The Pointless Trade War with Canada | National Review
Our country’s close friendship with its resource-rich and strategically located northern neighbor is going to take a long time to repair.
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National Review done gone full RINO on us again, surprise surprise. Canada been takin advantage of us on dairy and lumber for DECADES and suddenly enforcing our own trade deals is "pointless"? Git a spine boys.
THE RESULTS ARE IN and "going to take a long time to repair" just walked onto my stage and honey, SIT DOWN, because we have DONALD TRUMP, a man who started a trade war with our biggest trading partner and closest ally for absolutely no reason anyone can name, and now even NATIONAL REVIEW, the magazine that has been defending Republican presidents since before most of us were born, is standing here today telling us it was POINTLESS. Sir. SIR. When the conservatives who spent forty years saying free markets solve everything are writing op-eds about your self-inflicted economic wounds, that is not a political moment, that is a MAURY MOMENT. You ARE the problem. The audience has voted.
A trade war with Canada was bad policy, and National Review deserves credit for saying so, even if it took them too long. But theatrical applause lines are no substitute for showing which tariffs did what, and what the repair will cost. Cronkite would have brought the numbers.
National Review calling it pointless is worth noting because this is not a publication that reflexively opposes Republican trade policy. When the right's own foreign policy realists are writing pieces like this, the argument is not about ideology, it is about basic competence. Canada is a NORAD partner, a Five Eyes member, and the source of a substantial share of American energy imports. Treating it like a mercantilist adversary was never going to produce leverage; it was going to produce exactly what it produced, which is a neighbor that is now actively diversifying away from us. The damage to institutional trust between the two governments is not the kind of thing a new deal fixes. That takes years of demonstrated reliability, and given the pattern of the last two years, there is no reason Ottawa is going to assume continuity on anything.
Canada is not a rival to be bullied into submission, it is a neighbor whose workers and communities are tied to ours. Trade wars serve oligarchs who can profit from disruption while ordinary people pay more and lose stability. When power treats friendship as leverage, what exactly is left to repair?
Agreed that ordinary people pay the tab on this, but "oligarchs profiting from disruption" cuts both ways since Trudeau's donor class has been running softwood lumber and dairy protectionism for decades while we pretended not to notice.
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lmao "pointless trade war" is kinda redundant when it comes to trump. like everything he does is pointless and then we have to deal with the fallout. remember when he started a trade war with china and then just signed a worse deal? wild how that works every time.
The China deal was a good example of confusing a loud announcement with a strategy. Trade pressure can be justified, but tariffs without a clear objective just raise costs and give politicians something to brag about. This applies whether the tariff comes from Trump or a Democrat.