I already have: the Canadians aren't innocent bystanders in some kind of Evil Trumpian Shakespearean Trade Tragedy play.

But no one's claiming they're "innocent," in the sense that they have never ever ever thrown a sharp elbow in international trade.

We're talking about why this is a smart play for them to make. Why this is the appropriate approach for them to take. Because even if they're not "innocent," they also have never done anything like what Trump has been doing to them: massive unilateral tariffs across wide swatches of the economy in lieu of any effort to address trade disagreements in a less hostile, less aggressive manner. We're not treating them as a friend an ally with whom we might have some conflicts - we're treating them as though they were a duplicitous and hostile rival.

If your counterparty is acting the way the U.S. is acting, then making big unilateral and aggressive moves is really one of the only effective responses.

This isn't a dichotomy, where there are only two possibilities: either the Canadians are entirely innocent bystanders or everything that the U.S. is doing is okay and all their responses are wrong. Instead, what's happened is that Trump unilaterally adopted a wildly disproportionate and unnecessarily hostile approach to addressing whatever Canada was doing wrong. When we point out that the Administration's approach to Canada was wildly disproportionate and hostile, it is not a claim that Canada is pure and innocent - it's just that whatever the conflicts and disagreements were when Trump took office, this particular approach to addressing them was completely disproportionate and unwarranted.

If you address a conflict by intentionally and unilaterally escalating it to Defcon 1, as we did, then it is expected that you may elicit outsized and aggressive responses to your actions in escalating it so egregiously. And those responses will be appropriate and strategically sound, in most cases.