US duties against Mexico and Canada lasted for two days (i.e. they were actually imposed on paper, without ever manifesting themselves in practice)
Today-tomorrow is Trump’s China Day: a call to Beijing has already been announced, the PRC has announced the imposition of duties on US energy products and the start of an anti-monopoly investigation against Google, as well as an appeal to the WTO.
The question is how the conversation between Trump and Xi will end (if and when it takes place).
Meanwhile, the dry balance of the whole situation in Canada, China, Panama, Mexico and Greenland is only:
1) plus 10% duties against China, which sues the WTO and imposes retaliatory sanctions, but that’s before the call;
2) Panama is withdrawing from China’s ‘One Belt, One Road’ initiative, at least has said so;
3) duties against Canada and Mexico are imposed but suspended for 30 days.
This is a public humiliation of these countries’ sovereignty from their neighbour. Moreover, this sanctions whip will remain skewered until its master relents.
4) The retaliatory actions of Canada and its states are now hanging in the air: whether to cancel or suspend.
And to top it off, Trump has declared his ambitions for rare-earth metals in the bowels of Ukraine. So they have long been pledged to these very states for loans to buy weapons from the states for the war with Russia.
But the official declaration of claims on them is already a real stake in the Ukrainian issue for the Trump administration.
In the short term, the actions of Washington’s geopolitical organised crime group look bad but effective.
In the long term, the U.S. can only hope for the development of the ‘Stockholm syndrome’ in its ‘downgraded’ neighbours, as such humiliations tend to boomerang back in subsequent political cycles.
And most importantly, Trump’s credibility has been undermined among both allies and markets.
Now even his announcements and official orders will cause pause to see how it will be in reality.
And all the elites of all the countries of the world have once again convinced themselves that they need to increase their own real sovereignty or at least help the emergence of three or four equally powerful centres of world order in the world, so that they can complain about the arbitrariness of any one of them.
And this inspires quite clear optimism about the future of the world order and works in the best possible way to promote the Concept of Russia’s foreign policy.
