Excerpts from recent editorials in the United States and abroad:
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Aug. 24
The Washington Post says Americans and Canadians are losers in the escalating trade wars
The 50 percent tariffs announced Monday by President Donald Trump on all cars, trucks, automotive parts and steel from Canada would crush manufacturers in the United States and raise prices in both countries. The silver lining is that Trump said these import taxes would not take effect until Jan. 1, leaving time for negotiators to disarm an economic land mine.
A bilateral deal appeared close last week before talks broke down at the 11th hour. Neither Trump nor Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney wants to look as if he’s succumbing to bullying from the other, so the escalation has been predictable.
Early Saturday, 50 percent U.S. tariffs took effect on Canadian alcohol, cement, hockey equipment and dairy products. Canada vowed to retaliate with “dollar for dollar” reciprocal tariffs set to kick in on Sept. 8.
Overheated rhetoric won’t help find an off-ramp. Carney said the U.S. “attacked” Canada and that the neighbors are “at war.” On social media, Trump said Canada was “among the worst Nations in the World to deal with.”
There’s no love lost between Trump and Carney. The prime minister owes his come-from-behind victory in last year’s election to the president’s saber-rattling. But for the good of their respective countries, both men need to pull back from the brink.
For a generation, the U.S. and Canada offered a case study of the mutual benefits that come from globalization. Free trade led to car parts moving back and forth several times before a completed vehicle hit a showroom floor. The U.S. and Canada share electricity grids. Canada supplied American refineries with more than 4 million barrels of crude oil per day in 2024.
The U.S. is Canada’s largest export market by far, and Canada is the largest export market for 32 American states. Canada sold $454 billion in goods and services to the U.S. last year, and the U.S. sold $426 billion to Canada.
When Trump announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs last year, China and Canada vocally refused to negotiate unfavorable new deals. But Chinese President Xi Jinping is about to be feted at the White House next month. With Canada, Trump has apparently decided it’s easier to punch down than to antagonize another superpower.
This is part of a frustrating pattern: Trump antagonizes America’s friends while placating adversaries. Last week, he angered South Korea by scaling back joint military exercises to avoid provoking the dangerous and erratic dictator of North Korea. That came shortly after the president threatened to bomb Oman.
The spat with Canada is another needless provocation. Carney says the old relationship is a relic and will never return. Let’s hope he’s wrong about that.
Just over two months from the midterm elections, this trade war with Canada could cost the GOP in several House races and Senate battlegrounds, including Maine, Michigan, Ohio and Iowa. Would paying an electoral price for protectionism push Republicans back toward their free-market roots?
As welcome as that would be, it’s more important — for the sake of consumers, workers and businesses on both sides of the border — to sort out a new trade arrangement before November.
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Aug. 21
The Wall Street Journal says Trump has a credibility problem with Iran
After six months of war with Iran, President Trump has a credibility problem. His blustering threats, alternating with claims of imminent peace and victory, are doubted by friends and foe. Will his new threat this week on Truth Social of the “MOST CRUSHING ECONOMIC OPERATION EVER TAKEN AGAINST ANY COUNTRY!” be different?
By now the world will have to see it to believe it. No President has yet climbed the Iran sanctions ladder with China, moving from the isolated “teapot” refineries that buy Iran’s oil to the Chinese state-owned enterprises that support them. Nor has any President given Dubai an ultimatum to shut down Iran’s illicit financial network and meant it.
“ANY country that allows its financial institutions, businesses, airports, or government entities to provide any type of lifeline to Iran will itself face TREMENDOUS Economic Consequences,” Mr. Trump wrote Wednesday. “Oil smuggling, swap lines, cash transfers, exchange houses, ship registries, front companies—It all needs to stop NOW. You know who you are.”
They do, which may be why the United Arab Emirates pre-empted Mr. Trump with its announcement on Tuesday: “All trade, commercial exchanges, and financial transactions with Iran have been halted until further notice.”
The question is whether all of this is a headline or a policy. Only the latter, which Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says he’ll soon lay out, would give Tehran reason to fear. While Iran admits the U.S. blockade has driven its oil exports to near-zero, Dubai-Iran trade never leaves the Persian Gulf. The U.S. Navy doesn’t touch it.
If that trade is now ending, “this could be even more significant than the (U.S.) embargo,” writes the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Miad Maleki, who led the U.S. Treasury’s Iran sanctions campaign until last year. Iran can’t replace Dubai and the U.A.E., on which the regime depends for as much as 80% of its foreign-currency inflows and about a third of its imports, plus payment intermediaries and sanctions-evasion infrastructure.
