said had entered the United States illegally. Colombia balked at allowing the military C-17s to land. Mr. Trump responded with a 25-per-cent duty – the President’s reflexive figure – on all imports from Colombia, with the added threat that he would double the duties within a week to 50 per cent while he imposed visa restrictions on Colombians in the U.S.
“These measures are just the beginning,” Mr. Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform. “We will not allow the Colombian Government to violate its legal obligations with regard to the acceptance and return of the Criminals they forced into the United States!”
First, Mr. Petro responded with tariff threats of his own (“I’ll do the same”). But eventually, almost certainly aware that Colombian exports to the United States amounted to almost US$25-billion in 2022, he relented, and the obstacles to the dispatch of the deportees vanished.
“Historically, tariffs have not been used by American presidents to achieve policy goals,” said Laurence Ales, an economist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. “Trump has imposed conditions connecting tariffs with foreign policy and domestic policy. As of now it has worked.”
The message of this dispute has gone forth to Canada and others contemplating responses to Mr. Trump’s threats: You can play tough, as Mr. Petro did. But Mr. Trump will play tougher.
“The purpose of tariffs is to protect your domestic industries and to level the playing field for your local businesses,” said Vivek Astvansh of McGill University’s Desautels Faculty of Management. “But Trump wants to use tariffs to make other countries, including long-standing friends of America, do what he wants them to do. It is not a way to win friends. The danger for the U.S. is that these countries could start befriending America’s enemies, which include China and Russia.”
American trade policy is almost always in flux, with free-trade impulses and protectionism trading places as conditions change.
Republican presidents William McKinley and Herbert Hoover signed stiff tariff bills. GOP president Ronald Reagan used his 1988 Thanksgiving address to criticize protectionism, expressing a view that later would be embraced by both George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush. “One of the key factors behind our nation’s great prosperity,” he said, “is the open-trade policy that allows the American people to freely exchange goods and services with free people around the world.”
That is no longer the Republican view, which under Mr. Trump now more nearly resembles the view of some Democrats beginning in the same year of 1988, when representative Richard Gephardt of Missouri won the Iowa caucuses with a protectionist message in a state where farmers often have held an ardent free-trade view.
In the middle of the first Trump administration, the AFL-CIO, the leading labour group in the U.S., acknowledged in a position paper that “tariffs are one way to address unfair trade,” but added that it was “critical to recognize that tariffs are merely a tool, not a comprehensive plan for trade reform.”
By melding protectionism with an offensive against migrants, Mr. Trump has performed an unusual political alchemy – and in the process has emerged as perhaps the greatest American populist leader since William Jennings Bryan, a Democrat who in his 1896 presidential campaign against William McKinley argued, “Protection does not make good wages. Our better wages are due to the greater intelligence and skill of our workingmen, to the greater hope which free institutions give them, to improved machinery, to the better conditions that surround them, and to the organizations which have been formed among the wage-earners.”
McKinley easily won that contest. After he was assassinated in Buffalo in 1901, he was succeeded by Theodore Roosevelt, who combined his “big stick” philosophy with the notion that he would “speak softly.” Speaking softly is not Mr. Trump’s style, or – as Canadian and Mexican leaders have learned since he brandished his tariff threats – his practice.