SO MUCH FOR APPEASING THE TRUMPIAN BEAST- WHAT'S NEXT FOR MEXICO AND CANADA?
- Gonzalo Santos
- Mar 3
- 5 min read
Updated: Mar 4
The news is all over the place: the Trump's 25% tariffs on Canadian/Mexican imports, it has been announced, will commence as of 12:00pm tonight. The markets are already reacting badly to this chaos-inducing news.
A lot of people - especially the Mexican political and economic elites, in government and in the opposition, in the business class and in the media - bet this whole thing with threatened U.S. tariffs was manageable, negotiable, and preventable. Trump was just being Trump, threatening absurd, self-defeating tariffs just to get his way on issues like securing Mexico's cooperation in implementing draconian anti-immigration policies and more effective drug interdiction efforts.
So, they obliged him, blocking and deporting immigrants, sending 10,000 soldiers to the border, turning over criminal narco-traffickers, etc. And the Mexican government sent high-level delegations prepared to meet whatever economic demands Trump might have on Mexico. The Canadians began to act more forcefully, announcing concrete reciprocal tariffs. Neither made much headway. The tariffs got paused for 30 days after the leaders' respective phone calls to Trump, but after all the Mexican/Canadian efforts at "persuasion," they will begin tonight at midnight.
Watch Trump lie through his teeth tomorrow at his State of the Union address to Congress - to great applause - on (a) the matter of his unsuccessful shakedown of Ukraine and his blowout at the Oval, and (b) on his imposition of his tariffs due to the insufficient efforts of the Mexicans & Canadians to stop the "invasion of murderers and rapists at the border" and the uninterrupted flow of fentanyl into the country.
The truth for imposing the tariffs, though, is that it has never been because of the immigration issue, nor the fentanyl epidemic. It is the misbegotten offspring of the neo-mercantilist, go-it-alone, nationalist-protectionist understanding by the Trumpians in power on how best to shore up the declining hegemony of the U.S. in the world-economy, and to best stop and reverse the rise of China and East Asia.
This has been an obsession of U.S. policymakers for some time now. The diagnose that the U.S. has been losing ground to the archipelago formation of dynamic economies in East Asia centered on China is entirely correct - and has been so since the 1980s and 90s with Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, and the 2000s and 2010s with China.
The U.S. under many presidents of both parties has tried a variety of strategies:
(a) neoliberal globalization and "engagement" with China;
(b) more naked domination of Eurasia through aggressive military means and more trading blocks to "contain" and exclude China;
(c) switching to "near-sourcing" and "friend-sourcing" all manufacturing away from East Asia and into North America; and finally,
(d) forgo free trade relations altogether, EVEN IN THEIR OWN REGION OF NORTH AMERICA, and concentrate henceforth in imposing high tariffs and extracting "protection" rents to ALL former allies (save Israel so far).
The real problem is that none of the "prescriptions" implemented by the last 7 U.S. presidents - from Ronald Reagan to Trump - have worked. That's the U.S. conundrum, and that is what Trump wants to "solve,” like King Arthur solved the problem of the Gordian Knot - by one fell swoop of his tariff sword!
China - and East Asia more generally - has repeatedly found a way to turn each and every U.S. strategy to its advantage, catching up and surpassing the West over the past 40 years in area after area of the world-economy. The result is that today the U.S. is the most indebted nation in the world - mostly to East Asia!
Besides that, China now commands more of the world's economy, via BRICS+ and the "Belt & Road Initiative," than the United States and its G-7 rich country partners. Not to mention the Chinese advantage population-wise!
The Trump administration strategy is to forcefully retreat to its own, admittedly still huge national economy, rather than forge a robust trading/geopolitical North American block, renege of all international obligations (save Israel), and bully its allies to extract maximum protection rents and onerous economic concessions (mineral resources, cheap labor, etc.).
It won't work, of course. The one area in which the U.S. maintains its unquestioned supremacy - the military real - is practically useless: the nuclear arsenals cannot be used to force anyone into submission, without triggering a war that will destroy the U.S. and probably most of the planet. And to the degree that the Trumpian approach is to deny giving any further armaments to allies and avoid U.S. boots on the ground or paying others to fight, to desperately save money to shore up his bankrupt economy, the whole military option is now moot.
On the other hand, sanctions, tariffs, and prohibitions of certain high-tech exports, will not protect the U.S. economy or preserve its advantages from the avalanche of innovations coming from East Asia, as recently illustrated by the advent of the far superior DeepSeek artificial intelligence app from supposedly "quarantined" China.
What are Canada and Mexico to do? Well, aside from the fact that Canada finds itself astride several flanks Mexico does not -- the G-7, NATO, the Pan-European global north -- they do share long borders with and large diasporas in the U.S., and they are vital partners in the three-way T-MEC free trade pact, now directly and purposely subverted by Trump.
Canada has more affinities with the Pan-European world and will perhaps concentrate on finding support there (EU, U.K., Australia, New Zealand), if it can avoid succumbing to the brutal Trumpian "suggestion" to allow itself to be swallowed into the United States as the mere 51st state. And there’s always China beckoning.
Mexico has two strategic assets to resist Trump geopolitically and economically:
(a) its huge diaspora (~40 million) in the U.S., and through it, the huge Latino panethnicity (~60 million). Much mutual solidarity needs to be activated, and this time for real, as both homelands and diasporas are being targeted by Trump and his minions. The role of the diasporas is dual: fight for their rights and against fascism with all other social sectors in the United States; and mobilize in solidarity with Mexico to stop all attacks on it.
(b) Latin America and the Caribbean, whose states are already organized as the CELAC. But the people, too, must be empowered to rise and resist all U.S. attacks against Mexico and every other Latin American country. The time has come to form a continental front of state and civil society resistance and once united, forge an autonomous integration project without the overbearing, interventionist, wounded hegemon.
For a variety of reasons, the Mexican elites - both political and economic - have been most reluctant from weaning Mexico from its deep toxic dependencies to the United States, as the later increasingly spirals out of control and romps around trying to shore up its dying hegemony in futility and turns its rage towards Mexico as the place for retribution.
These Mexican elites have had ideological blinders for a long time and are even now in denial as to their neighbor's increasing slide into chaos, fascism and neo-mercantilism.
So, the first step is to stop being in denial. The second step is to stop trying to appease the fascist monster, it will only ask for more. The third step is to figure a way out from under the wounded colossus, before it falls and crashes Mexico as well.
Time to put some distance, change course strategically, and resist the Trumpian threats in solidarity with its own diaspora and its many global southern allies.
Surrender is not an option. Not for the Canadians, not for the Mexicans - on either side of the U.S.-Mexico border. The only option open to us, forced upon us all by the unfolding Trumpian fascist threat, is to resist. The people at the grass-roots level are already resisting inside the United States. The sooner Mexico and Canada and the rest of the states in the region stop appeasing and stand up to Trump, the better.