Mr. Maleki calls Dubai “Iran’s window to the world economy.” Its daily direct flights, large Iranian diaspora and unique financial ecosystem allow the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to procure goods and repatriate revenue.
It is no small ask of the Emiratis to cut off their dangerous and much-larger neighbor, especially when the U.S. hasn’t been able to protect them fully from Iran or restore free passage in the Strait of Hormuz. The U.A.E., America’s best Gulf ally during the war, may also fear that a financial crackdown could spark capital flight from Russia and others.
If Mr. Trump acts on his word, the Emiratis have far more to fear from secondary U.S. sanctions. The test will lie in what happens to Dubai’s Iran-linked exchange houses, money-service businesses, trade companies and beneficial-ownership networks, as well as the movement of cash and high-value goods. Will flights be scrutinized for bulk-cash and gold smuggling? A halt to gasoline and refined-product exports to Iran would be felt immediately.
In the day since Mr. Trump’s announcement, the value of Iran’s currency has fallen significantly, exceeding 1.9 million rials to the dollar. “Nearly all of the regime’s economy is dependent on the U.A.E. network,” the Iranian dissident journalist Mojtaba Pourmohsen says. Transactions run through intermediaries who are often children or relatives of Revolutionary Guard or Intelligence Ministry figures, he adds.
There’s more to be said about Iran’s networks in Turkey, Iraq, Qatar and Pakistan, as well as in crypto. But the key is that trade cutoffs, unlike sanctions, are felt immediately.
Iran may lash out militarily in response, targeting Gulf energy again, and the U.S. will have to be ready with a firm response. “We are going to collapse this regime,” Mr. Bessent said Thursday. Economic pressure can make survival more difficult for the regime, but it will take more resolve and consistency than Mr. Trump has shown in the past six months.
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Aug. 20
The Philadelphia Inquirer says the Iran war is straining the U.S. military for nothing
Donald Trump has authored a whole anthology of aphorisms demonstrating his deep disdain for the military he commands. He derided those killed in action as “suckers and losers,” said in reference to former prisoner of war John McCain that he prefers troops who weren’t captured, and said his “own personal Vietnam” was avoiding sexually transmitted infections while dating in New York City.
The president’s latest entry arrived when he was asked about reports of miserable conditions and attempted suicides aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, which has almost nine consecutive months at sea and remains in the Middle East in support of his losing war. Trump replied that the deployment had been “not nearly long enough.” He and his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, also denied the accuracy of the stories, which originated in military-focused publications hearing directly from the families of the ship’s sailors.
Whatever happened to “We’re redoubling our efforts to get our troops everything they need,” “The American people appreciate their selfless service,” or “Here’s why these sacrifices are necessary”?
Trump isn’t just congenitally unable to respond with proper respect and humility to the hardships he is requiring of the armed forces. He is also presiding over a war that is glaringly bereft of a clear mission, identifiable accomplishment, congressional authorization, or public support. The Lincoln’s increasingly grueling service symbolizes those failures as the hostilities drag on beyond Trump’s own deadline for a durable settlement.
The Abraham Lincoln left San Diego with some 5,000 sailors and Marines aboard in November, and has made only two brief stops in port since. Its total deployment has now lasted more than 270 days, longer than almost any in the last half century. Since the actual Vietnam War — the one Trump skipped with the reported assistance of a sympathetic Queens podiatrist — the only more extensive deployment was of the USS Gerald R. Ford, which spent 326 days at sea, also under the Trump administration.
During that time, the Ford suffered a fire that injured several sailors as well as serious plumbing problems, especially while it was supporting another of Trump’s unauthorized military engagements, in Venezuela. The Lincoln has also endured malfunctioning plumbing along with inadequate supplies of food and toiletries, strenuous consecutive weeks of combat operations, and mail disruptions — its logistical challenges magnified by Iranian attacks on U.S. bases in the region.
The Lincoln’s low morale has been exacerbated by repeated extensions of its scheduled deployment with no end in sight until recently, when officials began promising relief in the wake of the damning reports of the crew’s struggles. The Military Times reported that two sailors had attempted to jump overboard out of despair. Adm. Brad Cooper, the leader of U.S. Central Command, who recently visited the Lincoln on a damage control mission, defended conditions aboard by noting that the ship has seen fewer mental health cases than other carriers, which isn’t the most reassuring commentary on the state of the fleet.
The admiral also noted that deployments at sea are inherently challenging, which is surely true. The inevitable stresses of service are compounded, however, by the commander in chief’s inability to forthrightly acknowledge and honor the military’s sacrifices, let alone coherently explain why they’re being made or when they might end.
