Skip to content

Trump’s Trade War Is Good News

The who, what, and why the media won’t tell you.

Trump is ultimately targeting China. The Good Oil. Photoshop by Lushington Brady.

I was never a fan of the ‘4D Chess’ narrative peddled by die-hard Donald Trump fans. While I largely approved of the first Trump presidency, all but the most blinded apparatchik had to admit that it was chaotic, disjointed, sometimes clueless and far too often reacting rather than acting.

Which was only to be expected, really. Trump, as he rightly pointed out, was not a politician, much less a Washington insider. That was his great strength as a campaigner, and his great weakness as a first-term president. Trump is, as Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams pointed out, someone who learns by doing. Push the buttons, pull the levers, see what happens – what works and what doesn’t. He’s a fast learner, too, but not fast enough in his first term to really get a handle on the Washington Machine. Which gave the swamp the time needed to regroup and throw continual snags and pools of quicksand in Trump’s way.

The second Trump administration isn’t playing 4D chess, either. It’s sweeping the board clear with brutal swiftness. Trump 2.0 is disciplined, focussed, and determined not to give the swamp monsters an even break. Whether it’s the flurry of executive orders starting on Inauguration Day, the sweeping ICE arrests and deportations, or simply frog-marching recalcitrant swamp monsters from their lairs, the new Trump administration knows exactly what it’s doing and is steamrolling through the barricades at breakneck speed.

Which brings me to Trump’s three-pronged trade war, with Mexico, Canada and China.

What, exactly, is the point of it all?

Searching for answers from the mainstream media is almost completely useless; their coverage is limited to the sort of Orange Man Bad! nonsense we’ve endured for the past decade. Any meaningful background or analysis is almost impossible to find. Even the supposedly wicked, right-wing Murdoch press are calling it ‘silly’.

Yet, given what I’ve noticed about the second Trump White House’s strategic discipline, that seems most unlikely. Trump must have his reasons, no matter what the MSM say.

As it turns out, he does – and pretty good reasons, at that.

Tariffs are an import tax. Anything imported to the USA from Canada, Mexico or China, will attract an immediate extra cost of between 10 and 25 per cent. That cost gets directly passed to the consumer.

So, with the stroke of a pen, Trump makes Canadian or Mexican goods sold in the US one-quarter more expensive. The inevitable outcome is that Americans will largely avoid Canadian or Mexican goods.

This is a very big deal for both countries, no matter how much Justin Trudeau or Claudia Sheinbaum puff out their chests and threaten retaliation.

The tariffs will absolutely pummel Canada. Sixty per cent of its international trade is with the US, accounting for 40 per cent of Canada’s GDP. The tariffs are expected to double unemployment in provinces like Ontario. In fact, every single Canadian province trades more with the US than with other Canadian provinces. But US exporters will barely notice: US exports to Canada are just 1.5 per cent of its GDP.

Similarly, Mexico’s exports to the US are 35 per cent of its GDP. The other direction? Just 1.2 per cent of US GDP is from exports to Mexico.

Make no mistake: Trump will win this trade war. There can be no doubt of the outcome – only how long it takes Canada and Mexico to buckle. Although both have announced retaliatory tariffs on the US, these amount to a flea biting a 600 pound gorilla. Irritating but the bug will get squashed in the end regardless. Indeed, the executive order authorising the tariffs made clear there was plenty more to come, if the United States’ neighbours want to play hardball.

So, why is he doing it?

Because Trump, the self-styled ‘Peace President’, is loath to get his nation into a real, shooting war. This is a matter of both principle and political reality. The American public would not stand for yet another ‘Forever War’. They’ve seen too much of their blood and treasure flushed away in too many foreign shitholes for no return to abide any more.

And shooting wars just aren’t Trump’s style. Consciously or not, he operates according to the dictum of Isaac Asimov’s Salvor Hardin, from Foundation:

‘Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.’

Hardin, like Trump, preferred to use a combination of bluff, threat and economic coercion, to bring enemies to heel.

Tariffs on China make sense, but why Mexico and Canada? Firstly, because both are a stepping-stone to a wider trade war with China. In some ways they’re examples for Xi Jinping (himself no stranger to blatant economic bullying, as Australia well knows) to ponder.

Secondly, for the very good reason that both Mexico’s and Canada’s lax border policies are directly harming the United States.

Mexico has been far too content to let tens of millions of illegal immigrants wash through the country and surge across the southern border. With them have come the infamous cartels and violent gangs like MS-13, bringing a wave of murder, rape and drug fatalities to the cities and rural heartland of America.

