Donald Trump on Saturday said he would impose a 100% tariff on all Canadian imports if the North American country makes a trade deal with China.
Beside that tariff threat, another Trump foreign policy maneuver to make news on Saturday involved the president announcing the US had taken the oil that was on recently seized Venezuelan tankers.
The US president wrote on social media that if the Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, “thinks he is going to make Canada a ‘Drop Off Port’ for China to send goods and products into the United States, he is sorely mistaken”.
“China will eat Canada alive, completely devour it, including the destruction of their businesses, social fabric, and general way of life,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform. “If Canada makes a deal with China, it will immediately be hit with a 100% Tariff against all Canadian goods and products coming into the [US].”
Trump has repeatedly invoked tariffs in a bid to bend countries to his will – with some success, though he also repeatedly backed down from his most extreme tariff-related threats.
Notably, days earlier, Trump walked back his threat to impose sweeping tariffs on several European countries in order to facilitate the US’s acquisition of Greenland, the semiautonomous Danish Arctic island which the president has been fixated on. Trump claimed he had reached “the framework of a future deal” on Greenland.
In a New York Post interview published on Saturday, Trump boasted that the US will gain sovereignty and take ownership over land in Greenland where American bases are located.
“We’ll have everything we want,” Trump reportedly told the Post. “We have some interesting talks going on.”
Meanwhile, in the same Post interview published on Saturday, Trump said US refineries will process the oil which his administration had taken from seized Venezuelan tankers.
“Let’s put it this way – they don’t have any oil,” Trump told the Post. “We take the oil.”
The oil is being refined in “various places” including Houston, he said.
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 on Tuesday that his administration had taken 50m barrels of oil out of Venezuela and was selling some of it in the open market.
The intercepted vessels either were under US sanctions or said to be part of a “shadow fleet” of ships that disguise their origins to move oil from major sanctioned producers – Iran, Russia or Venezuela.
Trump’s Latin American foreign policy has homed in on Venezuela, initially aiming to push the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, from power. After failing to accomplish that aim through diplomacy, Trump ordered US forces to fly into the country to grab Maduro and his wife in an overnight raid on 3 January, bringing them to New York to face criminal drug-related charges and detaining them there.
In Saturday’s interview with the Post, Trump bragged that a new weapon he called “the discombobulator” played a central role in that raid.
Those remarks came after the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, shared on social media a purported eyewitness account of the US military using some sort of “very intense sound wave” to incapacitate Maduro’s bodyguards.
Trump has said the US plans to control Venezuela’s oil resources indefinitely as it seeks to rebuild the country’s dilapidated oil industry in a $100bn plan that is prompting many raised eyebrows, not least from environmentalists and the US oil giants.
