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Comment by palmotea | Hacker News Reader

> Up until a while ago, I'm pretty sure that the consensus was that China not trustworthy. And then, Trump plays his cards and the consensus is now that the US are even less trustworthy. So here you go.

But that doesn't make China trustworthy, which this move implies.

It seems like there's some "narcissism of small differences" kind of thing going on here. Trump may not share Canada/Europe's values to the same degree of prior US presidents, but China does not share those values at all and never has. It's really questionable judgement to throw your lot in with China if you're not happy with the leadership of the US.

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Why would this move imply anything about China's trustworthiness? Canada has forever been USA's lap dog. They say "jump" we say "how high?". Those tariffs we had were mostly to be in solidarity of the US.

Yes, it was also to protect car manufacturing in Ontario, but Trump has sent a clear signal that as long as Canada isn't a US state, this industry is going to die. So, why bother with a tariff at all?

This has nothing to do with China's trustworthiness.

> Why would this move imply anything about China's trustworthiness?

Per you GGP: China was previously considered untrustworthy, so its products tariffed to exclude them. It implies more trust if now those tariffs are being removed to allow them in. And it's especially off of the motivation is some evaluation of the US's trustworthiness, because those two things are completely independent.

> Yes, it was also to protect car manufacturing in Ontario, but Trump has sent a clear signal that as long as Canada isn't a US state, this industry is going to die. So, why bother with a tariff at all?

If that were the motivation, it would make way more sense to partner with the Europeans. IMHO. There's a better alignment of values there.

I don't see where you're going. We trust europeans and I very much doubt that we had any tariff on their automobiles to begin with. We're talking about removing a "artificial" stopgap tariff specifically targeting Chinese imports, not preferring China over Europe.

European cars can't compete here because they're not cheap enough. Chinese car are. They're the one disrupting the global market now.

We do trade with plenty of people who we don't think are trustworthy (Trump's US, for instance). I don't see that this move implies that China is trustworthy at all.

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