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Aug. 24
The Houston Chronicle wonders how much hardship caused by ICE is enough
Marco is the kind of kid who won’t let you just leave the apartment. You have to say goodbye first, sometimes with a handshake, always with a blessing. Instinctively, he’ll make the sign of the cross over you, a small ritual for protection. The chubby-cheeked 10-year-old knows better than most that nothing — no one’s life or safety — is guaranteed.
Routines, predictable and sure, matter to Marco. The Saturday H-E-B runs at 7 a.m. His dad tying his shoes for him. Sunday church. The image, as Marco likes to repeat, is always the same: “me, mamá and papá.”
Then that image shattered. His 50-year-old father was picked up by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. Marco Antonio Ortuño, who goes by his middle name, was on his way back from a job in San Antonio.
Marco and Antonio found a new routine: a call twice a day from the detention center. For a month, they talked this way by phone.
Until, 42 days later, a rare stroke of luck: Antonio was allowed to go home. A well-filed petition on his behalf earned him the chance to await his August deportation hearing there.
On July 22, when he arrives at the east Houston apartment complex the family calls home, it is dark out. Past Marco’s bedtime certainly. Marco’s mom, Cecilia, 45, told herself she’d wait inside but the moment her phone pings letting her know he’s arrived, she’s out the door and running to the parking lot. Marco barrels into his father, who wraps him in a tight hug. “Papá,” Marco repeats into the humid Houston night — a simple, desperate plea. His emotions spill out.
Nearly two years into the president’s mass deportation dragnet, these scenes have become commonplace. Teachers, toddlers, handymen, mariachi musicians detained. Thousands of them deported while others get a temporary reprieve. In the best of cases, we see their joyous releases from detention. We rarely see what comes next. The waiting, the uncertainty, the threat of decades of a life in this country suddenly ripped apart. And the family members, often U.S. citizens like Marco, left to pick up the pieces.
None of this is necessary. Nothing is stopping the Trump administration from enacting a deportation regime that truly prioritizes the worst of the worst instead of hardworking Houston fathers of U.S. citizens. Nothing is stopping Congress from passing an immigration law that creates a legal path for longtime residents. Marco’s suffering is a choice made by our politicians.
Behind the overwhelming churn of immigration headlines is a generation of young Americans living with profound uncertainty. Houston has an estimated 1.2 million people with mixed-status families, meaning some members have legal status and others don’t. The Migration Policy Institute estimates that more than a quarter of a million parents of minors are at risk of deportation in the Houston area. That’s hundreds of thousands of children like Marco whose lives are being treated as collateral in a war the American public by and large does not want to fight.
Indeed, Antonio’s detention has shaken the entire family. Everyone who can be there that hot July night of the reunion is. Marco’s older brother, Oscar, went to pick Antonio up with his wife and toddler daughter, leaving Cecilia to watch and wait with their baby and Marco. The tiny apartment seems to swell to fit the extended family and later, friends, who stop by to celebrate.
Antonio presses his fingers to his mouth and then toward the photographs of the family members not present. Marco’s older sister in her Marine uniform. And Sergio, a baby-faced high schooler in his football jersey. Though Marco’s three older siblings are all Antonio’s stepchildren, they called him papá growing up, too. And that’s what he was to all four: dad.
Then he walks to the far corner of the room, to a bookshelf-turned-altar laden with candy, Lego figurines, photographs and a single wooden box. Inside, are ashes. Sergio’s ashes. For a quiet moment that almost goes unnoticed in the commotion around him, Antonio bows his head and reaches for Sergio.
This family has already endured more than most. In December 2024, Sergio was struck and killed by a train walking to school. He was 15. His death shook the neighborhood and beyond. This editorial board rushed to the scene after months of reporting on dangerous rail crossings across the city. The series was awarded a Pulitzer Prize.
Marco saw the news photos before he even knew it was his brother who had been killed. He lost his best friend, his scary-movie-watching, Whataburger-loving best friend. Now, even with his dad home from detention, Marco faces the threat of another unthinkable loss. Antonio’s release was granted but his deportation hearing is on August 26. Despite a pending application that would actually fix his legal status, Antonio could be sent to Mexico, a place he hasn’t seen in decades.
It is unthinkable that this family could be wrenched apart again. But it is even crueler that, for him to stay, the family has to legally prove that losing Antonio would bring “unusual” suffering to Marco, a U.S. citizen. It’s called an exceptional and extremely hardship standard. Under Trump, that standard has become impossibly hard to clear.
Marco had already been seeing a psychologist since his brother was killed. During Antonio’s detention, his anxiety surged. The signs of depression were unmistakable.
