With the Mexico Trade War, Trump Is Back

After a few weeks that were, by Donald Trump standards, quiet, a new era of diplomacy by tweet has kicked off in earnest. The president-elect fired the opening shots of the impending North American trade war, announcing he will impose a 25 percent tariff on Mexican and Canadian exports to the United States on the first day of his second presidency, conditional on the two countries increasing their commitments to international border security. For good measure, he also announced a 10 percent tariff on China, demanding an immediate end to the export of chemicals used in the production of fentanyl, the majority of which hail from Chinese chemical manufacturers. 

The posts on Truth Social, naturally, set off an immediate diplomatic firestorm. Canada was the first country to react, with reports indicating that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called the President-elect within hours to discuss enhanced border enforcement. While most of the focus on the illegal migration crisis tends to spotlight America’s southern neighbor, illegal alien encounters on the Canadian border have jumped 600 percent from FY2021 to FY2024. 

Canada, which does not struggle to tain its sovereignty in the face of sophisticated cartel networks in the same way Mexico does, effectively allowed itself to become a staging ground for human traffickers throughout the Biden years. Trump’s decision to leverage the severe impact of tariffs, given that three-quarters of Canadian exports are destined for the United States, reveals the president-elect’s steadfast commitment to ending the migration crisis. Trudeau’s immediate, submissive response suggests that Trumpian leverage, Art of the Deal style, is as effective now as it was during the first MAGA quadrennium. 

With Canada’s meek leadership seemingly subdued, attention will no doubt re-focus on the primary trafficking highway to the United States’ south. It’s no secret that the Biden Administration’s negligence on the southern border touched off an unprecedented migration crisis, but at the end of the disgraced Biden’s term, it’s worth taking stock of the scale of the catastrophe. Since Biden’s January 2021 inauguration, Border Patrol has reported 8.72 million encounters with illegal aliens along the southwest border. Once a North American agitation, with net-zero migration between Mexico and the United States, lax border enforcement has developed into a full-blown crisis of global proportions. Border Patrol reports that aliens from 160 different countries and six continents have been encountered in the southwest. (The Biden administration would have allowed migration from the seventh continent, but emperor penguin caravans tend to travel less than 100 miles.)

Mexico’s leadership, now headed by Morena’s left-wing President Claudia Sheinbaum, has already signaled that they will be less cooperative with the incoming American administration. Sheinbaum is a markedly more ideological figure than her predecessor Lopez Manual Obrador, who was noted for pragmatism and proved an unlikely partner for Trump. Though AMLO’s detente with cartels enabled brutal, record-setting violence in Mexico, his willingness to play ball with Trump resulted in the Re in Mexico accord and ultimately drastically reduced illegal border crossings. Sheinbaum’s combative early response to Trump’s tariff threats suggests that negotiations between Mexico and the 47th president may be less amicable than those between Mexico and the 45th president.

Sheinbaum brazenly responded to Trump’s tariff threat by flipping the usual border narrative on its head and going on the rhetorical offensive. La Presidenta said that drugs are an American, not Mexican, crisis and noted the frequency of illegal firearms shipments from the U.S to Mexico. She additionally suggested that Mexico would respond in-kind with reciprocal tariffs, which she noted would drive up inflation in both countries. Sheinbaum, serving a single six-year term and leading a citizenry generally accommodated to inflation, undoubtedly understands the political pressure inflationary tariffs could place on the Trump administration. Though 80 percent of Mexican exports are to the United States, Sheinbaum understands the political moment and intends to exercise calculated leverage of her own. The course of these trade and security negotiations, shaping up to feature brinksmanship, will define the course of both new President’s terms in office.

Trump’s move to assert American dominance over North American trade and security has already upended the continental status quo, with reactions from China still unclear and likely to develop against the backdrop of global tension and realignment. But whatever the outcomes of these negotiations, the broader implication is clear: Trump is back, and the clearest expression of American power is, once again, at the end of his posting thumb.