The Munk Debates Podcast - Friday Focus: Tariff reversal and Trump's shocking plan for Gaza

Episode Date: February 7, 2025

Friday Focus provides listeners with a focused, half-hour masterclass on the big issues, events and trends driving the news and current events. The show features Janice Gross Stein, the founding director of the Munk School of Global Affairs and bestselling author, in conversation with Rudyard Griffiths, Chair and moderator of the Munk Debates. The following is a sample of the Munk Debates' weekly current affairs podcast, Friday Focus. Rudyard and Janice start the show talking about President Trump reversing course on tariffs at the last minute. While some say this was all a negotiating tactic by creating confusion to get concessions from Canada and Mexico, others are more concerned that this is all a pretense to Trump 2.0's territorial ambitions.  Moreover, the damage done to the Canada-US bilateral relationship will have huge long term consequences. In the second half of the show Rudyard and Janice turn their attention to Trump's shocking plan for Gaza, reimagined as the Riviera on the Mediterranean as the Palestinians are relocated against their will. This plan, so utterly lacking in credibility, is an affront to Trump's entire voting base which wants to retreat from the world, not spend money on developing it. Even so, when a President says something, no matter how outrageous, there are consequences. To access full-length editions of the Friday Focus podcast consider becoming a donor to the Munk Debates for as little as $25 annually, or $.50 per episode. Canadian donors receive a charitable tax receipt. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue. More information at www.munkdebates.com.Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The following is a complimentary excerpt of this week's edition of the Friday Focus podcast by The Monk Debates. To access full-length editions of each and every episode, along with all kinds of great additional benefits and perks, become a donor to the Monk debates. You can do that for as little as $25 a year, and you'll receive each and every year 50 Friday Focus episodes at full length. It's all available right now on our website. in just a few simple clicks. Triple W. The Monk Debates.com. Look for the Friday Focus option in our navigation bar, the top right of the website. Make your donation, and we will send you each and every Friday a link to listen to the

full-length edition of this program. Thanks in advance for your generous contribution. Rudyard Griffiths here, the executive director of the Monk Debates. Welcome to this, the Friday Focus podcast. What an incredible weekend. It was. And as always, to unpack it all, we are joined by Janice Gross Stein, the founding director of the Monk School of Global Affairs. Janice, happy Friday. Thank you, Richard. And I am in Washington. And I can only tell you that I would call this

the wackiest week we've had. Yeah. Well, two-part show. In the first half, let's talk tariffs. It is a week seems like a year. And then on the back half of the show, let's talk Gaza because you are deep expert in the Middle East. And needless to say, this story has roiled the region, upended a whole bunch of assumptions about what could happen next vis-a-vis Israel, the people of Palestine, and so many other issues. But I want to begin with Trump and tariffs, Janice. You and I did an emergency edition of Friday Focus on Sunday morning. We were kind of shell-shocked by the announcement the previous day that Donald Trump would be proceeding with 25% tariffs against Canada. It only lasted, though, about 72 hours.

The president seemingly climbing down late in the afternoon on Monday, announcing a 30-day-day-day-season. suspension of the implementation of the tariffs, what are we to make of this, this kind of whiplash of Saturday's breaking of the North American economic trade and bilateral relationship with Canada, and then Mondays, I don't know what you call it, sudden stall, maybe reversal in the face of factors that we can get into. Roger, that question connects the two segments of today's Friday focus because it's the same question that everybody doesn't matter what the policy issue is, is asking, what is Trump want, what, you know, what's the plan?

What does he intend here? Walking away from that, really terrible weekend from Canadians last weekend. I think there's just two ways to look at this. who knows, which is right, and I don't think Donald Trump knows himself. One is that this is a bluster, tough negotiating, out of the gate a threat, deliberately create chaos and confusion in order to get the other side off start, you know, offside, confused, off balance, all the things that he does. and they get everybody focused on moving trying to avoid and we're very forthcoming with the concessions. And there are certainly people who think that's what this is.

