By Kevin D. Williamson
Tuesday, June 04, 2019
It is a blessing to have good neighbors and a curse to
have bad ones.
India, for example, has revolutionized its national
economic life and, to some extent, its social life since the middle 1990s, and
the fruits of its reforms have enriched that country in obvious and less
obvious ways. But India remains a partial prisoner to geography and history,
surrounded as it is by failed and failing states (Pakistan, Sri Lanka), basket
cases (Bangladesh), and a totalitarian police state with a nuclear arsenal and
grand nationalist ambitions (China). At the other end of the spectrum, the
still-young Czech Republic has been helped along greatly by the fact that it is
located alongside Germany and Austria, which are, in this century, two of the
best neighbors one could hope for. Happy Switzerland can go its own independent
way thanks in part to the neighbors with which it is blessed; but if Iran
should tomorrow undergo a great awakening and reconstitute itself as a liberal
constitutional republic, it still would be in a pretty tough neighborhood and
would be circumscribed by that reality.
Economics and diplomacy may help to shape the world, but
geography still will have its say.
The United States has been shaped by its neighbors, too,
and by its geography — which for many years ensured that a great many Americans
did not have to think about Mexico or Canada, which are very far from Wichita,
much less about Central America or faraway realms on the other side of our
fortifying oceans. The editors of the foreign pages of American newspapers, who
were lonely men, used to observe that as far as their readers were concerned,
if it didn’t happen in England, it didn’t happen. Princess Diana we knew — but
how many Americans could pick the Empress Masako out of a police lineup?
Europeans sniffed that Americans knew no foreign languages, and Americans were
convinced, not without some good reason, that they didn’t really need to.
That was then.
The United States is bordered by two magnificent but very
different countries: Canada, sprawling and 80 percent uninhabited (“Too much
geography and too little history,” Mackenzie King famously observed) and
Mexico, beautiful and complex, turbulent and poor. We Americans do not talk
about Canada very much, except for the occasional tantrum about how timber
royalties on Crown Lands are calculated or a low-level skirmish about dairy
policy. The United States and Canada do about three-quarters of a trillion
dollars in trade annually, Canadians and Americans have fought together from
the Great War to Afghanistan, and if Trudeau helps some Americans to feel a
little better about Trump, then Trump helps more than a few Canadians feel
better about Trudeau. Americans may not think about Canada very much —
Canadians do not have the luxury of not thinking about us — but when we do, we
generally think well of them: Canada is, according to the polls, Americans’
favorite foreign country.
Mexico is a different story. Like much of Latin America,
it has been plagued by bad government, corruption, ineffective institutions,
poverty, and dysfunction. It is not so poorly off as Ecuador or Guatemala, but
it would need to go a great way before being as prosperous as Chile or Panama;
it would need to more than double its income to match Canada’s and treble it to
match our own. The central government exercises only incomplete control over
some Mexican territory, particularly along the border, and the organs of the
Mexican state routinely are overmatched by the organs of Mexican organized
crime. The flow of illegal immigrants across the border into the United States
is lawless and intolerable — and also entirely understandable, as is the
related flow of asylum-seekers from points south.
The Trump administration is right to put getting control
of illegal immigration — and getting control of the southern border — at the
top of its agenda. Democrats and mainstream Republicans still scratching their
heads about the ascent of Donald J. Trump need look not much further than that
issue to understand his attraction and their failures.
But, as it turns out, getting control of the border is
hard work, and securing funding for a border wall and other measures requires a
measure of political competence that President Trump simply does not have and
is not likely to acquire. His admirers believe him to be a master negotiator,
always three steps ahead of the game; in reality, congressional Republicans got
what they wanted out of the Trump administration — tax cuts — and left him
hanging on immigration, putting off meaningful action until the loss of the
Republican majority in the House of Representatives took such action off the
table as a practical matter.
And so the border remains unsecured.
President Trump loves tariffs, and so he has set upon a
new strategy for capping the flow of illegal immigrants and asylum-seekers
across the southern border: He proposes to bully Mexico City into doing it for
him, threatening to impose tariffs on Mexican imports — starting at 5 percent,
escalating to 25 percent — unless the Mexican government waves the magic wand
it does not actually possess and seals off the U.S. border from the southerly
side.
This policy is unlikely to work, for several reasons. The
first and most important is that it is not at all clear that the Mexican
government has the capacity to act as demanded, especially given the fact that
it would be obliged to act in part through its famously corrupt police forces.
But there are other considerations, too: Contrary to President Trump’s beliefs,
tariffs are paid by the importing party, not by exporters, and the incidence of
this tax — i.e., the question of who actually ends up paying it — ends up being
a very complicated question. Some costs will be passed along to American
businesses and consumers; some may be borne by Mexican exporters; some may be
passed on to workers in the form of downward pressure on their wages or in
productivity demands. Mexican inputs touch the entire North American supply
chain, including the parts of it involved with politically sensitive businesses
such as automobile manufacturing and agriculture, the latter of which already
is reeling from the damage inflicted by the president’s ill-considered trade
war with Beijing. That means that Andrés Manuel López Obrador & Co. may
calculate that they can wait out the Trump administration. The outcome is far
from foreseeable or fixed.
The better long-term approach for the United States
happily joins self-interest to open-handedness. What this requires is
recognizing that we as a country are blessed to have Canada for a neighbor and
would be radically better off if the country to our south were economically and
politically something more like Germany and something less like Equatorial
Guinea — or at least moving in that direction. Mexico is not Haiti or even
Venezuela. It is not Pakistan. It is a middle-income country bordering a very
wealthy one with which it has a long and fruitful but difficult relationship.
We do not need a Marshall Plan for Mexico, but we do need a campaign of North
American investment and institution-building there. Some of that was in fact
accomplished through NAFTA, and Mexico today is a very different place from
what it was in the 1980s. (In 1980, the Mexican peso was trading at 23 to the
U.S. dollar; by the 1993 apex of Mexico’s currency crisis, the peso was trading
at 3,000 to the dollar.) But there is a long way to go.
Of all its destructive tendencies, Trumpism’s most
destructive is misunderstanding the world and its economic relations as a
zero-sum game. A richer Mexico would be a blessing to the United States, and a
poorer one would represent an expense, a diminished market, a lost opportunity
— and a danger. Compared to the rest of North America, Mexico is both weak and
poor. Even if President Trump’s tariffs worked, the result would only be to
leave Mexico even weaker and even poorer. And that would leave the United
States weaker and poorer, too, even if there are a great many people in
Washington who are too ignorant and blinkered to understand the fact.
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