Via Laurence Moran, Andrew Coyne in The Globe and Mail on Trump v Canada:
This is not a negotiation in any meaningful sense of the word. It is an extortion racket. A negotiation involves an exchange of offers. But there is no offer on the American side. There is only a threat: Give us what we want or we will hurt you. The demands, what is more, as often as not have nothing to do with tariffs, or trade, or the economy.
To say the Trump administration are not free traders is not just understatement: it’s beside the point. They’re not even protectionists, really. Their objective is not to replace free trade with managed trade. It is to use tariffs as a weapon to advance their broader foreign policy objectives – namely, hemispheric domination.
They have no interest in getting a deal, ever. They want rather to perpetually hold out the threat of trade war to hammer us into submission. Either we agree to their demands – to align our external trade policy with theirs, to give the U.S. privileged access to our resources, to buy only from American defence contractors – and accept being reduced to a vassal state. Or they bomb us into the stone age, economically speaking.
But in fact that is not the choice. Because even if we accept their terms, there is nothing to stop Mr. Trump from bombing us anyway, or threatening to. Indeed, accepting his demands may simply persuade him to make further threats and further demands, since we would have proven that threats work.
At the moment there is much concern that retaliation on our part might lead Mr. Trump to escalate (indeed, he already has). But returning to the bargaining table may as easily do the same. Mr. Trump, in short, will do what he will do. He plainly wishes us ill, for whatever reason, and there is nothing much we can do to alter his behaviour.
What we can do is refuse to ratify it. What we can do is refuse to reward it. What we can do is preserve our freedom, our independence, and our dignity – to show Mr. Trump that whatever he throws at us, we cannot be coerced. Walking out of the negotiations was the easy part. Staying out is the test.
Snuggling up to China and Russia and trying to demolish Canada. That’s the US now.
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