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I get what Trump wants from Mexico. I'm not sure what he wants from Canada. Is fentanyl coming in from Canada? I thought it was coming from Mexico.
I mean, He's said that he wants Canada to become part of the US, but that can't be his motivation here, can it?
I don’t think he wants anything from them per se. He wants stuff to be made in the US, by the US, for the US. America has enough raw materials, it can physically do that.
The tariffs are a goal, not a lever to the goal.
It cannot physically do that. Sure, any one specific thing can be made in the US, albeit at greater cost. But it would have to take resources from some other industry. It can't make everything it is making now and make everything it imports, not even if it stopped producing exports. It's not just because of the trade deficit which means it consumes and invests more than it produces, but because it would lose the gains from trade.
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That's Juche.
I’m not sure if you’re providing additional info or criticising by analogy. If the latter, it would be nice if you say so.
Personally I don’t find ‘a tiny, bent state once did this, so if you do it you will turn into a tiny bent state’ hugely convincing. Circumstances matter.
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That's true, but the situation is different. North Korea did Juche out of necessity. They were a small, backwards nation being embargoed by most of the world, and also completely lacking in oil and other key resources. Today they're... still small and backwards... but they've survived, much longer than anyone thought possible (albiet with a lot of help from the USSR and China). The USA is different. We're large, rich, and have basically every kind of natural resource within our border somewhere. There's no particular the USA should have to trade with other countries if it doesn't want to. The usual econ argument is that free trade and specialization of labor makes countries more prosperous, bu the counterargument is that it leads to income inequality, alienation, and fragility as our entire industrial base moves overseas.
We can talk about industry being shipped to countries with lower wages and laxer environmental regulations, but none of that really applies to Canada.
It may not apply to Canada. It does, however, apply to other countries that use Canada as a point of entry into the US economy.
There are a fair number of "made in Canada" products where the final transformation is done in Canada with the rest of the processing chain being overseas.
(Ditto Mexico.)
Trump is putting higher tariffs on Canada than on China (25% vs 10%).
I think the 10 % on China is on top of existing tariffs, so that the total is bigger than 25 %.
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I dont care about lower wages or environmental rules much. But i do think it its a bad thing when global capitalism concentrates all te production for something critical into a single place. Case in point, some people are joking that we can't oppose Denmark because they control the entire world supply of ozempic.
So long as everyone makes something that everyone else needs, it should be fine, right? Denmark can't oppose Taiwan beacuse both need each other.
Unless the Taiwanese just don't overeat, in which case the Danish have no hold on them.
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What if he is serious about Canada joining the United States, and he wants to use tariffs to force them to either ruin their economy or join the Union?
Then perhaps it is better to induce the population of Canada to hold that referendum now, rather than give them a chance to elect a government likely to be more protective of Canadian interests.
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I think the "annexing canada" and the "tariff canada unless they accede to his demands" might be coming from the same place: "you're entirely dependent on the US, so get in line and work to our benefit, rather than benefiting from our largesse and then stabbing us in the back in every public forum you get into"
I think there are some other similar things in Trump's policies, like asking NATO to pay for its own defense: some of that is just cost-cutting, but some of it is the NATO countries deriding the US for being a warmonger while being completely dependent on its warfighting capability. I suspect if they were praising their benevolent protector instead of claiming they're superior because they don't need to spend money on weapons, it would be a lower priority.
How is NATO dependant on America? European NATO has 400 nukes, 2 million troops, carriers, submarines, aircraft, everything.
European NATO would crush Russia in a conventional war. 500 million Europeans beat 140 million Russians 100% of the time. They're only behind in nuclear weapons but still retain the power to cause Russia a lot of damage.
Everyone points to them not spending as much as the US military but they have everything they need already.
"They're only behind in nuclear weapons" - this is blatantly untrue. Russia has substantial technological advantages in multiple fields, especially hypersonics for which there are only theoretical missile interdiction systems. Additionally, Russia and her allies have an immense military materiel manufacturing advantage - look at the disparity in artillery ammunition supplies in Ukraine. If you cut off foreign aid (so no China/North Korea/Iran for Russia and no US for EU Nato) the disparity becomes overwhelming - it doesn't matter how many warm bodies you can supply if you don't have weapons for them to fire or bullets for them to shoot. If they're telling the truth about the Oreshnik's availability the conflict would be even more one-sided.
If Russia has been struggling to crush Ukraine for the past 3 years even with their munitions advantage, then they can't beat a force vastly larger and stronger than Ukraine.
Europe has large navies that can blockade Russian sea trade. Europe has large air forces that can at least secure air parity, they won't be reduced to sitting around getting glide-bombed to death. They have a massive front with Russia that Russia will struggle to man, stretching from Turkey up to Finland.
Europe produces machine tools domestically. They have Germany for precision engineering. If they're actually at war they'll get serious and start producing ammunition in large quantities. It's really not that hard to produce shells and gun barrels, we know from history that German industry can produce large amounts of munitions, not to mention the other states. They're just trapped in the EU aura of omnishambles and are dragging their feet. Aside from Britain I doubt most of the other NATO countries care that much. This war doesn't really harm their interests enough to make a serious effort to arm Ukraine intensively.
