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Thursday, June 13, 2019

Trump was right to threaten Mexico with tariffs

Trump was right to threaten Mexico with tariffs

A (North) America First policy

Donald Trump holds a piece of paper he said was a trade agreement with Mexico, while speaking to the media before departing from the White House
Let’s not mince words. President Trump and his loyalists were dead right. His threat of tariffs pushed Mexico to work harder to stop the Central American caravans, and the migrants who hope to exploit immigration law loopholes in order to receive asylum in the United States.
And the bipartisan, Trump-loathing political, business and media establishments were all dead wrong. They warned that his strong-arming would ignite a trade war, disrupt the thick web of supply chains linking the American and Mexican economies, and risk a recession. Equally off-base was the establishmentarians’ angst that Trump’s gambit would endanger the revamp of the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) that he has sought and which Mexico and Canada recently signed.
Trump busted a ballyhooed — but entirely phony — globalist policy norm. Immigration and trade policy must kept completely separate? Seriously? When one of Nafta’s selling points is a promise that prosperity in Mexico will keep Mexicans home? All the same, I hope Trump doesn’t whip out the tariff threat again. Not because Trump’s tactics were ‘bullying’ — a childish charge that pretends coercion plays no part in international relations. And not even because further actual or threatened levies will undermine Nafta’s intended replacement, the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA).
Read the article at spectator.us...

Alan Tonelson is the founder of RealityChek, a public policy blog focusing on economics and national security, and the author of The Race to the Bottom.
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