The Wall Street Journal has consistently criticized Trump’s economic policies, particularly his ongoing “trade war” with Canada, over the past several weeks. And certainly, the tensions are regrettable. Trump’s trolling of the insufferable Justin Trudeau, with talk of Canada becoming the “51st state,” perhaps only galvanized the Canadian left. It unfortunately may ensure that the only real hope for a Canadian return to normality, the election of Pierre Poilievre, may be lost.
That said, does the WSJ truly believe that the current $1.7 trillion budget deficit stacked on top of $36 trillion in national debt and an annual $1 trillion trade deficit are sustainable in any fashion? Do they believe any Republican president would have survived the midterms if he cut or “reformed” Social Security? If so, consult the fate of the recommendations of left-wing Barack Obama’s 2010 Simpson-Bowles commission (“The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform”).
DOGE, the effort to demand either symmetrical or no tariffs, closing the border, the rare minerals agreement, etc., are all controversial, even desperate efforts to stave off insolvency.
NAFTA was sold on the promise of trade equilibriums, eventually leading to no tariffs and rough parity. Yet Canada currently runs a $60 billion surplus largely because of its energy sales and selective tariffs on U.S. agriculture and some manufactured goods. That sum might be tolerable from a friend and not worth the acrimony, even with the present massive trade and budget deficits—if it had occurred in isolation.
But it did not. The Canadian surplus is force multiplied by its chronic refusal to spend a measly 2 percent of its GDP on defense. Canada could have easily offered a partnership with the U.S. to explore joint missile defense or shared Arctic Ocean naval patrols with a new fleet of Canadian and American icebreakers.
But it did nothing of the sort.
Worse still, no Canadian leader can offer any defense of their policies, such as: “We believe a $60 billion surplus with our free-trade American partner is justified, and we also believe we are further correct in not spending our promised 2 percent of GDP on defense.” Their veritable retort of “Trump is a monster” is no defense at all.
And there is wider context still. Mexico currently siphons off $63 billion in remittances from the U.S. economy, most of it from illegal aliens. Most of them enjoy some sort of subsidy from the American local, state, and federal governments.
Its trade surplus has ballooned to over $170 billion, largely because of opportunistic partnering with the Chinese to avoid US duties on imported Chinese-produced goods.
No one truly knows the full cost of an open border paid in American blood and treasure to Mexican cartels—70,000 lives and $20 billion annually?
Add up our northern and southern neighbors’ various surpluses and one could argue that $300 billion flows out of the U.S. to our so-called best friends and supposed partners in a so-called free-trade agreement supposedly designed to promote “free,” if not truly “fair,” trade.
Did any of the appeasements from the prior somnolent Biden administration—printing money, open borders, kindred socialist and green programs, USAID reckless generosity, and no concern over massive trade deficits—have any effect on either Canada or Mexico?
Or was Biden’s appeasement interpreted as weakness to be exploited rather than magnanimity to be reciprocated?
| The summation, after looking at the situation in Ukraine: |
On matters of trade, immigration, and foreign policy, we are witnessing a counter-revolutionary effort to erase the madness of the Biden revolutionary years. Then unnamed and largely unknown radicals, under the veneer of a waxen effigy president, hijacked the country and imposed upon it the most radical and nihilist agenda in the past century.
The current correctives are not easy or pretty. But the alternative to the prior status quo was not the status quo at all, but a Jacobin nihilism that had led only to insolvency, civil strife, the destruction of the southern border, at least two theater-wide wars abroad, and the end of the U.S. as we once knew it.
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