The Russians don't have enough munitions to destroy 2 million professional soldiers, which is what they'd need to do before Europe starts drafting. Europe's sheer size and scale can buy them time to militarize their economy. Russia doesn't seem very good at swift blitzkriegs.
Ukraine has somehow managed to hold this long by throwing warm bodies into the fray, Europe can do that for years and years. Ukraine has no navy and next to no air power, Europe has both.
And this whole discussion is silly because Europe does have nuclear weapons and wouldn't be attacked anyway.
This is because the majority of EU munitions were actually sent to Ukraine, along with a lot of "instructors" and other technical staff who used those weapons. They aren't struggling to crush Ukraine by itself - they're dealing with EU's stocks as well. The EU currently has a massive ammunition shortfall, and according to people who are actually involved in the EU defence industry they need at least 3-4 years to build their stocks back up, and 10 years to be fully prepared. I will freely admit that if you give the EU a decade's warning to prepare in advance that they'd do substantially better, but that's not the situation we're in now.
They currently don't have enough materiel to put up a fight against Russia - it was all shipped to Ukraine. That weakness you're identifying is actually lethal if the conflict took place now as opposed to ten years in the future. It doesn't matter how many warm bodies and soldiers you can produce if you can't actually give them bullets to shoot or guns to shoot them from.
And in this situation (assuming a kindly wizard has disarmed all nuclear weapons) Russia would just threaten EU leaders with Oreshnik strikes and let them know that it isn't just grunts and poor people who would be in danger - and the EU would immediately surrender.
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Are you counting Ukraine as part of Europe? Because right now the rest of Europe doesn't seem to be doing a great job of defending it. They also notably had trouble with Serbia/Bosnia in the 90s and Russia/Georgia in the 2000s. Defense is about more than just "is able to continue to exist." As always, the main problem is that those 500 million Europeans are divided into about 50 different countries that don't agree on much.
Ukraine isn't in the EU or in NATO, tons of european voters dislike Ukraine (illegally flooding markets with their cheaper grain, bombing the oil pipeline with Russia, covering up their own accidents that killed some polish people and trying to blame it on russia) so the motivation to defend it isn't fully there.
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In this context I mean European NATO which was also unthreatened by Serbia or the Russian invasion of Georgia. Georgia would be nigh-impossible to defend even with the US involved, just via geography.
There has to be a limit, NATO countries can't be expected to fight and die for countries that aren't even in the alliance as a reasonable part of their defence.
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Yeah, if it wasn’t for nukes, EU could defeat. The nukes are still not something one can take out of the equation, though.
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I would argue a vast amount of those military resources were researched designed and developed with US IP... decreasing costs for our allies...
And to add to that, if you have XX amounts of jets including however many f-16s, as you can see in ukraine, once you get into a real war, those artillery shells start to deplete quickly. Im aware some european countries produce their own jets but I believe, and am willing to be proved wrong, that despite that much of the equipment is still sold to them by the US. So they get into a war and then you have Macron begging in the house just like zelensky for a loan to buy equipment.
Europe does buy a lot of American equipment but that's fine, many countries do that. They buy it with their own money as opposed to other people's money like Ukraine.
And they have the Eurofighter, Rafale and Tornado that were produced entirely in Europe. They have Leopards, Leclercs, Marders, MLRS and long-range SAMs... Turkey license-builds the F-16 domestically. There is a European version of just about everything except stealth fighters.
Maybe the American stuff is a bit better? American aid would obviously make it much easier to beat Russia. But it's not strictly necessary with over 3:1 population advantage and a much larger industrial base. 1v1 Europe would beat Russia every time in a conventional war. It would be like the Ukraine war but in reverse where sheer size is the most important thing. Broadly speaking, as Russia is to Ukraine, so Europe is to Russia.
If they were actually at war, then they'd start building serious numbers of artillery shells. But there's no reason for them to be at war so they don't bother.
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Cost cutting would involve actually cutting defense spending which they're not going to do. This is pure misplaced populist resentment. Folks intuitively know they're getting screwed by Millitary Industrial Complex but they don't want to be seen as pinko pacifists so they resent Canada or Belgium, or whomever, instead of Lockheed/Boeing lobbyists.
For all the buzz it gets "defense spending" in the for of tanks, ships, jets, missiles, Et Al is effectively pocket change within the context of total US spending.
The DoD's budget accounts for about 700 billion dollars of the Federal government's 6.9 trillion dollar total, in other words somewhere around 10%. Of that 10% somewhere between 1 quarter and 1 third goes to maintenance and procurement. The remaining balance is going to things like food, wages, housing, medical benefits, the GI bill, etc...
Point being that the US could cut 100% of what most people think of when they think of "defense spending" and it wouldn't make much more than a 3% difference overall.
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This is my question. Is he just picking a fight for the sake of it?
I think so. Tariffs are not going to put much of a debt in America's liabilities. America spends too much on domestic programs, not that it imports too much
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It crossed my mind earlier that this is a distraction.
[tinfoil]
Right now DOGE is working around the clock to gain access to government computer systems. Elon is working with Trump to implement the purge as we speak. If the media went full-out covering this the way they reported on Comey in 2017, they likely wouldn't be able to get away with it. If everyone is worried about tariffs and the economy instead, then DOGE can work in the shadows to take control of federal agencies away from the career civil service.
[/tinfoil]
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I'm not convinced even the Canadian government [is in any state to] know the answer to that.
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