Conrad Black: Trump’s Tactics Toward Canada Suggest He Underestimates Resolve of America’s Neighbor to the North

 The collapse of the Canada-United States trade negotiations is not only unfortunate in itself, it is a serious and very unnecessary mistake by the Trump administration. 

It has been one of the hallmarks and accomplishments of that administration that it has continuously corrected the errors of its predecessors and particularly the second Bush and Obama and Biden administrations in the strategic errors of impracticable overseas insertions of ground forces and by appeasing America’s enemies.

Despite a good deal of antipathy to President Trump’s America in the world, including in countries that are generally well disposed to the United States, only extremists such as most of the current Democrats and the European left hoped for Iranian success against America, given the generally recognized odium of the Iranian regime.

Canada is an altogether different matter. It is a fair-trading country with which America does not really have a trade deficit and against which it has no grievance. It is true that no country has an absolute right to free access to the world’s largest market. 

It is also true that no country has an absolute right to unlimited access to the world’s approximately 10th largest economy, which Canada is. Mr. Trump claims that Canada seeks all the rights of an American state without becoming one. 

This is not quite true, as Canada accepts higher taxes, approves more restrictive gun laws, and has generally managed its border much more carefully than America did until last year, precisely not to become an American state. 

Canadians do not want, inter alia, the crime rates, chronic poverty, and the corrupt criminal justice system of the United States that has given that country with 5 percent of the world’s population, 25 percent of its incarcerated people. And the Canadians could equally argue that the United States has all the rights of a Canadian province without joining Canada.

Though it is distressing and outrageous that approximately one-third of Americans are not proud to be American, the majority of Americans who are rightly proud of their nationality delude themselves if they think that all other nationalities aspire to be like the Americans, or even to be American. 

Destitute and desperate people of the world have demonstrated their desire in Europe and North America to migrate to more prosperous places. Yet no Fourth of July orator, including the president himself, should misconstrue this as the desire of prosperous democratic populations, including Canada, to join the self-anointed “sweet land of liberty.”

This president has made it very clear that he does not care about international opinion, and to a large extent this is precisely the right attitude. 

Canada, though, has a practically unblemished international record. It has never engaged in an aggressive war, unlike the United States. It has never sought to gain anything from any war and since the War of 1812, when the United States attacked Canada because of its grievances against England, Canada has only gone to war for the cause of freedom throughout the world and not because it was itself under attack. 

The Germans and Japanese never threatened Canada but Canada dispatched large contingents of armed forces in both world wars, almost all of them volunteers, entirely because of the principle of human liberty and the discouragement of international aggression.

The only deficit the United States runs with Canada is from an importation of oil at a knockdown price that it then sells on at a profit to itself. 

The notion that it has serious grievances against Canada is bunk. Mr. Trump’s initial comparison of Canada with Mexico was outrageous, given Mexico’s complicity with the most violent gangs in the world in trafficking millions of people illegally into the United States including hundreds of thousands of violent criminals. 

And Canada has never engaged in anything like Mexico’s systematic enticement of American manufacturing across its border with tax breaks and cheap labor to export unemployment back into the United States.

Since Canada has not historically been an assertive country, Trump apparently assumes that it is not a resilient one. Mr. Trump will discover that this is not true.

 Canada is angry and it takes more seriously than it should Trump’s nonsense about becoming the 51st state. It is in a position to make the United States pay expensively and in politically inconvenient places for its trade aggression, through a far-fetched recourse to a never-invoked 96-year old technicality. 

And eventually, Americans will regret their president squandering the great, but as it has turned out, undeserved luxury of having a 3,000-mile border with an entirely cooperative and honest neighbor.

Last week, I appeared, for the first time, on Bill O’Reilly’s Internet site. It was a convivial occasion. When Bill said that the United States “doesn’t care about Canada,” I agreed with him, but said that that could change. It likely will.

https://www.newenglishreview.org/trumps-tactics-toward-canada-suggest-he-underestimates-resolve-of-americas-neighbor-to-the-north/