‘Tariff Man’/AP

By Lisa Van Dusen

November 27, 2024

You know that a story has all the makings of an economic-crisis catalyst when the Globe and Mail runs 13 news and opinion pieces plus an editorial about it on the same day. It may say more about the state of the world that, in the case of Donald Trump’s first post-2024 election outing as “Tariff Man”, the event in question was a tweet, or whatever such notice-box notice boxes are called on the impeccably named gaslighting platform Truth Social.

Humanity has now lived through a quarter century of post-millennial, post-internet disruption of the status quo ante of global power distribution that existed post-WWII and, more recently, post-Berlin Wall. For the first 15 years of the century, the post-millennial power realignments produced by that sequence unfolded mostly sub rosa, as institutions, nations and political and other players empowered as early adopters of the most transformative properties of the fourth industrial revolution ‑ from surveillance to hacking to the coercion and corruption enabled by a massively expanded, suddenly, simultaneously synchronized tactical playing field, to social media to unprecedented propaganda and misinformation capabilities – deployed those capabilities on an unsuspecting public.

Since 2016, when a covertly corrupted referendum narrowly expunged Britain from the European Union and a U.S. presidential campaign riddled with operational skulduggery produced, with spectacular irony, the “American carnage” presidency, the assortment of distinctly 21st-century power consolidation tactics that have necessitated the term “polycrisis” as a euphemism for “sh*tshow” have migrated from covert to overt, if not accountable.

An American president serving as an invaluable asset and weapon of mass disruption and destruction to an aspiring, post-democracy world order now brazenly talks about eliminating voting, threatens to outsource violence against NATO members to non-NATO members and, among myriad examples of the trademarked, democracy trolling contempt that characterizes this circus, has shared a virtual double bill with a “prison choir” named for the day he unleashed a deadly riot against the United States Congress in an attempt to overturn an election result. A reality-show writer’s room of two dozen lunatics working 24 hours a day high on Ketamine for six months couldn’t generate a more preposterous propaganda vendetta against humanity. And, based on the events of the past six months, to say nothing of the past quarter century, the endgame promises to be even crazier than the first 10 open seasons.

But first, the pièce de résistance, as they say in Vaudeville: Trump’s entirely predictable warning on Monday evening that he will impose a tactical tariff of 25% on all goods entering the US from Canada and Mexico, plus “an additional 10% tariff, above any additional tariffs” on China (Trump’s trade wars, by the way, have a way of redounding to China’s benefit, which squares with his autocratic admiration for Xi Jinping). This will be done by executive order immediately after the inaugural parade on January 20, presumably along with the other dictator-on-day-one edicts. “This Tariff will remain in effect until such time as Drugs, in particular Fentanyl, and all Illegal Aliens stop this Invasion of our Country!” reads Trump’s threat.

It may be worth noting that one of the features of our 21st-century iteration of anti-democracy warfare is the astonishing degree of Machiavellianism among political and geopolitical players who previously or otherwise hadn’t displayed it.

In classic dictator-threat fashion, this one is more akin to a Mafia dead-fish delivery than a diplomatic démarche. Indeed, Trumpologists have translated it as CUSMA review/possible NATO-spending coercion, in keeping with the president-elect’s record of using tariffs as a triangulation tool that both attaches a price tag to every demand and wreaks panic among his targets. Trump used a 25% tariff on steel and aluminium to similar leveraging effect during the NAFTA/CUSMA negotiations in 2018.

Into this hypertactical ecosystem will stagger the CUSMA review and likely renegotiation, based on its Article 34.7, which provides for a review of the deal as of July 1, 2026. In other words, the IED within the deal that may ultimately and in retrospect cast the euphoria over the agreement’s successful negotiation in 2018 as premature in light of Donald Trump’s improbable second coming. To quote Bill Clinton’s wryly aspirational adage for this age of chaos, “There are no permanent victories or defeats in politics or human affairs.” Indeed.

How did trade become a battleground for the war on democracy? If we travel back to the hinge of history that was the year 2000 – or, more precisely, two events that straddled that hinge – the Seattle WTO Ministerial Conference of 1999 (a.k.a. the Battle of Seattle) and China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in December of 2001, we get a sense of how the evolution of global trade and the devolution of global democracy have been enmeshed ever since. As time wore on and successive WTO negotiating rounds became increasingly intractable; as it became clear that China’s accession to the WTO had produced not the democratization and embrace by Beijing of the rules-based order some had predicted, trade transformed from a system of conflict-deterrent economic integration to an organizational subterfuge target and network of supply-chain dominance by China based on, among other factors, its purchase of more than 100 ports worldwide.

The consequences of this evolution gradually became clear across a number of trends, including Beijing’s preference for more coercive bilateral trade agreements with countries along the Belt & Road economic and political-influence network rather than multilateral deals, with the exception of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership.

A year and a half before the scheduled CUSMA review, some Canadian premiers are pushing to have Mexico dropped from the CUSMA (which would, at face value, please China on the fragmentation front), backed up by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in a more nuanced fashion, on the grounds that Mexico is being used by Beijing as a backdoor into the North American automotive market. In which case, China’s competitive desire to dominate the automotive industry – akin to but slightly less tactical and more strategic than its plan to dominate the airline industry – may outweigh its competitive aversion to North American trade integration.

In his piece for our Policy CUSMA series, NAFTA Chief Negotiator John Weekes writes, “Slamming the door on Mexico would leave them with little alternative but to make a strategic partnership with China.” In other words, if CUSMA fragments, China wins. And if CUSMA doesn’t, China wins.

(It may be worth noting here that one of the features of our 21st-century iteration of anti-democracy warfare is the astonishing degree of Machiavellianism among political and geopolitical players who previously or otherwise hadn’t displayed it, from the former game show host who can’t spell “coffee” now reprising the world’s most powerful job after the most relentlessly unbelievable election campaign in history, to the CCP general secretary presiding over an unprecedented run of economically leveraged, democracy diminishing, global-influence expansionism. In the new world order, apparently, everyone’s a tactical mastermind).

The degradation and deception campaign waged against the economic, geopolitical, democratic and human rights status quo in order to replace it with one that better suits the purposes and interests of anti-democracy actors has now been underway for more than two decades.

Trade, including CUSMA and NAFTA before it, has served as just one bearing wall of the international economic status quo, which is why it is under assault. In trade negotiations as in so many things, context is everything.

Policy Editor and Publisher Lisa Van Dusen has served as a senior writer at Maclean’s, deputy editor at iPolitics, Washington columnist for the Ottawa Citizen and Sun Media, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News and an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.