President Donald Trump and his supporters have heralded his use of tariff threats to extract concessions on drug trafficking and border security from Canada and Mexico.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Yet, experts say, some of the measures agreed to by America\u2019s two largest trading partners and close allies are less substantial than what has been trumpeted.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Trump announced the 25% tariffs on the two countries Saturday, with the expectation they would take effect Tuesday. By Monday, he said that he had reached an agreement with Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum to deploy 10,000 of her country\u2019s national guard officers to the U.S. border to stem the flow of migrants and drugs into the U.S. Sheinbaum said she had agreed to establish a bilateral \u201cworking group\u201d with the Trump administration that would tackle security, migration and trade.<\/p>\n
The same day, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said he had agreed to beef up border and drug enforcement, as well as appoint a new \u201cfentanyl czar\u201d and designate cartels as terrorist organizations. \u00a0<\/p>\n
In return, Trump promised to suspend the tariffs on both countries for 30 days.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cAs President, it is my responsibility to ensure the safety of ALL Americans, and I am doing just that. I am very pleased with this initial outcome,\u201d Trump said on social media. According to The Associated Press, the White House sent out an email that saw 68 Republican lawmakers praising the confrontation.<\/p>\n
For Mexico, it was not clear whether the 10,000 troops represented a fresh call-up. The Associated Press reported it appeared the soldiers were merely being shifted from other parts of the country.\u00a0<\/p>\n
While Trump has praised Sheinbaum on social media, if he decides he is not seeing results from an additional troop deployment, \u201cget ready for a trade war,\u201d said John Feeley, a career diplomat and former U.S. deputy chief of mission in Mexico.<\/p>\n
Crossings at the southern border had already begun to plummet in the final months of the Biden administration, reaching fewer than 100,000 per month for the first time since at least 2022. Interdictions of fentanyl have also fallen sharply in recent months. <\/p>\n
Although deaths attributed to fentanyl overdoses declined for the first time in five years in 2023, they still totaled more than 100,000 that year, the most recent for which data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is available.<\/p>\n
But Trump is looking for headlines, Feeley said, and is unlikely to be persuaded by data showing reductions in migrant and drug flows that were already trending down before he took office.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re mistaken if you think there\u2019s a metric of success for Trump,\u201d Feeley said, referring to quantitative sources of data. \u201cHe\u2019s not reading spreadsheets or DEA reports. He\u2019s looking at headlines and social media retweets.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Trump administration has faced a blitz of calls from U.S. manufacturers that rely on Mexican imports, especially automakers, The Wall Street Journal reported. Kevin Hassett, Trump\u2019s National Economic Council director, appeared on CNBC on Monday to issue an assurance that the negotiations with Mexico and Canada were about a \u201cdrug war\u201d and not a \u201ctrade war.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
A similar situation may be playing out with some of the concessions announced from America\u2019s northern neighbor. While Trump said Canada had agreed to take a more aggressive posture on its U.S. border in exchange for a suspension of tariffs, Canada\u2019s parliament had already passed a new border security and drug interdiction bill in December. Trudeau also agreed to appoint a border czar and designate drug cartels as terrorist groups.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThis whole thing is strange to me,\u201d said Laurie Trautman, director of the Border Policy Research Institute at Western Washington University. While there is drug activity on the Canadian border, it is much more limited in scope compared with Mexico, she said \u2014 with fentanyl comprising a smaller percentage of drug flows (43 pounds was seized there last year, according to Drug Enforcement Administration data, compared with 21,100 pounds at the southern border).\u00a0<\/p>\n
According to the DEA, 1 kilogram (roughly 2.2 pounds) of fentanyl has the potential to kill 500,000 people.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not as if we don\u2019t have issues \u2014 there are illicit flows,\u201d she said, \u201cbut comparing between the two borders is an exercise in futility.\u201d<\/p>\n
On Monday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump had been \u201castoundingly clear\u201d about his rationale for the tariffs.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe illegal surge of deadly drugs and of human beings that we have seen trafficked over the southern border and northern border,\u201d Leavitt said. \u201cThe president is making it very clear to both Canada and Mexico that the United States is no longer going to be a dumping ground for illegal deadly drugs and illegal human beings.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump has also cited drug flows as a reason to impose additional 10% tariffs on China, despite that country posing a host of other security threats to the U.S. On Tuesday, China announced a set of retaliatory measures on U.S. goods and interests, including levies of up to 15% and an antitrust probe into Google \u2014 though, for now, analysts have noted <\/strong>many of these measures appear to be largely symbolic, citing the marginal levels of the specific U.S. goods so far singled out by the Chinese levies, as well as Google\u2019s insubstantial presence there.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Trump has signaled that his approach to negotiations is to keep friends and foes alike off balance. While markets became used to dismissing his threats during his first administration, this time may be different, according to Goldman Sachs analysts.\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cThe outlook feels more uncertain and, even with the [tariffs] delay, we think the risks have tilted toward higher tariffs than we had previously assumed,\u201d they wrote in a note to clients Tuesday. \u201cThe challenge is that creating uncertainty is likely part of President Trump\u2019s strategy.<\/p>\n In an October interview with the Wall Street Journal\u2019s editorial board, the then-candidate was asked whether he would use military force if China invaded Taiwan.<\/p>\n \u201cI wouldn\u2019t have to, because [Chinese President Xi Jinping] respects me and he knows I\u2019m f\u2014\u2013g crazy,\u201d Trump responded.\u00a0<\/p>\n Yet, the paper\u2019s right-leaning editorial board said this week that the president \u201cblink[ed]\u201d as he brokered truces with Canada and Mexico that were \u201cmuch less \u2026 than meets the eye.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Whatever concessions Trump may have won, the board said, have likely come at the cost of greater uncertainty \u2014 one of investors\u2019 and economists\u2019 least-favorite trends.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cMr. Trump\u2019s weekend tariff broadside against a pair of neighbors has opened a new era of economic policy uncertainty that won\u2019t calm down until the President does,\u201d the board said. \u201cAs we warned many times before Election Day, this is the biggest economic risk of Donald Trump\u2019s second term.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n President Donald Trump and his supporters have heralded his use of tariff threats to extract concessions on drug trafficking and border security from Canada and Mexico.\u00a0 Yet, experts say, some of the measures agreed to by America\u2019s two largest trading partners and close allies are less substantial than what has been trumpeted.\u00a0 Trump announced the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":14701,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14700","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14700","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14700"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14700\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14701"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14700"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14700"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14700"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}