On Thursday, the White House put out an image of a bald eagle pinning a Canada goose under its talons and added a statement that managed at once to be obsequious, vulgar, and untrue.
“President Trump said it best: ‘Canada is easily the most difficult and unreasonable. They feel entitled, but they are not a State, and will be entitled no longer!” Canadian leadership chose retaliation over partnership — and America is no longer willing to carry them.”
That, it seems, is now the party line. Canada had dared to retaliate against previous U.S. tariffs, many of them imposed illegally, so now it must be punished further.
Since some MAGA cheerleaders believe this piffle, it is worth recalling the sequence of events. In his first term, Trump was mainly concerned with scrapping NAFTA. To bring Canada to the table, he imposed tariffs on steel and aluminum.
The Canadian government decided to humor him, accepting various changes and agreeing to replace NAFTA with the new USMCA. Trump strutted, boasted, and crowed. “The USMCA is the fairest, most balanced, and beneficial trade agreement we have ever signed into law,” he told factory workers in Michigan. “It’s the best agreement we’ve ever made.”
The White House, which in those days tried to maintain a minimally dignified tone, took a similar line in its official statement: “The deal marks a tremendous victory for American workers, farmers, manufacturers, and businesses alike.”
Oddly, Trump began his second term by tearing into the deal he had struck during his first. On the day he was inaugurated, he imposed a new set of tariffs on what he called “one of the nastiest countries,” adding: “We don’t need their cars, we don’t need their lumber, we don’t need their energy, we don’t need anything.”
Canadians might have been forgiven had they left the table in a huff, but they instead went through the motions of taking Trump seriously. His stated problem with Canada, back then, was that fentanyl was supposedly flooding across the border. That claim was untrue: Less than 1% of the fentanyl seized at the frontiers came from Canada. But rather than pointing to that statistic and sitting back, the Canadians humored Trump, spending over $1 billion on beefed-up border security and designating drug cartels as terrorist organizations.
Did Trump suspend his tariffs in response? Of course not. He claimed that the Canadians were disrespecting him and imposed them anyway.
Canada, with heroic self-restraint, still did not retaliate; indeed, it dropped some tariffs it had imposed in response to Trump’s earlier levies. Trump’s response? To impose yet more tariffs, this time on Canadian wood products.
Even now, Canada held back from strong countermeasures. Instead, it tried persuasion. The government of Ontario ran an advert on U.S. TV with a voice recording of Ronald Reagan’s 1987 radio address, in which he persuasively explained why tariffs destroyed American jobs. Trump, enraged, announced a further 10% tariff.
This, then, was the background to the current escalation. Every time Canada backed off, it was hit with a new tariff. Every time it withdrew its countermeasures as a goodwill gesture, it was hit by another new tariff. Canadians are the most accommodating and courteous people in the world, but they are fierce when roused.
I see no prospect of Canada backing down again. Whereas polls show that most Americans disagree with Trump’s trade policy, almost all Canadians are backing their government. Resolve in the face of an outside threat gives a nation patience and strength. Even the Iranians, ruled as they are by murderous tyrants, rallied to the regime in a crisis and so outlasted the vastly stronger U.S. military. How much more true will this be of the Canadians, who know that their cause is just and that the rest of the world, as well as a chunk of the American public, is on their side?
Why is this happening at all? What wrong has Canada committed? No country is culturally closer to the United States. No country was quicker to follow America into Iraq and Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11. Was Canada’s offense to decline Trump’s demand to submit to annexation? Is the trade war a peevish tantrum from someone who wants to alter the map?
AMERICA IS HEADING FOR BANKRUPTCY
If so, the U.S. is paying a heavy price. Every other ally and partner will recognize the force of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s complaint that American treaties are “signed in pencil.” Decades of accumulated diplomatic goodwill have been torched, and for what?
That image of the eagle and the goose? It was taken from genuine footage filmed in Ontario. If you watch to the end, the goose wins.