The news that the US, Canada and Mexico have agreed a new trade deal, USMCA, may have caused a little surprise this morning among Trump critics. Isn’t the US President supposed to be leading the world into a new dark age of protectionism, sparking a 1930s-style depression as he puts the interests of a few blue collar workers in rustbelt industries above the health of the US and global economies as a whole?
Yet for anyone who has been following Trump’s methodology the news shouldn’t really have caught them unawares. Trump, it is true, was elected thanks in part to promises to protect US workers from unfair foreign competition. Yet he has since made quite clear that his instincts are far more towards free-trade – within days of the animosity of June’s G7 meeting he was asking: why not go to zero tariffs? His steel and aluminium tariffs have served to draw attention to the native protectionism of countries which have criticised him – as he pointed out, for example, it is a bit rich the EU claiming to be a champion of free trade when it imposes 10 per cent tariffs on imports of US-made cars – four times the tariff applied in the other direction.
What has happened between the US, Canada and Mexico is Trump all over: he stirs things up, insults people – and then when relations can’t seem to get any worse he makes up, shakes hands and does a deal.
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