Over among the Big Brains at American Thinker, John DiLeo has a take on the current trade blowup with Canuckistan that I hadn’t considered:
A more important fact to remember, though, is that Canada is far more dependent upon American goods than the USA is on Canadian goods. The USA is the origin of somewhere between a third and a half of Canada’s global imports. Canada cannot win a trade war with the USA. By having a trade war with us at all, Canada loses, no matter what.
So the question would seem to be, why did Carney start this?
We know where Carney is getting his advice. A longtime central banker who was not in electoral politics before being selected as Canada’s PM last year, he has hired American Democrat activists (yes, that’s USA Democrats) as key advisors, including as his chief of staff, to assist him in planning policies that will hurt President Trump and the Republican party in the midterms this fall.
That much, I’d figured out already. Then this:
In his first year and a half on the job, Carney has signed new deals with Mainland China, committing to increase Canada’s already considerable linkage with the CCP economy. He’s basically committing Canada to be a willing vassal in China’s notorious “Belt and Road Initiative.”
So the old law-and-order question comes: “Cui bono?” (who benefits) from this rather unnecessary trade war? Why would “the Canadians walk away from a trade agreement to which their negotiators had already agreed, when Prime Minister Mark Carney recalled them specifically to create a fight”?
DiLeo spells it out:
Trump Administration trade negotiations are designed not just to get more manufacturing here in the USA, but also to get more manufacturing in Canada, and more in Mexico, and more in the UK, and more in the EU.
As we watch these battles, we see that the governments of some of those countries are kicking and screaming at the prospect. Amazingly, they don’t want to protect the jobs of their own citizens; they want to leave the status quo in place, watching their own manufacturing sectors continue to be hollowed out, watching China continue to fill the vacuum.
And:
The Chinese remain what they have been for decades: a dishonest partner, practicing every trade crime from Uyghur slave labor to currency manipulation, from material dumping to intellectual property theft.
Yup. China is asshoe, and worse: they’ve become our sworn enemy, just as much as the Soviet Union was during the Cold War.
And they have more allies in the West than we do.