President Donald Trump’s threatened tariffs against Canada and Mexico risked blowing up North America’s economy
Not all that much, according to people outside the administration looking at the agreements.
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The U.S. president has been openly pugnacious with America's two largest trade partners. His orders to impose a 25% tariff on all imports from Mexico and on most imports from Canada, with a lesser 10% tax on its energy products, created a sudden political and economic firestorm. Separately, 10% tariffs went into effect on China on Tuesday.
By agreeing to the pause for Mexico and Canada, Trump has been able to tell his supporters that he brokered a smart deal and to declare victory in addressing illegal immigration and drug trafficking. Canada will have a new “fentanyl czar,” and Mexico pledged to deploy 10,000 members of its National Guard. The White House sent out an email with 68 Republican lawmakers praising him after the pauses were announced.
But many of those outside the White House looking at the tariffs drama say little was accomplished, arguing that the measures taken by the two U.S. neighbors were already in place or likely could have been achieved without Trump's ultimatums. Even the financial markets seemed to shrug off the showdown with a modest sell-off on Monday.
What Canada and Mexico offered the United States
Weeks ago, Canada offered $1.3 billion Canadian dollars ($900 million) for border security with a package that included drones, helicopters, more border guards and the creation of a joint task force. On Monday, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said after talks with Trump that they added the fentanyl czar and agreed to list Mexican drug cartels as terrorist organizations.
“Canada did not bend the knee,” Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Andrew Furey said. “There is such a small flow of fentanyl into the United States from Canada that it will be tough to show the president that there’s been gigantic reduction because there’s not a gigantic start to begin with compared to the southern border.”
The Trump team saw it as win that Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum agreed to station 10,000 members of her country’s National Guard on its border with the United States. But those troops are essentially being shifted from other parts of the country, rather than newly deployed.
The Associated Press observed more than 100 members of the National Guard boarding a plane Tuesday morning in the southeastern city of Merida, bound for Ciudad Juarez. Additional units were scheduled to depart Cancun and Campeche, while still others were expected to move north by road.
They would join the more than 10,000 troops already stationed along Mexico’s northern border, whose presence has been unable to stifle persistent violence in a region closely held by organized crime to allow the smuggling of drugs, migrants and guns.
“It did not get the United States much at all from what it already had substantively,” said Josh Lipsky, a senior director at the Atlantic Council, a foreign policy think tank in Washington. Lipsky said Trump could have achieved the same results without the bad will generated by tariff threats.
Trump's pattern: Find a way to declare a win
Inu Manak, a fellow for trade policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, said Trump's tariff threats "were certainly not necessary,” but his objectives in making the threats are “purposefully vague so that he can declare victory regardless of the outcome.”
“A win is anything Trump wants it to be,” she said. “There isn’t any grand strategy or rational explanation for what he’s doing. It’s chaos for the sake of chaos.”
Trump often stirs up drama and then tries to take credit for actions that might not resolve the underlying problems. After the recent wildfires in Los Angeles, Trump made a big show of having water released on Friday from reservoirs in California, even though the water does not flow to Los Angeles County. He's also taken credit for corporate investments in artificial intelligence that predated his presidency.
But what also matters to Trump is showing that he can get others to act. His tariff threats this year echo what he's done before, with similar but less durable results for Mexico.
In 2019, then-President Andrés Manuel López Obrador reached a similar deal with Trump to head off another tariff threat. At that time, López Obrador pledged 15,000 members of the newly created National Guard to help stem the flow of migrants at the northern border and another 6,500 at Mexico’s southern border.
Trump posted on X after the 2019 deal that the tariffs “are hereby indefinitely suspended.” But this time, Mexico bought itself only 30 more days until the taxes could begin.
Trump's defense that his approach works
The White House did not respond to questions about which parts of its agreement with Canada and Mexico were new and what could be produced from the upcoming talks.
Peter Navarro, Trump's White House trade adviser, said Tuesday at a Politico event that the tariffs threat meant that fewer U.S. citizens would die from fentanyl addiction. He suggested additional concessions could come from talks over the next month and that Trump's seemingly mercurial approach to Canada and Mexico had succeeded.
“When he does stuff and it looks like things are a little chaotic, it’s not,” Navarro said. “It’s genius and he delivers.”
Navarro said that what Canada and Mexico had offered was not “minor” because “it's a 30-day thing” and more concessions could result.
Building or burning bridges with trade partners?
The risk for Canada and Mexico is that Trump could easily end his tariff suspensions and again threaten to charge the import taxes. While White House officials have said the taxes were about stopping illegal drugs, Trump himself has said the talks also need to address America's trade imbalance with its neighbors.
All of that means other countries might be less likely to trust Trump going forward.
“Would you threaten to burn down the house of your friendly neighbor to get some salt or sugar from them?” said Daniel Beland, a political science professor at McGill University in Montreal. “President Trump’s approach to bargaining is destructive, and it erodes trust. Most Canadians are unlikely to forget what just happened, even if his tariffs are never imposed upon Canada.”
Verza reported from Mexico City, and Gillies reported from Toronto. Associated Press Writer Amy Taxin in Santa Ana, California, contributed to this report.
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