Tariff wars...

Pete North is another commentator observing the Trump rampage and getting high on the overdose of old-fashioned common sense.  The news that...

"Trump halts tariffs on Mexico as it rushes troops to border
Mexico agreed to rush 10,000 national guard troops to the border to strengthen efforts to block the flow of drugs, especially fentanyl, coming into the United States..."

...could be another example of a genius playing the globalist game. Following the Columbia and Venezuela climbdowns. The legacy media is in predictable meltdown.

Donald Trump is putting an end to globalisation. More or less at the stroke of a pen, the WTO system is dead. The era of trade liberalisation is over. The age of American elite indifference to deindustrialisation and the export of blue collar jobs is coming to an end. Trump knows that America has leverage and tariffs are an instrument of that leverage, and he's using them to achieve political objectives such as the end of wage-depressing illegal immigration and the import of fentanyl. 

So will it work? Well, the cost of some things will go up. If American businesses want labour, they're going to have to pay the going rate, so we can assume the cost of food production will rise. Ordinarily, as I understand it, that would be a catastrophic inflationary measure, but this will in time be matched by energy abundance as Trump abandons the green agenda. 

It likely means the re-shoring of steel, microchip, chemical and pharmaceutical production - which, if nothing else, is strategically prudent. It was a mistake for the West to become so heavily dependent on China. 

As well as acting in the national interest, this puts political pressure on the "liberal" regimes in Canada and the EU. That's no bad thing. The sooner the Trudeau regime collapses the better, and for Europe to prosper, the EU must fall. The EU's Net Zero policies have done more to collapse European industry than any single influence since WWII.

Moreover, Trump is giving us hope that mass migration is not inevitable, and can be reversed if we make better choices at the ballot box. Further to this, if American disengagement brings an end to the pointless war in Ukraine the Europe is safer and better off for it. If Europe is then motivated to pay for its own defence and make itself more competitive, what's not to like?

For the USA, this is a fundamental remodelling of the state, the economy, and its role in the world. There will be transitional pain, but Trump really is fixing the foundations, asserting that the USA is a homeland, not just an economy. So far, I'm not seeing a downside. For once in the West, voting made a difference.

Meanwhile, back in broken Britain there is news of yet another teenage stabbing in South Yorkshire.  Well done on keeping British kids safe Keir Starmer, the Home Office and Yvette Cooper-Balls... 

The sequitur here is that Trump's action may be securing the US borders and slowing the easy access by criminal gangs and families to the USA. And then rounding them up and sending them home.  How can we deploy this apparently successful tactic in our interests?