Donald Trump promised steep tariffs on Mexican and Canadian goods, and on Saturday, he made good on those promises.
The Chicago Council on Global Affairs has been polling on foreign policy attitudes of the American people for 50 years, and during all that time, "protecting American jobs" as a foreign policy goal has been at or near the top.
Gallup’s Lydia Saad noted "that promoting fair trade policies was a goal 'on a par with preserving national security' and ranked higher than defending allies’ security or working with the UN," according to Forbes.
Trump's 25% tariffs on Mexican and Canadian goods and an extra 10% on Chinese goods (on top of the 25% already imposed) may make some things we buy more expensive. The reaction of Canada, and especially Mexico, reveals a realization that Joe Biden's get-along, go-along appeasement strategy on a range of issues with our neighbors to the North and South is no longer the case.
“Problems are not resolved by imposing tariffs, but by talking and dialoguing, as we did in recent weeks with your State Department to address the phenomenon of migration; in our case, with respect for human rights,” Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum wrote on X.
We categorically reject the slander that the White House is making against the Mexican Government of having alliances with criminal organizations, as well as any intention of intervention in our territory.
— Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo (@Claudiashein) February 2, 2025
If such an alliance exists anywhere, it is in the armories of the United States…
"Talking and dialoguing" in the past four years got us 8 million illegal aliens entering the U.S., 72,000 Americans dead due to fentanyl, and a trade deficit of $160 billion.
Mexico has been treating the United States like a doormat for four years. It's time we tried to put the relationship back on an even keel.
Victor Davis Hanson writes in the New York Sun:
After four years of Mr. Biden’s appeasement, Mexico seems to assume that it has a sovereign right to encourage the flight of millions of its own impoverished citizens illegally into America and further assumes that it can fast-track millions of Latin Americans through its territory and across our border.
Mexico either cannot or will not address the billions of dollars of raw fentanyl products shipped in — mostly from China — and then processed for export to America by its cartels across a nonexistent border.
Mexico seems to have little concern that some 75,000 Americans on average die from mostly Mexican-imported fentanyl each year — more deaths in just the last decade than all the Americans killed in action during World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War combined. Who then is our friend, and who is our enemy?
One of Mexico's largest sources of foreign exchange is the $63 billion in remittances that Mexican citizens and family members send back home. Those yanqui dollars buck up the Mexican peso, giving extra purchasing power to Mexican citizens. As Professor Hanson suggests, why not slap a 20% tax on these remittances? It would put Mexico on notice that the good old days of American appeasement are in the past and make the Mexican people pay a tangible price for their government's misbehavior.
President Sheinbaum objects to the tariffs because she says her country is making good progress in the fentanyl war.
"Our government has seized more than 40 tons of drugs in four months, including 20 million doses of fentanyl," she claimed on X. Most of that 40 tons was marijuana and counterfeit prescription drugs.
From October 2022 to the end of September 2023, Customs and Border Protection seized 6 billion doses of fentanyl at the Mexican border. And that represents just a tiny fraction of the fentanyl that makes it into the hands of addicts every year.
Tariffs aren't going to stop the flow of illicit drugs into the U.S. from Mexico. They won't stop illegal entries and won't fix the trade deficit, at least right away.
But Joe Biden is no longer president, and his appeasement of Mexico's leadership and hands-off approach to drug cartels have to end.
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