Montezuma's Revenge

 As of this morning, Trump is still saying he's about to impose sweeping 25% tariffs on all goods from Mexico—even though he signed a free trade agreement with them during his first term, and they remain a close ally, friendly neighbor, and one of our two largest trading partners. The Mexican government has tried to offer him concessions—but it seems there's nothing he actually wants in exchange (so much for that "Trump's tariffs are just bargaining leverage" theory). He's just pointlessly, vainly torpedoing our international relationships for its own sake. It's the ultimate acte gratuit. 

Mexico and Canada have, understandably enough, threatened to retaliate if Trump goes through with this. And who can blame them? It's Trump who started this trade war in the first place, without the slightest provocation from either of our allies. So I can't fault them for defending their interests. But a lot of Americans will suffer cruelly as a result—not least in our agricultural sector. And so, one of the many ironies of Trump's policy is that the people who will pay the price are not Mexican nationals—but U.S. farmers in states that voted overwhelmingly to return him to the White House. 

After all, the United States has actually benefited more than our neighbors from the unfair advantage we secured through free trade. In the pre-NAFTA regime, Mexico produced most of its food internally. But in the wake of the neoliberal trade deal, Mexico's domestic corn industry was decimated, because small subsistence farmers simply could not compete—absent protective tariffs—with heavily-subsidized U.S.-grown crops flooding in from across the border. It's U.S. food exporters who benefited most from NAFTA, then, and Mexican farmers who suffered. That's the real irony here. 

And so Trump, by walking back free trade agreements with Mexico, is actually shooting his own country and his own constituencies in the foot. There's something cruelly karmic about this. We reap as we sow. The U.S. deployed its leverage in the years of its imperial might to force other countries in our hemisphere to accept our cheap crops. We benefited, but peasant farmers across Latin America were bankrupted and forced to join the flood of displaced and dispossessed people streaming into the slums. Now—it would appear—because of Trump's sheer stupidity—they are actually about to get their revenge. 

So it has always been, throughout history. In the nineteenth century, Heinrich Heine wrote about the displaced and dispossessed Silesian weavers—put out of work by foreign competition from the new mechanical looms in England. In a great poem of social protest, he said that these unemployed and pauperized weavers were still weaving—but now they were weaving the funeral clothes of the German government. And so it is now. The Mexican peasant farmers the U.S. forced out of business are still sowing—but now they are sowing the seeds of our own country's punishment. 

Pride goeth before a fall. The U.S. in its imperial arrogance has thought that it can push around its allies, friends, and neighbors, and that they will tolerate it all without complaint. But now, at the hands of that ultra-chauvinist Trump, we are about to deal ourselves a gratuitous defeat. The dispossessed weavers wove old Germany's winding-sheet, as Heine wrote. And so too, the displaced Mexican farmers are sowing the karmic retribution for our own country's hubris and folly. And what folly is that? Not least—the ultimate folly of returning an obvious sociopath and madman to the presidency.