How countries respond to Trump’s rates is what matters below

It was not a lantern, the tariffs are here, and this is only the opening save of the oval office.

The World Trade System has not been here before. A slide towards a broader commercial conflict is in the letters, since President Trump prepares similar tariffs first against Europe, and then at a lower level universally.

But what matters as much as the actions taken by the United States is how the rest of the world responds.

That, in turn, requires a judgment on what the president is really trying to achieve.

Trump regularly changes his justification for tariffs, either to coerce diplomatic change, to deal with commercial imbalances or to increase significant income.

These policy objectives cannot be achieved simultaneously.

For example, learn from the experience of Trump’s first term “China Deal”, Western diplomats have been fighting to find lists of American products that could buy more, to give some victories to the White House.

Europe could say that it is increasing its purchases of American shipments of liquefied natural gas, specialized arms or magnets for wind farms.

It really doesn’t matter if these trends were already by train, as long as the president of the United States can have a “victory.”

But is the objective really to change the commercial deficit numbers here?

Officially, the justification of the Trump movement is the punishment for the trade of synthetic opioid fentanyl, but that is widely seen as a legal pretext for the “emergency” action that would normally require a decision of the congress.

Canada has indicated that it will adopt a robust approach to Trump, better articulated by the contender to be the next prime minister, Mark Carney.

“We will take reprisals … dollar per dollar,” he told the BBC, ridiculing the justification of fentanyl and saying that Canada “would face a thug.”

This is significant if Carney is successful or not to Justin Trudeau and ends up presiding over the G7, which is the largest “advanced” most large “economies in the world.

As a former governor of the Bank of England, Carney witnessed Trump on the world stage at G20 and G7 meetings of first hand and has clearly concluded that the US leader only respects the strength.

He had a coded warning for any nation that would seek to remain quiet and not get the president’s attention: “Good luck.”

In the recent conversations that I have had with European commercial negotiators, they have emphasized cooperation and association, as well as treatment with the United States. When asked, they avoided directly criticizing even the extraordinary suggestion of using tariffs against NATO Denmark ally about the destiny of Greenland.

The real question here is whether the rest of the world, even tacitly, coordinates the retaliation tariffs on, for example, the high -profile political supporters of President Trump, such as Elon Musk, which is a typical characteristic of previous smaller disputes.

Tesla, the electric vehicle manufacturer led by Musk, last week warned about the impact of tit a fee per eye.

All this aimed to make the rival courts around the Oval office, and interest in Congress, affirm their concerns about the impact on global exports of US factories.

All this is before the impact on American internal prices.

This could also come, more owner, through the application of a planned carbon trade tax in several jurisdictions.

Exactly how this develops depends on the perceptions of how powerful the United States remains.

Some nations can conclude that these days, there are other options in the world.

With the threats of tariffs that were sprayed in multiple directions every day, the world is in unknown territory.