Tuesday, February 11, 2025

Our Tangled Border War -- comments by Charlie Angus, Wesley Wark, Dan Gardner, Paul Krugman. And new tariffs!


To illustrate this post, here is an artwork called Non-Sign II, which was built at the Peace Arch border crossing in 2010 - I think that messy tangled black border framing an empty centre is symbolic of our Canada-US border war today.

Here are some useful observations and comments:
    
The Power of the Boycott
Canadians Tell Trump To Stuff It
...As a tool of resistance, the boycott has a very long tradition. What makes the Canada 2025 boycott unique is that no one organized it. There are no leaders. There is no strategic team looking to use it as a negotiating tool. This resistance campaign has sprung from the determination of ordinary people to resist tyranny.
The boycott of products, alcohol, and vacation destinations is getting stronger all the time.
...Guys like Trump believe that intimidation and threats are the way of the world. It is the ideology of this new age of gangsterism. But what makes the power of the Canadian boycott unbeatable is that the more Trump threatens, the more people dig in. And it is starting to cause serious economic pain.
As I have said before, the MAGA crowd might love chaos, but capitalism doesn’t.
Once the impacts of the bourbon boycott, the grocery store actions and the cancelled travel bookings begin to pile up, you are going to see a lot of American businesses calling out the predator-in-chief.
As for Canada? Keep the boycott going. We will last one day longer and be one day stronger than the creeper in Washington.
You Got a Friend in Me
Or, the US National Security Adviser knows Canada like the back of his…?
...It now turns out that [National Security Adviser Republican congressman] Mike Waltz is an expert on Canadian public attitudes. He appeared on the US NBC News’ program, “Meet the Press,” on February 9, was asked about Trump’s annexationist remarks about Canada, and pressed about Prime Minister Trudeau’s comments at the recent business leaders’ conclave in Toronto. Waltz was reassuring, sort of —no plans for a military invasion of Canada. But then he went on to reveal his fulsome knowledge of Canada, saying he thinks that “the Canadian people, many of them, would love to join the United States.” This is clearly an evidence-free assertion, reportedly based on some random discussions with Canadian snowbirds in Florida (a flock that should rapidly thin itself, or maybe be asked rude questions by CBSA border officials on their post-winter return), or perhaps hangers on at Mar-a-Lago (you know who you are, Kevin).
OK, we can laugh at nutty comments like this, and no doubt will need to get used to them. But the less reassuring aspect of Waltz’s Trump-mouthpiece remarks was his note about the reassertion of “American leadership” in the Western hemisphere. He told the NBC
“that’s what we’re talking about, from Greenland, to Arctic security to the Panama canal coming back under the United States.”
...Canada will have to vigorously resist, at every turn, any such exercise of American “leadership,” especially in the Arctic.... You can’t play Canadian nice with these guys.
Dan Gardner / PastPresentFuture
The Future of Canada
Some comments of mine followed by an essay by three Canadian scholars
...Imagine it’s a few years from now and Donald Trump has sufficiently frayed the bonds of NATO that the future of the alliance is in grave doubt. Or Trump has finally gone ahead and pulled the US out of NATO entirely. And if he does that, why not toss NORAD on the bonfire?
Not at all hard to imagine, is it? Well, what happens then?
...No, I am not imagining the 82nd Airborne parachuting into Toronto in 2027. In fact, for the sake of argument, let’s leave direct military force out of the equation entirely. I don’t think that’s truly impossible, given the gangster in the White House, but let’s keep this within the bounds of the probable.
Where would Canada be?
...We would be entirely dependent for our economic and military security on a country led by a gangster — a gangster backed by a broad, popular movement whose vision of America’s place in the world resembles Hulk Hogan tearing off his shirt at WrestleMania.
The shakedowns would be relentless. And we would have no choice but to hand over whatever was demanded. There would be no other option.
Oil, critical minerals, Arctic shipping, fresh water. Whatever they want. Picture pipelines siphoning Lake Superior and Lake Ontario to fill swimming pools in Las Vegas and Phoenix and irrigate crops in central California. We would have no choice but to say yes. If we hesitated, the capo di tutti capi in Washington would slap us with tariffs until we changed our mind. Or maybe, to make it extra humiliating, the president would, in words he has already used, encourage Russia “do whatever the hell they want” to us.
Whatever the particular sequence of events, they would always end with Canada mumbling, “yes.”
For the first time in my life, we Canadians believe there is a real threat of becoming the 51st state. Overwhelmingly, we hate the very thought. Overwhelmingly, we think that’s the worst-case scenario.
But that’s not the worst-case scenario.
We could become, in reality if not law, a resource colony of the United States. A land of nothing more than extraction and American military bases. A land with modest control of its domestic affairs, little control over foreign policy, and little or no voice in the Washington halls of power where the most important decisions determining Canada’s fate are made.
Think Guam but bigger and colder. I think that is the worst-case scenario.
Sabotaging the Pax Americana
Trump and Musk are making us distrusted, friendless and weak
...in less than three weeks Musk, Trump and their minions have taken a wrecking ball to the foundations of the Pax Americana.
As I said, foreign aid is no longer a major part of US spending. But the abrupt demolition of USAID, apparently in response to right-wing conspiracy theories and the claim that the agency was full of “radical-left marxists who hate America,” didn’t just leave millions relying on American aid in the lurch. It said that America doesn’t believe in helping people in need, and considers anyone who does suspicious. So much for moral authority.
At the same time Trump threatened to impose high tariffs on Canada and Mexico, on obviously spurious grounds. Never mind that he blinked, at least so far. (He is, as I write this, saying that he will impose a new set of tariffs on steel and aluminum, which would, if they happen, hit Canada in particular.) We have a trade agreement with our neighbors that specifically rules out unilateral tariff increases and calls on members to go through a dispute settlement process instead. Trump personally signed a minor revision of that deal in 2018.
So now we’re a nation that doesn’t keep its word, that can’t be trusted to honor its agreements.
Finally, Trump’s threat to seize Greenland, a territory belonging to Denmark, a member of NATO, and his talk of annexing Canada show that we no longer consider our erstwhile allies partners worthy of respect.
All of this makes us distrusted and friendless. It also makes us weak, because America needs allies even more now than it did during the Cold War.
Back then the U.S. economy was considerably larger than that of our major rival; it was always a severe strain on the Soviet Union to maintain anything resembling military parity. Now, however, as the chart at the top of this post shows, China’s GDP, adjusted for differences in price levels, is significantly larger than America’s. And that’s the right measure if you’re thinking about raw power. As the chart also shows, however, the world’s democracies as a group still considerably outweigh the major autocratic powers.
So this is a really bad time to be alienating democracies around the world and destroying America’s reputation as a trustworthy partner.
I mean, what we’re seeing is what you’d expect if China and Russia had somehow managed to install people who wanted to sabotage America’s international position at the highest levels of the U.S. government.
And we thought we had a 30 day reprieve? Think again:
View on Threads
Trump is just addicted to tariffing. And he doesn't care that they make no sense...

CFR: Tariffs as a revenue source? “Trump is almost certain to be disappointed .. “.. 92 percent of the tariffs collected during his first term went to compensate American farmers for the cost of other countries’ retaliation ..” @cfr.org www.cfr.org/blog/where-w...

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— Carl Quintanilla (@carlquintanilla.bsky.social) February 7, 2025 at 1:00 PM
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2 comments:

lungta said...

Scratch a "lil pp conservative or a trashcan dani ucp and they will bleed 51st state red, white and blue.

12:16 pm
Cathie from Canada said...

I am afraid you are right!

11:11 pm

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