There are others who are more concerned that there's a change in tone from this president. This is the real estate guy all of a sudden. He did talk about Greenland the last time he was president, but now it's Greenland, Panama, Canada, and us we'll talk about later, Gaza. And this is more serious than just bluster and bluff, which argument is right is going to be hugely important for this country. There was one encouraging note out of Washington this morning, which is the new ITR international trade representative said,

we are going to take a serious second look at USMCA, which is what they call it in Washington. and we call it because more enough to two. Well, you don't do that if you're going for something much bigger and much bolder. You just say you're walking away from it and they are not saying that. So there is a note of encouragement here. Janice, I guess what I'm struggling with is that all those answers make sense, but they imply a certain rationality to person's behavior and to policymaking. And again, we will talk about gas in a moment.

but as you say, these stories are interconnected, that this is a president that clearly is making up major policy on the fly. And there is obviously deep fractures and struggles going on inside his administration, both vis-a-vis his own government, the U.S. government, and what Elon Musk is doing, but even within his own White House reports that his commerce and trade secretary along with, you know, Scott Besson, who's responsible for the entire kind of financial universe that is America, were opposed to these tariffs, at least the announcement in the way that they were made.

And just the damage, Janus, that was done to the bilateral relationship, if all of this was for nothing, or for simply having a renegotiation of USMCA, which has to happen anyway by 2026, but the president choosing to go out and literally scare the wits out of Canadians and Canadian policymakers and what that's elicited, the response here in Canada and Mexico to these unprecedented and completely unwarranted threats and attacks, the damage that this has done to American credibility, to its bilateral relationships. It just seems as if it is, it is, is to what end, Janice, and maybe that end is not a rational place. Maybe it does not start from first principles.

How do politicians respond to that? How do you respond to a chaos monkey in the White House? You know, it's entirely possible because nobody who's worked with Donald Trump spent any time around him denies the chaos that he creates. You know, there was some hope that Susie Wiles, his new chief of staff, had brought some order to the campaign. If you actually watched that campaign and had plenty of wild moments of the kind you just described, Bridgerd. So I tend to agree with you here that part of this is simply this man who's undisciplined, who says what's on his mind. There's no orderly policy process.

But it doesn't matter because people have to read. react to it. And you're also right to point to the damage. The damage in Canada, you take a look at any public opinion poll. The anger in the Canadian public tax energy exports, you know, by American. This is a sea change in the way that Canadians will now think about the United States. Mexicans are angry. But let's not stop with the damage there. The damage is to every ally of the United States. I had an American right to me just yesterday and say, I am embarrassed to be an American given the way our country has treated you, our oldest friend. So the damage is huge. Will the people around him who are rational? We may not like their policies, but there's certainly

people there with experience in running large organizations. Will they be able to rein this in and channel into some sort of process. I think that's the hope for allies, because if they can't do that, we live like this for four years. Yeah, what do you think about all those allies in Asia, countries like Vietnam, Japan, South Korea? They have to be looking at these events

that took place in North America over the weekend and early this week and saying, is there an ally here? What is this? Isn't it time to start doing exactly, what the Canadians and Mexicans are doing now, which is hedging. We're all going to start hedging. And surely, Janice, the big beneficiary of that is the very country that this supposed you know, tariff mania, the president, is designed to thwart and denude and push off as a global

competitor. All this to me seems like China has had a remarkable two weeks, the premiership of of deep seek, a strike right to the heart of American AI supremacy, week one of the Trump presidency, and week two, going into week three. A huge win as the United States, you know, deeply destabilizes its allies. And again, Janice, I just, I struggle with this because he only lasted to three o'clock in the afternoon, sorry, 4 o'clock in the afternoon on Monday. The threat of the tariff once implemented was only staying for 48 hours, Janice. No.

You're a disagree. Or a proposition. You would disagree because I don't think the threat has gone away at all. I don't think any Canadian right now is relaxed. The government is in urgent mode, finally, in urgent. mode because, one, he made it very clear they're coming back March the 1st. Are they? Are they, Janice?