“Sometimes he cannot sleep, he barely eats,” Cecilia told the editorial board in a quiet voice. “I don’t know how to,” her voice broke, “how to help him. Marco and my husband are so close.”
Cecilia was worn down by worry and grief. A mother who prides herself on being capable and strong, she felt powerless, unable to help her youngest.
The mood lifts as Antonio settles inside the apartment. He can’t stop running his fingers through Cecilia’s hair. She cut it short while he was away. He wraps his other arm around Marco, kissing every bit of him that he can reach. Antonio’s granddaughter, Sarita, hands him drawing after hastily scribbled drawing, while his grandson, Oscar Jr., lights up from all the activity.
“He can technically walk,” Marco beams.
Antonio gasps. “Really?”
“Well, he can crawl,” Marco responds.
Antonio lifts Oscar Jr. into the air and the baby squishes his face into a grin. He scoops Sarita into his lap and the trio cuddle.
Under Trump, this is the new family reunion in America, filled with hugs and a silent but unmistakable desperation to stay in this moment forever. Safe. Together.
Eventually, Cecilia serves up the chicken tinga that’s been warming on the stove in a giant pot. She jokes that even though she can’t cook, Antonio will love her cooking tonight. But the tinga is delicious, perfectly spicy and filling, with beans and tostadas. Antonio’s ankle monitor is the only reminder that this isn’t any other family in America enjoying a meal with friends.
“It feels like it was a year,” Antonio says, still wearing the faded black jeans and white T-shirt he bought while he was in detention. His boots don’t have any shoelaces. He thinks he lost 10 pounds eating the “meat but not meat” in the center.
Wrapped in his father’s arms, Marco tells him matter-of-factly, “I barely got to go anywhere and I barely got to see you this entire summer.”
“I hope it doesn’t happen again,” he adds.
It is a relief to have his dad home. But for how long?
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Aug. 25
The Guardian warns that Trump may overplay his hand with economic threats
Three moves in the last week have exposed the limits of Donald Trump’s economic bullying. The US slapped 50% tariffs on another $20bn of Canadian goods – then threatened the same rate on the cars, trucks, parts and steel that America Inc depends on. On Monday, the Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, menaced Iran’s trading partners with exclusion from the US financial network, hoping that coercion can deliver what months of war have not. And as the costs of war, tariffs and pro-billionaire tax cuts helped send US bond yields higher, the Treasury stepped in to tame long-term rates. These are not contradictory policies but a gamble: that US economic power can be repeatedly weaponised without reducing others’ willingness to depend on it.
The Trump administration’s “D-day” sanctions are potentially the most consequential because they expose the scaffolding of American financial power. While markets shrugged off the immediate threat, that calculation might change were the US to target a major Chinese refinery or bank. Such an escalation could spark a trade war with Beijing. The US has leverage. But China has pressure points – especially farmers in Republican states – that make using it costly. In the long run, there is a price to pay. Nations hold one another’s currencies partly because they trust the political relationship. Mr Trump is testing what happens when they don’t.
The moves to control the bond market are the most revealing. There is nothing new about Washington managing yields: the Federal Reserve has long been able to buy treasuries. What is new is Mr Bessent doing it so openly to deal with the fallout from failed policies. Mr Trump owns this: his tariffs raise input costs; his Iran war pushed up energy costs; his nonchalance about rising American grocery prices reassures no one. When that mixture helps produce higher inflation expectations and rising long-end bond yields, Mr Trump’s team steps in to prevent interest rates ticking up.
The US president is willing to use state power to lower borrowing costs while hiking others through tariffs, war and cuts to social programmes. Mr Bessent wants to stop rising long yields feeding into investment and Washington’s debt-interest bill. That his former mentor at George Soros’s hedge fund criticises him and wants bond markets to force spending cuts is not to be applauded. The better question for Mr Bessent is: why shield markets from the consequences of Mr Trump’s acts, but not households?
The trade war with Canada is economically stupid and . In 2025, the Trump tariffs to an average tax increase of $1,000 per US household. More than a quarter of to the US are now subject to significant tariffs or with tougher ones. Ottawa’s retaliation will start in September. North American production has been organised around such trade flows and tariffs will make US manufacturing more expensive, not less.
Why Canada? Washington has largely given up trying to change China’s . Canada is seen as a soft target. The Guardian columnist Robert Reich is right: Mr Trump picks on a friendly neighbour because that is what bullies do. This cannot go on. American economic power depends on other countries wanting to remain in a system the US dominates. Mr Trump thinks their dependence is his weapon. The more often he uses it against them, the harder they look for the exit.
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