--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Welcome to today's show. President-elect Trump isn't being very nice to our neighbors. He said he'd drop 25% tariffs on goods from Canada and Mexico on day one. This tariff will remain in effect until such time as drugs, in particular fentanyl, and all illegal aliens stop this invasion of our country.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That threat has Canadians saying, "How dare you compare us to Mexico?" And has Mexicans saying, "Rude, Canada." But it's certainly getting everyone's attention. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took a trip down to Mar-a-Lago to be like, "What's the deal, Donald? Will it work?" Nobody knows.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But after he left, Trump called Trudeau the governor of the 51st state. "Rude, Donald." We're gonna ask what the next block party might look like on Today Explained.
--:-- Mary Beth Sheridan: I'm Mary Beth Sheridan, Bureau Chief for The Washington Post in Mexico. Mexico's got a new president. The United States has an incoming president. How's that feeling right now in Mexico?
--:-- Mary Beth Sheridan: Definitely a fascinating moment. People are very worried, I would say, because, of course, Trump is coming in very focused on Mexico with threats to impose tariffs. He's even talked about using the U.S. military to go after fentanyl producers.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The president pulls you aside on at least a couple occasions and suggests that maybe we have the U.S. military shoot missiles into Mexico. What's happening? What you're just telling me. We need a military operation.
--:-- Mary Beth Sheridan: These people have become military divers. I will deploy all necessary military assets, including the U.S. Navy, to impose the full naval embargo and the cartels. I did that before and it worked. What we did was incredible.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's just a lot of uncertainty in Mexico and everybody's very focused on what Trump is going to do. Let's just speak about what he said explicitly. He obviously says a lot, but what's he said since winning the election?
--:-- Mary Beth Sheridan: So Trump posted on Truth Social that he would put a 25% tariff on Mexico and Canada if they didn't stop the flow of migrants and fentanyl over the border. So that's pretty much alarmed, well, both countries, I would say.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But in Mexico particularly, Mexico's very dependent on the U.S. market. 80% of Mexico's exports go to the United States. So any measure like that would definitely tip Mexico into a recession.
--:-- Mary Beth Sheridan: Trump has also talked about possibly using the U.S. military to go after fentanyl producers in Mexico. And Mexicans are very nationalistic. They remember U.S. invasions, and they are very worried about that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We are a free, independent, sovereign country. There will be good relations with the United States. I'm convinced of that.
--:-- Mary Beth Sheridan: When you say use the U.S. military to go after fentanyl producers, whatever it might be, we're talking about bombing Mexico, which we've discussed on the show before.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's really unclear what would happen. And I think Trump has intentionally left it a bit unclear. I mean, he's talked about sending the military to the border. People around him have talked about using special forces, possibly bombing fentanyl labs.
--:-- Mary Beth Sheridan: It's a little unclear both what he would do and whether he would do it with Mexico's permission. By the way, I doubt very much Mexico would give permission for something like that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But that point is left kind of undefined at the moment. So that lack of clarity is something that makes people very nervous.
--:-- Mary Beth Sheridan: Has Mexico done anything yet to address Trump's threats?
--:-- Mary Beth Sheridan: So they've been really eager to sit down with Trump's people, which has not happened yet. Claudia Sheinbaum has spoken. She's the president of Mexico. She's spoken twice to Trump by phone. And both sides have described those conversations in very positive terms.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And Scheinbaum is trying to kind of quiet the fears both of Mexicans in Mexico and migrants in the U.S. who are there, you know, unauthorized and could face deportation.
--:-- Mary Beth Sheridan: She's trying to kind of keep the markets from going crazy and keep people from worrying too much. For our compatriots and their relatives who are here, for Mexican companies and entrepreneurs, There's no reason to worry.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So far, the plans that Mexico has made are very low-key, and a lot of the focus has been on Mexicans in the United States who could be some of the primary targets for mass deportation.
--:-- Mary Beth Sheridan: So Mexico is beefing up the legal staffs at its consulates and things like that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Do we know how Mexico's new president, Claudia Scheinbaum, feels about our past and future president, Donald Trump?
