No. of Recommendations: 14
I must have missed all the tanks along the border...
You think tanks are necessary for us to be an adversary to Canada? There's a reason why trade war is the metaphor that gets used.
The other perspective on this is that Trump is making very, very aggressive moves on trade in an attempt to re-industrialize large swaths of the country. Do I agree with Slash and Burn negotiating tactics? No I don't.
And those very, very aggressive moves will involve harming large swaths of Canada. He's not trying to hide this. He apparently believes that because we buy many billions of dollars of goods from Canada that we are "subsidizing" them, and he wants that to stop. But there's no way to stop it without severely harming Canada's economy. He's out to hurt them - quite severely. Which completely changed the election dynamic overnight there.
Except for the fact that just like here the liberals are terrible at actually governing. BTW Trump will run over Carney in any negotiation. Poilievre would have been a far more capable representative of Canada's interests. They blew it.
There's no indication that Trump can run over anyone in a negotiation. So far, all that's happened is the U.S. unilaterally giving concessions all over the place, because we've managed to create a situation where we have the weaker negotiating position and it's getting worse as time passes.
Trump's team completely misread the Chinese reaction to these trade moves. Trump needs Xi more than Xi needs Trump, and that increases over time - which is why China hasn't even come to the table. He hasn't been able to have any serious negotiations move forward past the initial phase, because Trump hasn't identified to his team or his counterparties what he actually wants. That's what sidelined the discussions with Japan, and the same is apparently happening with India. Since Trump doesn't actually know what he wants, that's not going to change going forward.
Which is why there hasn't been any material progress. Oh, sure - there's meetings. It's useful to someone like Modhi and Meloni to take a meeting with high-ranking U.S. officials. But those meetings aren't moving towards any actual agreements, because Trump doesn't know how to operate in a negotiation where the counterparty isn't forced into capitulation.
