Editors at National Review Online pan President Donald Trump’s latest action on trade with our northern neighbor.
Handling China, Russia, or the EU will always be tricky. Mistakes and missteps on our part are, of course, undesirable, but given the complex issues involved, probably unavoidable. However, for the U.S. to be in the middle of a poisonous brawl with Canada (Canada!) takes a degree of foolhardiness that would once have been inconceivable.
President Trump’s tariff plans were always going to anger Canada, but persisting with “jokes” about the “51st state” made things worse. They helped insert a turbocharged Canadian nationalism into tariff negotiations and ensured the election of Mark Carney, a Davos-Canadian with an agenda all his own as Canada’s prime minister.
NAFTA was a good deal for the U.S. Its successor, USMCA, wisely kept most of it intact while adding some needed updates and unneeded protectionism. Trump described it at the time as the “largest, most significant, modern, and balanced trade agreement in history.” Once reelected, Trump wanted more, but, from his opening salvos onward, he has made reworking our trading relationship with Canada much more difficult than it needed to be.
The latest tariff standoff with Ottawa was triggered by the administration retaliating against Canadian retaliation (trade fights are like that) at federal and provincial levels, for earlier U.S. tariffs and the insults that preceded them. The White House claimed the power to do so under Section 338 of the 1930 Tariff Act, an act, … better known as Smoot–Hawley, a familiar name to students of the Great Depression. Section 338, which allows the president to impose tariffs up to 50 percent under certain conditions, had lain dormant for the better part of a century. Its survival is, to repeat ourselves again, a reminder of the value of sunset clauses.
