Trade Blackmail Will Backfire on the US
Planned tariffs on Canada and Mexico have been suspended, but the economic damage has been done.
It’s going to get a lot colder around here.
Photographer: Geoff Robins/AFP/Getty Images
About the best that can be said of the new trade policy emanating from the White House is that it’s all a bluff. After several days of panic, the US agreed to delay enormous new tariffs on Canada and Mexico in exchange for some token border-security measures.
Yet serious damage has already been done. And these costs will be nothing compared to the harm that the new administration might yet inflict by starting a full-scale global trade war. If that happens, everybody loses — Americans not least. This new economic strategy, if one can dignify it with that term, ranks among the worst White House initiatives ever undertaken.