Trump threatens Canada with 100% tariff over possible deal with China | US foreign policy
Donald Trump said on Saturday that he would impose a 100% tariff on all imports from Canada if the North American country strikes a trade deal with China.
Besides the tariff threat, another foreign policy maneuver by Trump that made news on Saturday was the president’s announcement that the United States was taking the oil from recently seized Venezuelan tankers.
The US president wrote on social media that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney “is sorely mistaken if he thinks Canada will become a ‘Drop Port’ for China to ship goods and products to the US.”
“China will completely destroy Canada, including eating it alive and destroying its jobs, social fabric, and overall way of life,” Trump wrote on the Truth Social platform. “If Canada makes a deal with China, there will be an immediate 100% tariff on all Canadian goods and products coming into Canada. [US].”
Trump has repeatedly resorted to tariffs in an attempt to manipulate countries to his will; has had some success, but has also repeatedly backed down from its most extreme threats regarding tariffs.
Meanwhile, in an interview published in the New York Post on Saturday, Trump said: in question US refineries will process oil the administration buys from seized Venezuelan tankers.
“Let’s put it this way: They don’t have oil,” Trump told the Post. “We’re buying oil.”
He said the oil was refined in “various locations,” including Houston.
The US military has seized seven Venezuela-linked tankers since the start of Trump’s month-long campaign to control Venezuela’s oil flows. Trump said Tuesday that his administration had extracted 50 million barrels of oil from Venezuela and sold some of it on the open market.
The seized ships were either under US sanctions or were said to be part of a “shadow fleet” of ships hiding their origins to transport oil from major sanctioned producers such as Iran, Russia or Venezuela.
Trump’s Latin American foreign policy focused on Venezuela and initially aimed to remove Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro from power. Having failed to achieve this goal through diplomacy, Trump ordered US forces to fly into the country, capture Maduro and his wife in an overnight raid on January 3, bring them to New York and detain them there to face drug-related criminal charges.
In an interview with the Post on Saturday, Trump boasted that a new weapon he called “confusing” played a central role in the raid.
These words came after White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt: shared An eyewitness account appeared on social media claiming that the US military used some type of “very intense sound wave” to neutralize Maduro’s bodyguards.
Trump said the United States plans to control Venezuela’s oil resources indefinitely as the country seeks to rebuild the country’s devastated oil industry with a $100 billion plan, raising many eyebrows, especially from environmentalists and US oil majors.
