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While it's entirely possible Trump is absolutely excited to apply tariffs all around, my perception is that for Canada and Mexico his goals are more to use it as a "big stick" to get them in line with his goals: "your entire economy depends on us and I have the power to ruin you, so here's what I want you to do", like how he used it as a threat with the Colombian president refusing deportation flights
Canada's economic interaction with the US doesn't seem to be harmful in terms of the US's long-term economic success: "you send us oil, we refine it and sell it back to you" is actually a pretty good setup for the US. If anything, it seems to paint the Canada-US relationship similarly to the US-China relationship, where not building domestic industrial capacity leaves the former dependent on the latter.
The question then becomes whether Canada will cave sufficiently to Trump's desires, and I can see there being some pain there: Canada's tended to frame itself as "the US, but properly enlightened" and I expect that will lead to some #RESIST and trying to get Trump to cave first, and I'm reasonably confident Trump will actually pull the trigger if it comes to it.
I get what Trump wants from Mexico. I'm not sure what he wants from Canada. Is fentanyl coming in from Canada? I thought it was coming from Mexico.
I mean, He's said that he wants Canada to become part of the US, but that can't be his motivation here, can it?
I think the "annexing canada" and the "tariff canada unless they accede to his demands" might be coming from the same place: "you're entirely dependent on the US, so get in line and work to our benefit, rather than benefiting from our largesse and then stabbing us in the back in every public forum you get into"
I think there are some other similar things in Trump's policies, like asking NATO to pay for its own defense: some of that is just cost-cutting, but some of it is the NATO countries deriding the US for being a warmonger while being completely dependent on its warfighting capability. I suspect if they were praising their benevolent protector instead of claiming they're superior because they don't need to spend money on weapons, it would be a lower priority.
Cost cutting would involve actually cutting defense spending which they're not going to do. This is pure misplaced populist resentment. Folks intuitively know they're getting screwed by Millitary Industrial Complex but they don't want to be seen as pinko pacifists so they resent Canada or Belgium, or whomever, instead of Lockheed/Boeing lobbyists.
For all the buzz it gets "defense spending" in the for of tanks, ships, jets, missiles, Et Al is effectively pocket change within the context of total US spending.
The DoD's budget accounts for about 700 billion dollars of the Federal government's 6.9 trillion dollar total, in other words somewhere around 10%. Of that 10% somewhere between 1 quarter and 1 third goes to maintenance and procurement. The remaining balance is going to things like food, wages, housing, medical benefits, the GI bill, etc...
Point being that the US could cut 100% of what most people think of when they think of "defense spending" and it wouldn't make much more than a 3% difference overall.
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