--:-- Mary Beth Sheridan: Her predecessor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador who left office at the end of September had managed to create a pretty good relationship with Trump to everybody's surprise.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We had a great relationship right from the beginning and I think that maybe was against all odds. A lot of people were betting against it. But they've learned not to bet against us, I suspect. I know they've learned that in Mexico.
--:-- Mary Beth Sheridan: Lopez Obrador is a leftist, a nationalist, and Lopez Obrador gave in to Trump's demands on curbing migration. And in exchange, Trump kind of left him alone on a lot of other fronts.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So the question is, Claudia Sheinbaum is the new president. She is definitely a leftist. She's the protege of Lopez Obrador, but she's a different personality. She's a scientist, much less charismatic, obviously female.
--:-- Mary Beth Sheridan: And there's been a lot of questions about whether she will be able to establish the bond that Lopez Obrador had with Trump.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Instead of distancing ourselves, we are deciding we're opting to walk together towards the future. We want to privilege understanding.
--:-- Mary Beth Sheridan: You know, Lopez Obrador, I think, and Trump in part had this respect because each saw the other as the head of a movement.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Claudia Scheinbaum won with a commanding majority in the elections last June, but she kind of rode on the coattails of Lopez Obrador. So she may not have quite the same stature.
--:-- Mary Beth Sheridan: So far, they've both said their conversations were very positive. So we'll see what happens.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Do we have any sense of who she wanted to win the presidential election in the United States?
--:-- Mary Beth Sheridan: Oh, she was so careful about not expressing any preference because I think she understands Mexico needs to have a good relationship with the United States.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In particular, the economies are so intertwined. So many Mexican jobs depend on the exports to the United States.
--:-- Mary Beth Sheridan: So she didn't want to do anything that would get her off on the wrong foot with the new president.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: If you look carefully at what's been going on, Mexico has become just a crucial ally for the U.S. in stopping migration.
--:-- Mary Beth Sheridan: So under President Biden, in particular in the past year, the Biden administration leaned on Mexico. Migrant arrivals at the border, the detentions by the U.S. Border Patrol had reached historic highs in December.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the Biden people came down and really had a tough talk with the Mexicans. And Mexico cracked down in a huge way.
--:-- Mary Beth Sheridan: They have done about a million detentions since then. And the number of migrants being detained at the U.S. border has dropped by 75 percent.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So Mexico has a crucial role to play in terms of being able to stop migrants.
--:-- Mary Beth Sheridan: The other thing I would mention is that the U.S., both consumers and U.S. business, depend tremendously on things made in Mexico.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Everything from fruits and vegetables to cars to Oreo cookies. I mean, the two countries are very, the economies are interwoven.
--:-- Mary Beth Sheridan: Even our Oreo cookies? I didn't even know that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You bet. Cheez-Its, all kinds of snack foods. Yeah, they're made in both countries now.
--:-- Mary Beth Sheridan: And stuff goes back and forth. Think about Oreo cookies are made using U.S. wheat. Mexican beer is made using barley from Idaho and Montana.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, Trump has talked about these 25 percent tariffs that he could put on Mexico and Canada because of migration and drugs.
--:-- Mary Beth Sheridan: But those would wind up having a real boomerang effect for American consumers and for the American companies that rely on Mexican parts for, you know, auto factories in Detroit or airplane factories in the U.S. and so on.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Tell us a bit more about the boomerang effect. What could the U.S. economy look like if Trump went ahead and imposed 25 percent tariffs?
--:-- Mary Beth Sheridan: I do think that consumers could feel this very quickly in the U.S.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: For example, the Mexican government has calculated that pickup trucks sold in the U.S. could be $3,000 more expensive with these tariffs because a lot of the pickups and or the parts are made in Mexico.
--:-- Mary Beth Sheridan: You look at stuff like agriculture. In the winter, the berries that are in American supermarkets come from Mexico, largely.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Mexico has a longer growing season. And in a lot of cases, they're actually grown either by American companies sometimes or in sort of joint venture type arrangements, right?
