
On the afternoon of Sunday 2 February, Mexico’s president Claudia Sheinbaum posted a defiant video threatening to retaliate in response to Donald Trump’s plans to impose a 25 per cent tariff on all Mexican goods. Less than 24 hours later, she had offered to send 10,000 troops to the US-Mexico border to stop migrants and fentanyl flowing into America. In exchange, Trump postponed the tariffs for a month. Six hours later, Canada got a similar pause on tariffs after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau agreed to launch a new “Canada-US Joint Strike Force” and also funnel more resources to the border.
Trump pushed North America to the edge of a trade war and pulled back at the last moment. The reversal has left onlookers wondering how serious he is about returning to an era of protectionism. Are tariffs simply a negotiating weapon? Or does Trump really want to entrench an era of protectionism in order to reshore manufacturing and secure American supply chains?
The past few days show that perhaps both can be true at the same time. Trump wants higher trade barriers with all countries irrespective of whether they are an ally. He has been touting tariffs since he railed against Japanese trade practices in the 1980s. If he has any consistent beliefs, this is one of them.
Look at Project 2025, the sprawling playbook for government written by leading voices on the right. It contains chapters for and against protectionism. The president of the CEO think tank and Project 2025’s advocate for free trade, Kent Lassman, posted on Twitter on 31 January that Trump’s tariffs will lead to “slower growth, snarled supply chains, and the potential for… a global slowdown”. Yet those who made their way inside Trump’s administration – like Peter Navarro, the president’s senior adviser on trade – were Project 2025’s devout tariff supporters. Navarro, interestingly, created a list of the countries the government should target first, based on trade deficits and the difference in the level of tariffs they impose on the US and vice versa. China comes out on top, followed by the EU, Thailand and Taiwan.
Why then target immediate neighbours, Canada and Mexico? Trump also views tariffs as an all-purpose weapon to beat other countries into line in areas distinct from trade such as immigration. Consider the tariffs Trump imposed on Colombia after migrant flights heading to Bogotá in January were turned back; Trump reversed the tariffs once President Gustavo Petro caved and sent his presidential plane to pick the deportees up. America First means welding the US’s economic might to what Trump deems are its national interests. In Trump world, tariffs serve both as a protectionist ploy and as a weapon to get more Mexican troops along the Rio Grande.
But they can also have unintended effects. Trump’s tariffs on Canada have been met with defiance from politicians on the left and right in Ottawa. The tariffs on Canada do not seem to have a rational basis – Trump said the tariffs were being imposed due to the number of illegal migrants and amount of fentanyl crossing the northern border, which is paltry compared with the southern border. This has led to speculation that this is a ploy to threaten Canada. Trump repeated in the Oval Office on 3 February that the way for Canada to avoid tariffs is to “become our 51st state”. US exceptionalism is not enough in other words. America must humiliate its neighbours – call it American exhibitionism. Or perhaps Trump is serious, as he has said before, about using economic pressure to force Canada into the union.
Yet the president would do well to remember that the notion of a Canadian state partly arose from cross-border aggression. The Fenian raids in the 19th century – where the US-based Irish republican militia, the Fenian Brotherhood, attacked a series of military outposts and other targets north of the border – fuelled Canadian national identity and the argument for confederation. A similar rally-round-the-flag effect is taking place absent an invasion. Anita Anand, the internal trade minister, has said there is a “a feeling of nationalism and the need to protect our sovereignty at this moment”. The Ontario premier Doug Ford has been wearing a “Canada is not for sale” hat. A crowd at a basketball game between the Los Angeles Clippers and the Toronto Raptors on Sunday in the Canadian city booed the US national anthem. Pierre Poilievre, the “Canada first” leader of the opposition Conservative Party, has repeated his call for Canada to cut back inter-provincial trade barriers in response to Trump’s threat.
Meanwhile, those across the Atlantic are bracing for when Trump’s attention turns to them. The US president has said that he will “absolutely” hit the EU with tariffs. “The European Union has abused the United States for years, and they can’t do that,” he said on 3 February. While the EU does have a trade surplus with the US, each average tariff between the two is roughly the same. Nonetheless, Trump is fixated on how EU tariffs on food and drink and cars from the US are higher than those set by the US on the bloc.
As for the UK, a joke going around online is that Trump will impose tariffs once he figures out what the country actually exports. The Starmer government’s plea that the UK has a trade surplus with the US says more about Britain’s capacity to export than it does about whether the US is being treated fairly in the eyes of Trump. One upside could be that the UK is spared from Trump’s protectionism, making the country more attractive to EU companies who want to escape tariffs placed on the bloc. Whitehall would be misguided, however, to assume that Trump’s decisions would be solely based on something as mundane as trade statistics.
Not least because the president’s decision to slap a further 10 per cent on Chinese goods is a reminder that, despite the theatrical renegotiations with Mexico and Canada, his administration is pursuing protectionism with more focus than he mustered during his first term. Navarro, the senior adviser, has claimed that discord hamstrung Trump’s protectionist instincts in his first administration. In Project 2025, he accused the former US defence secretary James Mattis, for instance, of blocking tariffs on steel and aluminium imports. “Mattis simply did not understand a key tenet of the Trump administration: economic security is also national security.” If the past few days are any indication, everyone in the current administration fully understands – and supports – that tenet now.
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