U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to impose 25 percent tariffs on all Canadian and Mexican products from the first day of his second term in office if Washington and Wall Street trading partners denounce the “invasion” of America by “illegal immigrants.” and don’t stop “drugs.”
A boy in Tijuana, Mexico, looks through the wall at the U.S. border, November 26, 2024 [AP Photo/Gregory Bull]
Trump has made a similar threat against China, except that in this case the tariff would be 35 percent.
If Trump follows through on his trade war threats, it would shatter economies in North America and around the world, not to mention dramatically intensify US imperialism’s sweeping economic, diplomatic and military offensive against China.
The target countries of the trade war would be forced to respond with their own tariff restrictions. This would quickly plunge the world into a trade war, similar to the Great Depression beginning in 1929, which contributed to the outbreak of World War II.
The countries now in the crosshairs of Trump’s trade war are the United States’ three largest trading partners. In 2023, they accounted for more than $1.32 trillion in U.S. imports, about 45 percent of all U.S. imports (with Mexico accounting for 16 percent, Canada 15 percent, and China 14 percent). Last year, US exports to these countries were twice as high as to the European Union, at over $820 billion (41 percent).
These numbers only give an idea of how economically interconnected Canada, the United States and Mexico are and the immediate and devastating impact that the imposition of tariffs would have on production chains, jobs and consumer prices in all three countries.
The USA is by far the largest trading partner for both Canada and Mexico. More than three quarters of all Canadian exports go to the USA. For Mexico the proportion is even larger.
By threatening punitive tariffs in violation of the US-Mexico-Canada free trade agreement USMCA (the successor agreement to NAFTA) and the rules of the World Trade Organization, Trump is signaling to the world that he is protecting the predatory interests of US imperialism against both “strategic rivals” and will ruthlessly pursue America’s alleged allies and “partners.” All legal restrictions are deliberately ignored.
Trump said Monday that the tariffs would “remain in effect until this invasion of our country by drugs, especially fentanyl, and all illegal immigrants is stopped!”
Canada is in many ways Washington’s closest imperialist ally. Still, Trump blithely threatened to destroy the economies of Canada and Mexico in a post on his social media platform Truth Social.
With his trade war threats against USMCA partners, Trump is trying to extract concessions on trade, investment and access to energy resources. His intention is to increase the wealth of the US oligarchy and strengthen its geostrategic position. He and his “America First” followers also want to force Ottawa and Mexico City to bring their “border security” and foreign policy more in line with Washington’s goals and interests. Canada should also be made to allocate hundreds of billions more in military spending.
Trump’s linking his trade war threat to an angry incitement against a “foreign invasion” serves more than just to provide a false pseudo-legal pretext for imposing tariffs. He is citing “national security” clauses in commercial law that were rarely, if ever, used before his first term in office.
He also wants to force Canada and Mexico to provide political and logistical support to the war on immigrants that his government has planned to unleash from day one. Trump’s stated goal is to expel millions of “illegal” immigrants, many of whom have lived in the United States for decades.
The anti-immigrant witch hunt is at the heart of Trump’s entire fascist agenda. It is intended to serve as a pretext for deploying the National Guard and the military in America’s major cities to suppress protests. There will inevitably be popular opposition as Trump’s administration implements its plans for a social counterrevolution, including $2 trillion in budget cuts, tax cuts for big business and the super-rich, and the elimination of all regulations on capital.
Trump and his advisers also see the war on immigrants as an important step and lever to advance their plans to create a fortress North America with militarized external and internal borders that are against both the foreign competitors of American imperialism and – in Trump’s words to say – directed against “the enemy at home”, that is, the working class.
When Trump entered the White House in 2017, he threatened to completely repeal the NAFTA free trade agreement. Then, in negotiations with Ottawa and Mexico City, he reshaped it into USMCA — a trade bloc more clearly under U.S. hegemony and more explicitly focused on waging a trade war, first against China, but also against Europe, Japan and other powers .
Trump’s tariff threat has alarmed Canada’s Liberal government and the entire capitalist elite. On Monday evening, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called Trump to appease him and had a “good” conversation, his advisers emphasize. An emergency debate took place in the House of Commons on Tuesday evening, and the Prime Minister was scheduled to meet with all ten premiers of the Canadian provinces on Wednesday.
The Canadian imperialist bourgeoisie’s response to increasing pressure from its partners and rivals in the United States will be to act even more aggressively against the working class at home and to pursue its predatory interests on the world stage.
On Tuesday, Canadian Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc said Canada will increase its cooperation with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. He is considering providing more resources to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and border services, including more helicopters and drones.
Even before Trump’s latest threats, Canada’s ruling class had announced that a radical shift to the right was necessary to ensure that Canada remained “competitive” and “behind Trump’s walls,” as the Globe and Mailthe traditional mouthpiece of the financial elite, expressed. This class war agenda includes: increased austerity, corporate tax cuts at least equal to Trump’s, a doubling of military spending over the next four years, and other measures “helpful” to Washington.
Canadian leaders have also called for Canada to pursue a separate bilateral trade deal with Trump at the expense of Mexico. Liberal ministers accompanied the campaign with angry accusations that Mexico was serving as a “back door” for China to penetrate the North American market.
The government in Mexico also reacted with panic to Trump’s tariff threat. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum asserted that Mexico is already dancing to Washington’s tune. She despairingly pointed to her administration’s efforts to limit Chinese imports, sending troops to stop hundreds of thousands of migrants from crossing the U.S. border and working with U.S. authorities to curb drug trafficking.
Workers in the United States, Canada and Mexico must unite in a common struggle against the imperialist powers of North America and their bourgeois satellites in Mexico to defend the jobs and democratic and social rights of all. The fight must be accompanied by a movement against the wars waged by the United States and its imperialist allies, including Canada, to plunder and redivide the world.
Regardless of the conflicts between the rival ruling classes of North America, they are united in the goal of placing the entire burden of the crisis of capitalism on working people.
Mobilizing and unifying the working class requires a relentless struggle against the reactionary, nationalist union apparatuses – from the AFL-CIO and the UAW auto union in the US to the CLC (Canadian Labor Congress) and Unifor (a coalition of unions in the US). automotive industry as well as the communications, electrical and paper industries). They divide the working class along national lines and wage reactionary campaigns to defend “Canadian” and “American” jobs. They are also fully integrated into imperialism’s war plans.
The working class must urgently take up the defense of immigrant workers and fight unequivocally against the scapegoating of immigrants – whether by Trump, Trudeau, the chauvinists in Quebec or the Mexican authorities. As world capitalism slides into a trade war, a quagmire of nationalism and war, the slogan of the working class must more than ever be: “Proletarians of the world, unite!”
