Then-President Ronald Reagan’s closing, bringing the U.S.-Canada Free Trade Agreement into force in September 1988:

“Let the 5,000-mile border between Canada and the United States stand as a symbol for the future.  No soldier stands guard to protect it.  Barbed wire does not deface it. And no invisible barrier of economic suspicion and fear will extend it. Let it forever be not a point of division but a meeting place between our great and true friends.”

Reagan’s brief 729-word talk enthuses over the North American future in practical as well as idealistic terms — “lower prices for consumers, job galore for workers, new markets for producers”; “a rich flow of agriculture and energy resources from one country to another” — and takes some particular pride in the agreement’s innovative services provisions “in such areas as accounting, insurance, tourism, and engineering.”

A generation later, he doesn’t seem to have gotten much wrong. The U.S. and Canada have the world’s largest goods-trade relationship: $412 billion in Canadian energy, metals, grains, etc., serve American homes, utilities, and factories, while Canadians buy $350 billion in U.S. goods, more than any other country and fully a sixth of the U.S.’ $2.1 trillion worldwide export total.  Nor was Reagan off on services and tourism.  Last year, American figures show 20.1 million Canadian tourist arrivals, a number equivalent to half of the 41 million Canadians. An example from Las Vegas, an especially tourism-dependent city: Canadian visitors typically stay 5.5 days at a stretch, and spend more per day on hotels, shopping, and meals than anyone but Australians. By the University of Nevada/Las Vegas count, they support about 43,200 Clark County jobs, add $3.6 billion to Nevada GDP, and lift local per capita income by $368.

This is what Mr. Trump is inexplicably trying to throw away, beginning with a bad-faith Feb. 1 “emergency” decree citing border issues, in particular drug trafficking, as justification for a 25% tariff on Canadian-made goods. (Tariffs and bans on legal products are rarely if ever useful responses to narcotics issues, and there’s very little there anyway: per U.S. Customs and Border Protection stats report “northern border” patrols accounted for 0.1% of last year’s fentanyl seizures, 0% for heroin, 3% for marijuana, and 0.1% for methamphetamine.)  Following that have come months of “51st state” insults and veiled threats, oscillating tariff decrees for cars and aluminum, and wholly unfounded claims that the U.S. is somehow “subsidizing” Canada.

This has done some visible economic harm to Canada — GDP growth down a point, unemployment and inflation visibly, if not drastically up — and brought a reaction, both from the Canadian public and in Canada’s larger strategy. That in turn is helping to sap American growth and employment. Two examples:

(1) Export losses: Canadians this summer have been looking for visibly American consumer goods, so as not to buy them. This has cut American wine, spirits, and beer exports by more than half, from $247 million in the first half of 2024 to $91 million so far this year, or by about 7 million gallons:

U.S. exports to Canada	Jan-June 2024	Jan-June 2025
Wine	24.4 million liters	11.6 million liters
Spirits	9.1 million liters	6.1 million liters
Beer	14.5 million liters	6.9 million liters

(2) Tourist visits: Much the same shows up in canceled air routes, lower searches for homes, and especially tourist visits. Just as they helped to show the success of North American integration through 2024, they now show unraveling and loss. StatCanada suggests Canadian tourist visits are down by a third: they counted 2.7 million returning Canadian cars in July 2024, and 1.7 million last month. As a particular case study, Las Vegas’s 1.4 million Canadian tourist visits make up more than a quarter of all international arrivals.  This year’s sharp drop in Canadian arrivals has accordingly made 2025 a bad one, with total visitor counts down by more than 10% and Clark County unemployment rolls up by 8,000 from April to June.

“[L]ack of Canadian visitors to casino resorts is a significant factor in Las Vegas traffic falling … Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) and major casino operators data for June released this week showed that total visitation to the resort city fell by 11.3% to 3.1 million. June was the sixth month in a row in which the number of Vegas travelers fell year-over-year, but the first month in which the drop-off was in the double digits in more than four years.”

More generally, as jobs and income seep away out of U.S. casinos, distilleries, vineyards and hotels, an assessment this spring from Canadian Prime Minister Carney provides a chilly next-generation counterpoint to Reagan’s enthusiastic and then-bipartisan vision of trust, integration, and shared destiny:

“Our old relationship with the United States, a relationship based on steadily increasing integration, is over. … When I sit down with President Trump, it will be to discuss the future economic and security relationship between two sovereign nations. And it will be with our full knowledge that we have many, many other options than the United States to build prosperity for all Canadians.”

Those seeking a useful case study in folly and unprovoked self-harm won’t do much better than those. Those seeking a bright spot: Canadians probably haven’t quite given up. A recent Pew poll, for example, finds that while “approval” of the U.S. is badly down at 34%, and 59% of Canadians view the U.S. as their “greatest threat,” a slightly smaller majority of 55% also still thinks of the U.S. as “greatest ally.”

In sum, this problem is self-created and probably not insoluble. All that’s necessary to start is for the U.S. government to be an honorable ally and good neighbor to a friendly country. Pretty much all American presidents have managed this up to now, so it can’t be that hard.