--:-- Mary Beth Sheridan: Right. Think about during the pandemic, when Mexico closed some of its factories, the Pentagon got all worried because the parts for the airplanes that the defense contractors build for the U.S. Army and Navy, they weren't coming.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They couldn't build those planes. So that's the kind of commercial side.
--:-- Mary Beth Sheridan: I think on the drug side, you know, Mexico is a very proud, very nationalistic country.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the public would not tolerate any kind of U.S. unilateral military action.
--:-- Mary Beth Sheridan: I think that would be that would really destroy the relationship.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it would be pretty chaotic for both countries, particularly in their economies, I would say.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's funny, this trade fight he's trying to pick with Mexico and Canada at the same time, if I'm not mistaken, it's kind of pitted Mexico against Canada a little bit.
--:-- Mary Beth Sheridan: Oh, the Mexicans have been pretty horrified that the headlines have been Canada's throwing us under the bus.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And what happened is, well, the Canadians, on the one hand, are worried about the possibility that Mexico could be sort of a backdoor for Chinese cars and auto parts and so on, that would come in.
--:-- Mary Beth Sheridan: And the Canadians are saying the Mexicans aren't being as tough on China as we are.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Now, the Mexicans say, hey, China is still a pretty small exporter to Mexico.
--:-- Mary Beth Sheridan: And there's not a lot of evidence, the Mexicans say, that there is some kind of backdoor thing going on.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Canada is heading into its own elections pretty soon. So the theme of trade has emerged, particularly on the provincial level, where some officials who, at least in the Mexican vision, are trying to make hay out of this issue.
--:-- Mary Beth Sheridan: But the Canadian government has gone so far as to say, "Well, let's just leave Mexico out of the North American Free Trade Agreement."
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, it's like one friend fighting with two friends and then the two friends start fighting with each other too.
--:-- Mary Beth Sheridan: Yeah, I think it is very much seen as an effort by Canada to strengthen its hand with Trump.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But it's hard to imagine that it will work.
--:-- Kaylee Glenn: Hi, I'm Kaylee Glenn, a postdoctoral fellow at the American Grand Strategy Program at Duke University.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Kaylee, thanks for joining us today. Prime Minister Trudeau himself took a trip to Mar-a-Lago to meet with President-elect Trump in a way that received some mixed reviews in Canada, at least.
--:-- Kaylee Glenn: Some saw this as a potential strategy for a leader who knows how to deal with a president like Trump, meeting him on his home turf, figuring out how there might be a way to dampen the tariff rhetoric.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But on the other hand, Trump is not yet president. And so there are folks who have been critical about Trudeau's apparent deference to the incoming president.
--:-- Kaylee Glenn: We're also seeing provincial leaders and regional leaders responding to these threats of tariffs.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So Ontario Premier Doug Ford, for instance, has recently threatened to enact sort of province-wide retaliatory measures in the form of cutting off Ontario's energy supply to specific United States if the tariffs are imposed on Canadian goods.
--:-- Kaylee Glenn: We will go to the full extent, depending how far this goes. We will go to the extent of cutting off their energy, going down to Michigan, going down to New York State and over to Wisconsin.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I don't want this to happen. And this is not exactly a weak threat.
--:-- Kaylee Glenn: Ontario's energy supply to the United States amounts for providing over 1 million homes with their electricity.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And this would have regional impacts within the United States, particularly in states like Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, which all account for large dollar amounts and large quantities of trade with Canada and with Ontario specifically.
--:-- Kaylee Glenn: What's also interesting is that Ontario Premier Doug Ford has mentioned that he is planning on meeting with other provincial premiers in Canada to sort of coordinate a potential response across the provinces to any sort of tariffs that are imposed by the United States.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Trump got a chance to sort of rearrange the relationships between Canada and Mexico in his first administration, and he took it. How did that go over?
--:-- Kaylee Glenn: In Trump's first term as U.S. president, he went ahead and threatened to impose tariffs on Canadian and Mexican products and actually went ahead and did impose them.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But what happened in Trump's first term was that Canada and Mexico retaliated.
