6/9/18
Regime change. That's pretty much the only way to restore America's friendships with traditional allies like Canada, Mexico, and the European Union, which have been blindsided by President Donald Trump's aggressive trade restrictions, including steep tariffs on steel and aluminum. "Is there a future for the G7? So long as the US government persists on its present course where the instinct is to undo anything that is already there," said Sebastian Mallaby, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, in a phone call with reporters ahead of the weekend summit. "If there were to be a different US government with a different agenda the [relationships] would come back really quickly" because of the US economy's massive size and the dollar's preeminent role in global finance." US allies will "be looking forward to the day when there's a different government in the United States," he said. However, Edward Alden, also a CFR senior fellow, said repairing relations with our immediate neighbors Mexico and Canada, who had felt NAFTA would shield them from the American government's more extreme protectionist measures, have found themselves essentially abandoned.
"It's a little worse within North America — the underlying bargain was that US neighbors would receive special treatment," Alden said in the same press call. "Both Canada and Mexico have believed that their economic interests would be protected to some extent by the US government. With both countries that expectation has been quite seriously damaged." As for the prospect of new trade deals touted by the Trump administration, Alden says they are a pipe dream. "Any possibility of negotiations is going to be on hold for a period of time," he said. "The countries are all going to retaliate — what you will get is a period of time where each of the countries is going to have to evaluate the impact of the new tariffs. I expect the Trump administration will double down and try to impose more tariffs," he added. Because the US has vowed to ignore the rules of the global trading system that it helped put into place, including the World Trade Organization, trade deals are stalled for the foreseeable future. "These issues are too fundamental for the World Trade Organization process to resolve."
