Canadians, too, heard Trump's inaugural speech.

Canadians heard threats, and trouble ahead.

No doubt some Americans felt pride and satisfaction when hearing Donald Trump's talk of our "Manifest Destiny" to expand our borders, his plan to impose tariffs on trading partners, and his assertion that the U.S. wasn't going to be pushed around by the likes of Canada, Mexico, Panama, Denmark and other pipsqueaks. 

The rest of the world heard the speech, too. 

College classmate Sandford Borins is Professor of Public Management Emeritus at the University of Toronto. Much of his ongoing research and commentary is about politics in Canada, and therefore, inevitably, its southern neighbor. Sandy posts his observations about politics, management, and life at https://www.sandfordborins.com.

He is pictured here in his office. Below it is a photograph taken by his son Nathaniel this fall. He is standing under a maple tree wearing a shirt we received at our 50th college reunion.

Guest Post by Sandford Borins

Listening to Donald Trump’s inaugural address as a Canadian, indeed as one of the more than 95 percent of humanity who are not U.S. citizens, I was reminded of the iconic “Greed is good” speech in the movie Wall Street. To quote from its peroration “Greed works, greed is right. . . . and greed, mark my words – will save … that other malfunctioning corporation called the U.S.” What I heard last Monday is a man whose career has been the embodiment of greed, projecting greed on behalf of the country he now leads. As I’ll explain, the speech conveys three types of greed: imperialist greed, societal greed, and environmental greed.

This Time It’s Different

We’ve heard numerous inaugural and other speeches by American politicians claiming that their country is exceptional, the greatest country on Earth, and so on. It’s offensive, but we accept that it’s in their culture, so we ignore it.

What’s different this time is that we had an inaugural address delivered by a billionaire, who surrounded himself with billionaires, who stated that his country is the richest and most powerful in the world and, in the next breath, that his country is being exploited and ripped off by the rest of the world. His conclusion, therefore, is that the U.S. should take reprisals against the rest of the world. Hence the threat that “instead of taxing our citizens to enrich other countries, we will tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens.” (I thought the U.S. taxes its citizens to provide public goods for them.) While signing executive orders that evening, Trump said that almost every other country is ripping off the U.S. and threatened to impose tariffs on the E.U. as well. Going beyond tariffs is the threat of “taking back” the Panama Canal and the reference to Manifest Destiny. The speech exemplifies the well-known imperialist credo: What’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is mine too.

A Canadian Example

In a recent press conference, Trump was asked about the effect of tariffs on the internationally integrated automobile assembly industry. His response was “We don’t need [Canadian-made] cars, we’d rather make them in Detroit.” This answer conveniently ignores the history of the Canadian automobile industry. For decades U.S. manufacturers, induced to locate in Canada by Canadian tariffs, were making cars solely for the Canadian market (brands like the Pontiac Beaumont, Parisienne, and Laurentian). Due to short production runs, these cars were more expensive than those manufactured in the U.S. The Auto Agreement of 1965, a precursor of NAFTA, eliminated tariffs for cars and parts between Canada and the U.S. As a result, U.S. factories began producing cars for the Canadian market and vice versa. This benefited producers and consumers in both countries. Trump’s answer is an expression of greed, namely a desire to erase a longstanding mutually beneficial pattern of international cooperation to benefit the US alone.

Societal Greed

One of the factors leading to Trump’s election was support from lower-income Americans, the people who feel they are not sharing in the U.S.’s fabulous wealth. Seen from abroad, the life chances of so many lower- and even middle-income Americans are so limited because the U.S. has so deficient a social safety net. But Trump has no intention of fixing the social safety net or requiring any significant redistribution from the billionaires to the rest of Americans. Rather, his intention is to make the billionaires better off and to benefit lower-income Americans by taxing the rest of the world.

Environmental Greed

The inaugural address included a commitment to increase production of fossil fuels (“drill, baby, drill”) and withdraw support for clean energy and electric vehicles. The executive orders included the U.S. leaving the Paris Climate Accord. Like the first, the second Trump Administration does not recognize climate change as a global problem or the carrying capacity of our atmosphere as a global public good. It is eager to sacrifice the environment of future generations for the benefits of “liquid gold” right now.

A Declaration of War?

Perhaps the inaugural address is mere rhetoric, and Trump won’t quickly follow through on his threats. For example, Canada’s ambassador to the U.S., Kirsten Hillman, describes the tariff threat as an attempt to “start a conversation” about the border. On the other hand, Trump may make good on his threats of economic and possibly military warfare. The U.S. has vast wealth and power, but it is not unlimited, and those who are attacked will find ways to make common cause and to fight back.

If the U.S. imposes 25-percent tariffs on all Canadian and Mexican imports, which essentially terminates the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement negotiated by the first Trump Administration, I’ll suggest two likely Canadian responses. The Canadian auto industry will not disappear. Rather it will restructure and seek partnerships with auto manufacturers in other countries, possibly including China. We may produce fewer automobiles for the U.S. market, but more for Canada and for other markets. The wholesalers for wine, beer, and spirits for the entire Canadian market are provincial marketing authorities. We won’t impose tariffs on American wine, beer, and spirits: the provincial authorities will stop buying them entirely and they will disappear from Canadian store shelves.

The imperialist ambitions Trump expressed in his second inaugural will be widely opposed and, if they make people in other countries worse off, they will also end up making Americans worse off. Not big wins for Americans, but big losses for everyone.

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