--:-- Kaylee Glenn: Canada imposed reciprocal tariffs on steel and aluminum products that remained in place until NAFTA was renegotiated to become the USMCA.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I will say that we just ended a nightmare known as NAFTA. They took our jobs for a long time. They took it for a long time and we now have a brand new U agreement. It's a whole different ballgame.
--:-- Kaylee Glenn: The renegotiated NAFTA into the USMCA was widely perceived to have included terms that were viewed as quite preferable for the United States.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Hmm. But now Trump is coming out before he's even in office, barking at Canada and Mexico and threatening 25% tariffs.
--:-- Kaylee Glenn: I think what this means is that the goals of what second term Trump administration is trying to achieve really matter here.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Candidate Trump mentioned the U.S. trade deficit with Mexico and specifically mentioned that the border between U.S. and Canada and the border between U.S. and Mexico is a key issue that he signaled he might use tariffs to address.
--:-- Kaylee Glenn: So if the goals of the tariffs are in fact security in nature, it's not entirely clear how tariffs would bring about desired policy change, given that Canada and Mexican leaders have already signaled they want to take action on the border.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So that is to say there's already room for cooperation and there might not be necessarily a need for the pressure levied by tariffs.
--:-- Kaylee Glenn: I think when people think about the border between the United States and Mexico, they think about migrants.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But when people think about the border between the United States and Canada, they think about like Niagara Falls.
--:-- Kaylee Glenn: What is Trump mad about regarding the 49th parallel?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There still remain irregular migrant crossings at unofficial entry points between Canada and the United States.
--:-- Kaylee Glenn: And Prime Minister Trudeau, alongside President Biden, coordinated the implementation of what's called the Safe Third Country Agreement to specifically address these irregular migrant crossings.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This once busy crossing between Quebec and New York is now quiet. The Canadian government closed the door to Roxham Road by extending something known as the Safe Third Country Agreement.
--:-- Kaylee Glenn: Under the agreement, asylum seekers arriving by land at official crossings are turned away and handed back to American authorities.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: After midnight tonight, police and border officers will enforce the agreement and return irregular border crossers to the closest port of entry with the United States.
--:-- Kaylee Glenn: So there's already been movement on the policy side between Canada and the United States to address things like irregular migrant crossings.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Because beyond that, it's not entirely clear what might be addressed in any sort of future policy move beyond what Canada and the United States have signaled they already want to do.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Trump loves to walk in and shake stuff up, right? He's a norm buster, a precedent setter, a precedent breaker.
--:-- Kaylee Glenn: Is that what he's doing here with Canada and Mexico just before he even takes office, scaring the living daylights out of everyone about tariffs and borders and bombings even?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, that's certainly possible. We sort of got a taste of Trump's foreign policy approach during his first term in which he dealt with traditional allies of the United States in ways similar to how the United States has treated its traditional adversaries with big threats and sort of harsh rhetoric for perceptions of unfairness.
--:-- Kaylee Glenn: So in a way, yes, President Trump in his first term was precedent breaking in terms of how he spoke about and how he handled allies.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: For instance, in his first administration, he considered Canada to be a national security threat and therefore justifying the imposition of the tariffs that we saw in 2018.
--:-- Kaylee Glenn: I can't recall a time when the United States had considered Canada to be a national security threat to that degree.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: After 1812. After the war.
--:-- Kaylee Glenn: Correct, yes. I mean, Canada has been a security ally across many different formalized alliances with the United States.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So it's not out of Trump's precedent, but it is out of U.S. precedent.
--:-- Kaylee Glenn: Kaylee Glenn is a postdoctoral fellow at the American Grand Strategy Program at Duke University.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: If that sounds like your kind of program, you can find it at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Go Blue Devils! Or, as I'm told, perhaps, go back to hell, ye devils.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm Sean Rameswaram from him, and I really don't want to get involved.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Our show today was produced by Halima Shah, edited by Matthew Collette, fact-checked by North Carolinian Laura Bullard and Victoria Chamberlain, and mixed by Andrea Christen's daughter and North Carolina Patrick Boyd.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is Today Explained. Thank you.
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