That's what he said. Intestinal fortitude to deal with a 2% decline in the S&P 500 and, you know, a slowdown of auto manufacturing in Detroit. And he's going to fold his cards by 4 o'clock in the afternoon on Monday. You know, isn't this just all bluster, Janice? Isn't this just all, and we'll get into the Gaza thing in a second, it's, we're taking this seriously. I get it. We have to, to some extent.

Yes. Maybe we also have to realize that this is a deeply dysfunctional White House. This is a president who's making it up on the fly. And this is potentially someone who can be mollified with very symbolic, media-friendly gestures like, quote, we're sending 10,000 troops to the border. You know, I think it's a very dangerous strategy, frankly, for us, for Canada. Because we, we, you know, it's the old argument rendered. We can't ever afford to get it wrong because we're smaller.

If we get him wrong once and punt, I take our eye off the ball. The consequences for us are huge for the United States, frankly, not so big. So we have to, number one, we have to, provide some videos. We have to provide data. We have to absolutely convince him that we're serious about what we promised we would do.

And all of us know, fentanyl is a very tough thing to make progress on. A lot of the fentanyl letters made in Canada now with Chinese precursors. It's consumed in Canada. The United States is not the

principal export target for Canadian-made fentanyl. But, boy, Like, go show this president that that's the – and we have to. But there's a bigger issue here. We still have to get ready for the possibility that that very erraticism that you talked about could lead him to bluster his way through and insist on going ahead. You can't discount it. I just think, Janice, you know, in – I wasn't sure about it.

I know you were opposed to it. But I think our trade negotiators, whoever was advising – The Trudeau government got it right. When you're standing up to a bully, you punch him in the face. And what we did was we surprised him because he said in that statement on Saturday, do not issue retaliatory tariffs. If you do that, you know, the hammer is coming down on you. And guess what?

Canada was first, but Mexico also showed some steel. And he folded like a wet tent because like, every true populist, Janice, Janice, they have no patience and no tolerance for political pain. They don't have the stomach to do

difficult things that will cost them with voters. They are truly populace. They are interested in bread and circuses and Christians fed to lions. They do not have the steely-eyed

kind of authoritarianism of the likes of Xi and Putin, which is genuinely terrifying. This is something different. We know this in Canada. This is Doug Ford in Ontario. The most weather vein of politicians probably that we have seen in a generation. We've seen this movie before. This guy, I just don't buy it.

I just don't buy the, you know, the big scary orange 850-pound gorilla anymore. Well, I hope you're right. you could be right here because we started by saying nobody knows. So you could well be right. And I think, you know, Canadians would be a huge sigh of relief. We're sure ready to do everything we need on the border and to keep at it. And we are going to make concessions when, you know, NAFTA 2 comes up. Those are not real issues for us.

What are issues are the kinds of structural changes that he's asking for. And, you know, again, There's a conversation here in Washington. There are issues on the table here and the way they talk about Canada. It's not only Donald Trump. It is a lot of other people that we would both call rational around him in the White House that have Canada in their line of sight. And that's why I'm more inclined to take this seriously.

You know, we all use that bully in the school yard. But just think for a second, when you punch the bully in the school yard in the face, there's a bunch of guys around you that are cheering you on because they've been bullied too and you walk away and you've got a whole bunch of new friends we don't have anybody else in the schoolyard with us we and Mexico are alone in this North American region with the United States that makes it much much harder for us Richard it's tied for his second and first trading partners and together I think our government governments, you know, read his tell.

Like this president has a big tell, Janice. I think it's that it's all hat and no cattle. I will tell, but let's talk about, let's take a break now, come back on the other side with our monk donors and curators to talk about Gaza because I think there's clues here in this. Yeah, that right. Our Gaza policy. And frankly, Janice, as soon as the Gaza policy came out,

I took a huge sigh of relief about terrorists. And it's the threat that they post account. I get that. So crazy. And it's sucking up so much oxygen that we are no longer the bright, shiny object in this magpie's eye. It has moved on to something else. And we're going to move on to that right after this short break. Thanks for listening to this excerpt of the Friday Focus podcast to get full-length editions of each and every episode of this program.

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