When neighbors draw up schedules of retaliation

CNBC reports that Canada's retaliatory tariffs — worth CA$27.6 billion and now set at 50% on American steel and aluminum — have taken effect as the trade dispute between Washington and Ottawa continues to deepen. The language of commerce has given way to the language of reprisal. That shift deserves careful attention, because reprisal, once begun, tends to find its own momentum.

I will speak plainly about what I know and what I infer. The specific schedules of duties, the precise goods affected, the architecture of any governing trade agreement between the two countries — these are modern instruments I cannot read as a practitioner. But the shape of the problem is one I recognize entirely. Two parties, each convinced the other moved first, each escalating to demonstrate resolve, each announcing the punishment as though it were the natural consequence of the other's offense. I have seen this dynamic precede wars.

The animating principle I would press here is simple: when nations have bound themselves to one another by treaty or by convention — and it is my inference, not my recollection, that the United States and Canada operate under such frameworks — those obligations do not dissolve simply because a new grievance arises. The public faith, once pledged, is not a seasonal arrangement. A party that treats a multilateral agreement as optional when the terms become inconvenient does not merely damage that single agreement; it instructs every future counterparty to discount whatever it promises next.

I am equally plain on the other side of the ledger. Canada's retaliatory measure is itself a form of escalation. Retaliation may be legally available; it is not automatically wise. The statesman's task — and I spent years on it, though I will not pretend those years were in your century — is to find the path that protects the national interest without permanently poisoning the relationship. A 50% duty may satisfy the impulse toward symmetry. It will not, by itself, resolve the underlying dispute, and it will impose real costs on industries and workers in both countries who are not the authors of the quarrel.

What should be done? The parties should appoint skilled negotiators, charge them with finding a text that both governments can defend at home, and give them enough time and quiet to draft it well. Language chosen in anger is language that will be disputed for a generation. Language chosen with care can hold. That is the lesson I would carry forward from every treaty I was ever asked to negotiate: the words you agree to in the room are the words you will live with in the courts. Choose them as if they bind — because they do.