Canada has announced its response to Trump’s new tariffs on Canadian goods. And that response may be something that Trump didn’t anticipate: They didn’t surrender. Instead, Canada is retaliating with tariffs of up to 50% on hundreds of US products.
Just as it seemed like Trump had never conceived the possibility that the attack on Iran might prompt Iran to fight back by targeting US bases and US allies in the region, so, here, Canada’s response seems to have caught Trump and his lackeys flat-footed. (Apologies to all my readers with flat feet. I also apologize to any of them with bone spurs, just in case I decide to trot out that nickname for Trump.)
Trump’s latest gambit in the Iranian conflict is to substitute economic sanctions for actual military conflict since we seem to be running low on weapons anyway. Because we already had sanctions in place before the US-Israeli bombing of Iran started, one wonders why we didn’t just ratchet up the economic sanctions in the first place. It is true that we eliminated much of the Iranian leadership, but now we have equally determined new Iranian leaders to deal with, plus the Strait of Hormuz fiasco, plus destroyed energy infrastructure and US bases in the region, plus many US wounded and 18 (?) US military deaths, plus significant damage to US military morale and preparedness, plus higher prices for US consumers. And Iran still has its nuclear program. Much of this could have been anticipated, and probably was, but Trump and his idiot underlings either chose to ignore the warnings or didn’t understand them, or both. The effects of Trump’s miscalculation (well, let’s just call it a “fuck up,” because I doubt he “calculated” anything) go beyond Iran and the Middle East.
By ineffectually projecting US military power, Trump has exposed the heretofore-unrecognized limitations of that power, weakening US prestige and influence throughout the world. Of course, one could interpret many of Trump’s policies as a deliberate attempt to do just that. The suspicions that Trump is Putin’s puppet are not some conspiracy theorists fevered nightmare. If you wanted to find someone who could win the presidency and destroy US prestige for generations to come, well Trump is your man.
Turning back to Canada, we are now seeing another completely needless exercise in self-sabotage. Canada may soon be demonstrating that US economic strength is actually a limited tool of power and that if you are just willing to stand up to Trump (and by extension, the US), you can, at the very least, inflict pain on the US and maybe even win.
If Trump goes TACO again with the tariffs on Canadian goods (assuming the tariffs survive court challenges), US prestige and power will take yet another hit. (In fairness, our prestige went down the toilet when Trump was elected a second time, but at least it appeared that even if the US had lost all moral prestige, it could still bully the world with our economic strength, just as it was thought that the US could bully the world with our “elite” military.) Canada may expose our economic vulnerabilities just as Iran has exposed the limits of our military capabilities in an age of drone warfare and decentralized military decision-making.
That Trump’s assertion of economic coercion may be faltering from the get-go is demonstrated by the childish threat that Trump announced earlier today. Trump threatened to rename Lake Ontario as “Lake America.” I am sure the Canadians are quaking in their boots.