Trump trade war with Canada is war on U.S. businesses

Having dynamited trade talks with Canada — in part due to the intervention of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick — Donald Trump has now imposed 50% tariffs on certain Canadian goods, with Canada immediately retaliating. This will be good for no one, especially the auto industry that straddles both countries.

We’re certainly not the first to point out that it is impossible to hurt the Canadian economy and to impose trade barriers without shooting ourselves in the foot. A great many industries are so intertwined as to be practically one. Not that we have any real reason to want to hurt the Canadian economy in the first place; Canada has long been our closest friend in the whole world, a neighbor with which there has been deep economic, cultural and security exchange.

Somewhere in his increasingly distracted brain, Trump must understand this, though he has gone about expressing it in the most damaging and juvenile way by threatening our northern ally with annexation and claiming he’s renamed Lake Ontario. That foolishness to alter the U.S. Geological Survey gazetteer and federal Geographic Names Information System will need to be reversed by the next president.

It’s worth noting that among the sticking points in the run-up to the deadline were U.S. demands for Canada to curtail rules that have long promoted French-language programming and culture in the dual-language country. Why should the U.S. care about this? It has practically no nexus to trade, and any rational federal government would have known well enough to leave alone.

Not this one, which is as much motivated by grievance, culture war and some warped vision of American supremacy that requires hostility, bullying and threats to assert supposed interests on the world stage, as opposed to the soft power approach that established us as a world power for the last century.

It became clear as negotiations neared the finish line that both sides understood there to be settled matters that they actually had wildly different understandings of. Each blames the other, but quite frankly, we have much steeper doubts about the competence of the Trump team, driven as it was by a desire to please the errant king. Weeks of work were undone by last minute demands that the Canadians simply could not accede to. For this, Trump called the negotiators “clowns.”

The thing about trade wars is that no one wins. Everyone loses, particularly the regular citizens of both countries involved, who face sometimes insurmountable shocks to their businesses. They’re always ill-advised, but particularly in a situation where the objective is to reach some kind of net-zero or positive trade imbalance with every other country in the world, a goal that is both impossible and pointless.

Not one official in the administration has tried to explain why this is a desirable goal, because there’s no rationale that makes sense, and the real reason — because Trump said so and that’s that — they can’t say.

If and when this pointless trade war is resolved, it won’t undo the economic damage that will already have been done, and it certainly won’t by itself reestablish the trust that we’ve needlessly smashed with our one-time best friends, who are certainly being wooed now by China. The only way to begin the long road back is to show Canada and the world that we can constrain and reverse Trump’s impulses, which can begin with a Congress actually willing to stand up to him.