Trump ends "The West" as we know it

The West was already in decline, and Trump has slammed his foot on the accelerator

Does “the West” still exist as a coherent concept? After the break with Europe over Ukraine and security, Donald Trump has moved to further collapse the West as a political, economic and military formation.

In doing so, the President seems determined to plunge US as well as Canada and Mexico into economic crisis. That risks taking the world with it. The Age of Turmoil we’ve lived in now for a decade or so has been primarily driven by economic insecurity, as well as Western military defeat. Trump is a symptom - and an accelerant. The political consequences, then, of yet more economic pain will be unpredictable.

Let’s just start with Canada, which is physically at least the closest US ally - and the most integrated on everything from economics to security. Like Mexico and China, Donald Trump has imposed tariffs, which serve as a de facto tax, where the company coughs up the money but then passes it on to the consumer as a price increase. Even on the terms of Trump, the motives here both bewildering and disturbing.

Superficially, Trump has imposed 25% tariffs on Canada, as well as Mexico and China, to stop the flow of the drug fentanyl across its borders. As Canada’s outgoing prime minister Justin Trudeau notes, this is just a pretext. Leave aside that overdose deaths are falling - helped by progressive measures such as the expansion of treatment services - and that less than 1% of fentanyl intercepted arriving in the US comes from Canada.

This simply serves as a tenuous legal pretext to impose tariffs, because Donald Trump actually wants to annex Canada, and turn it into the 51st state. It sounds, well, deranged, and many have obviously concluded that Trump constantly talking about turning Canada into the 51st state is just a ruse, he doesn’t really mean it, it’s just a negotiating ploy. No, he really means it.

In an extraordinary press conference, departing Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau declared that his neighbouring head of state sought the collapse of Canada’s economy in order to make it easier for the US to pursue annexation.

And indeed the Canadian foreign minister Mélanie Joly last night made clear that her government took Trump’s demands for statehood “very seriously”. Conversations with White House officials that Trump means what he says, she emphasised.

The Trump administration is simultaneously demanding the current border with Canada is revised. One of Trump’s closest allies, Peter Navarro, reportedly seeks the expulsion of the US from the ‘Five Eyes’ intelligence gathering network - the other three countries being the UK, Australia and New Zealand. The US is even threatening Canada’s water.

Yet this is simply heightening Canadian revulsion at its neighbour, thus fragmenting the West further.

According to the polling, 90% of Canadians oppose becoming the 51st state, while just 25% of Americans support Canada joining their Union. What’s truly disturbing is that even though Trump says the US wouldn’t use military force to annex the country, 62% of Canadians don’t trust him on that. So nearly two thirds of Canadians genuinely believe that there is a prospect of an invasion by the US and thus all-out war. What a time to be alive.

That may be unlikely, but Canada’s population will increasingly and quite rationally regard the US as a hostile state.

Indeed, before Trudeau announced his resignation, his Liberal Party were set to be obliterated in the coming election at the hands of the pro-Trump Conservatives, who were set to win a whopping big majority. But there’s been a massive turnaround, and the Liberals look like they’re now in with a shot. Even though I’d personally vote for the New Democratic Party, who alas have been further squeezed, such an outcome would be truly hilarious. Such a government will undoubtedly win an election campaigning on a platform of standing up to Trump - and achieving greater Canadian independence.

It gets even more disturbing because Trump is clearly dead set on annexing Greenland, too. Greenland is part of Denmark, an EU state. In his State of the Union address last night, he declared: “We’re going to get it one way or the other.” Not a subtle threat, then. The US is openly threatening to seize the territory of a European “ally”. Clearly unprecedented, and underlining the fragmentation of the West.

In that same State of the Union address, he claimed his trade war would cause only “A little disturbance”.

The evidence points to rather great consequences than that. The impact will drive further economic turmoil across the West. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, which runs a model estimating economic growth called GDPNow, US growth in the first quarter is now set to be minus 2.8%, down from an estimate of +2.3% just last week. And a month ago, that model showed around 4%.

That means that the world’s dominant economy in the first quarter is contracting at the fastest place since the pandemic erupted half a decade ago.

Sure, there’s lots of these models around, but the Atlanta Fed is regarded as the most reliable. Indeed, there’s lots of data pointing in this direction - US consumer confidence is now down to an 8 month low, and retail sales have had their biggest drop in nearly 2 years.

According to the Tax Foundation think tank, even before retaliation, tariffs will shrink the US economy by nearly 0.3% and after-tax incomes by 0.7% on average.

Note that the Biden-Harris administration was partly sunk because of rising prices hitting struggling Americans, so Trump deliberately hiking prices seems quite an interesting choice.

I’m guessing Trump is not exactly a dedicated student of US history, but it’s worth recalling the Smoot-Hawley Tarrif Act of 1930, which was passed by Republican politicians in Congress. As the official US Senate website records:

It was on June 13, 1930, that the Senate passed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, among the most catastrophic acts in congressional history.

Noting economists at the time wrote letters warning of the consequences, it adds:

As the economists predicted, the high tariff proved to be a disaster. Even before its enactment, U.S. trading partners began retaliating by raising their tariff rates, which froze international trade.

Years after that trade war began, the world was enveloped in war. You may suggest there are big differences today: back then, there was economic turmoil, the rise of fascism and growing conflict. Ah.

On that, the Chinese government has issued a statement which rather ominously ends with:

If war is what the U.S. wants, be it a tariff war, a trade war or any other type of war, we’re ready to fight till the end.

It’s worth bearing in mind that Trump’s pivot towards Russia may be partly understood as an attempt to peel Putin’s regime away from China, on the grounds that the US judges an ascendant China to be the pre-eminent threat. However, Trump’s behaviour is only bolstering China’s ascent. Note how both the US and the UK cut their international aid: China will gladly fill the vacuum to expand its influence.

Trump’s machismo doesn’t reflect strength: but rather the decline of the West, which can no longer be regarded as a cohesive entity.