Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of the accompanying video from professor Peter St. Onge.
It turns out the four-year border crisis took a single phone call to fix, suggesting maybe they didn’t want to fix it.
Last week, President-elect Donald Trump fixed the border by announcing tariffs on Mexico, Canada, and China unless their governments start controlling the border and fentanyl trafficking.
Specifically, Trump threatened 25% blanket tariffs on everything from Mexico and Canada and an extra 10% on China.
The reaction was immediate: Within 40 minutes of issuing his threat on X, Trump posted that he had a “great conversation” with Mexico’s president where she agreed to stop migration through Mexico and promised cooperation on controlling drugs at the border.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, meanwhile, gave an impromptu street interview appearing “shaken,” rambling on about the strong relationship with America and the “challenges we can work on together,” then immediately flew to Mar-a-Lago to grovel.
Meanwhile, the European Union—which wasn’t even targeted—issued an urgent statement encouraging member states to ramp up purchase of U.S. goods to avoid angering Trump.
So, four years of carrots didn’t work, 40 minutes of stick worked a charm.
The context here is the U.S. is much more important to these countries than they are to us.
They need us. We do not need them.
To put it in numbers, Mexico’s exports to the U.S. make up over a third of its economy. But our exports to Mexico are just 1.3% of our gross domestic product.
Canada is almost as bad: Exports to the U.S. are over one-fifth of Canada’s economy—one-fifth of their jobs. But our exports to Canada are just 1.4% of our economy.
Even for China, we export just one-fourth of what they export to us as a share of the economy. About 1 million jobs in the U.S. are producing for export to China, while 20 million Chinese jobs depend on exports to the U.S.
Interestingly enough, this is the case for nearly every country on earth—we are a much bigger share of their economies than they are of ours. Europe is the closest, and even there we’re twice as important to them as they are to us.
For countries like Japan or Korea, the ratio is so far off they should be caving on every last trade issue. Even before you consider the only reason they aren’t Chinese peons is the U.S. Marines.
This matters because it means the U.S. has enormous leverage over just about every country in the world.
This is easy to forget since our globalist uniparty hasn’t been using that leverage—instead, it’s been crawling around begging, say, Korea to buy American beef.
Now, you might say it’s rude to bully “allies” who’ve been treating us like a doormat for 70 years. But note other countries are very proud of using market access to bully other countries. The European Union, for example, literally charges nonmembers Norway or Switzerland annual fees to access EU markets, totaling a billion dollars.
If we did that, we’d be charging the EU something like $30 billion. We’d be charging China $50 billion.
Perhaps we should.
So what’s next?
The U.S. has been a doormat so long, other countries feel like they own us. Trump is simply giving them a taste of their own medicine.
They’ll squeal, but given the lopsided nature of globalism—given how much they depend on our markets—they’ll back down. It’s just a question of how much pain they can take and how many factories they lose along the way.
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