Canada’s border is fast becoming as notorious. Canada is the preferred route into America for international terrorists and criminal organisations, taking advantage of Trudeau’s weak-as-water border policies. Much as the so-called ‘asylum seekers’ leveraged Jacinda Ardern’s open border weakness as a backdoor route to Australia. In one astonishing case, Canada granted asylum and citizenship to Ahmed El-Didi, despite him being captured on video dismembering victims when he was an ISIS fighter.

As in Australia, too, the ‘international student’ trade is being leveraged as a de facto immigration system in Canada. The Globe and Mail reports that 50,000 so-called ‘international students’ never show up for a single class. Even India itself is cracking down harder on ‘international student’ scams than Canada has.

Those illegal immigrants, fake ‘students’, and terrorist ‘asylum seekers’ too often wash over the United States’ northern border. In recent years, a skyrocketing number of individuals on terror watch lists have been apprehended trying to cross from Canada into the US. Some 350 people on terrorism watch-lists have been caught at the Canada-US border, as compared to 150 at the Mexican border.

The tariffs are also a key part of Trump’s long-promised solution to the fentanyl crisis crippling much of the US. Synthetic opioids such as fentanyl kill nearly 80,000 Americans every year. Fentanyl is either smuggled into the US from Canada and Mexico or manufactured in illicit factories in the US from precursor ingredients smuggled in.

When Justin Trudeau claims that only small amounts of fentanyl are seized at the Canadian border, he deliberately skirts the issue of precursor ingredients. Much of this is done by exploiting a loophole that exempts import duties on low-value shipments. Such small shipments often are not screened at ports of entry, allowing shipments of drugs and their ingredients to enter undetected.

In any case, such is the potency of fentanyl that even the small amounts crossing the border from Canada could kill 9.5 million Americans.

The ultimate origin of these drugs and ingredients is the ultimate target of Trump’s trade war: China.

It’s long been suspected that China is deliberately flooding the US with cheap, powerful narcotics, as a means of weakening the world’s most powerful nation. Clearly, Xi learned something from studying Chinese history and the Opium Wars of the 19th century.

Trump also has another strategic goal in mind: retaking the Panama Canal from Chinese control. The USA built the canal and signed the Hay-Banau-Varilla treaty, giving it permanent control of parts of the Canal Zone, and a 99-year lease on the rest. But in 1974, Jimmy Carter capitulated and agreed to give Panama full control.

When Carter’s treaty came into effect in 1999, China swiftly pounced. A lease on the shipping ports was handed to a Chinese-owned company. Trump argues that Panama is gouging US ships with exorbitant transit fees, and that Chinese soldiers are taking control of its operations. The mainstream media dub this last claim ‘demonstrably false’ – a sure sign it’s almost certainly true.

If nothing else, the point remains that China is steadily acquiring much of the infrastructure that underpins global maritime trade. Not only does this give unprecedented scope for China to leverage punishment on nations who oppose it – as it did to Australia during the Covid pandemic – but control by Chinese companies is effective control by the Chinese Communist Party.

Ultimately, Trump’s trade war stands to be good, not just for the United States, but for much of the world. There will be short-term pain, especially for countries targeted, but ultimate gain.

Taking the heavy boot of the Chinese Communist Party off the neck of global trade will be a winner for everyone. Sure, establishment media are whining that Trump’s actions ‘upset the established, rules-based global order’ but so what? China has proven, with brutal directness, just how much it cares for the ‘rules-based order’. In any case, we in the West have had over 40 years of cutting tariffs – how’s that worked out for us? Does anyone feel more economically sure than Westerners did in the protectionist ’50s and ’60s?

Securing the US’s borders will benefit its neighbours, as well. When Australian PM Tony Abbott shut down people smuggling by boat into Australia, Indonesia complained bitterly. The tens of thousands of illegal immigrants who’d previously passed through Indonesia on their way to Australia were perforce now remaining in Indonesia. Within a very short time, though, they simply stopped coming into Indonesia, too. The human trafficking pipelines into Mexico and Canada will dry up, too, depriving the cartels of a major source of income.

The only question is how long it will Mexico and Canada to admit defeat and come to heel. If the first days are any indication, not long. Panama has already announced that it won’t renew its Belt and Road Initiative agreement with China. Indeed, President Raul Mulino suggested to visiting US Secretary of State Marco Rubio that it might end the deal early.

So, it’s not exactly 4D chess, but Trump’s trade war is good politics. Remember that Reagan won the Cold War without coming to direct blows with the Soviets. Reagan’s Star Wars-era arms race simply bankrupted the Russians. The Evil Empire collapsed without a shot fired.

A president who can win a war, even an economic one, and subdue his country’s enemies without firing a single shot is one for the history books.


💡
If you enjoyed this article please share it using the share buttons at the top or bottom of the article.

Latest