Trump is vulnerable to pressure…says former negotiator

Trump’s global trade war appears to have stirred retaliations and Canada’s former top trade negotiator said on Thursday, April 10, 2025, that Trump is vulnerable to pressure.

According to the CTV News, he believes that if nations around the world co-ordinate their responses to Trump, the U.S. president would be more likely to back away from tariffs sooner.

Steve Verheul said that Trump’s abrupt change of course this week shows his administration is vulnerable to financial and market pressures.

He was speaking on a trade panel at the left-leaning Broadbent Institute’s conference in Ottawa on Thursday.

“I think retaliation can be a useful tool, and it’s unfortunate that most of the rest of the world didn’t see it that way,” Verheul said.

“Because I think if there had been a more co-ordinated response from countries around the world, then we could have seen this fall away even more quickly.”

U.S. stocks dropped again Thursday, continuing a tumultuous week in the markets.

Markets lost gains spurred by the president’s suspension of some of his most devastating tariffs.

Most of world trade remains under massive U.S. duties.

This is despite the market rally after Trump abruptly reversed course Wednesday by pausing his so-called “reciprocal” tariffs for 90 days, .

Trump kept in place a universal 10 per cent tariff.

He also placed 25 per cent duties on steel, aluminum and automobile imports to the United States.

The president also pushed up tariffs on Chinese imports to 125 per cent.

This prompted a retaliatory 84 per cent tariff from Beijing on U.S. products came into force on Thursday.

This escalated the trade war between the world’s two largest economies.

U.S. tariffs on Canada remain unchanged

Prime Minister Mark Carney posted on social media Wednesday that the pause was a “welcome reprieve for the global economy”.

However, upcoming negotiations with countries around the world will result in a “fundamental restructuring of the global trading system.”

Carney, who spoke with Trump by phone in late March, said the president has agreed to begin negotiations on a new economic and security agreement following Canada’s April 28 election.

Canada and China are the only countries so far to maintain retaliatory tariffs on the United States. The European Union announced a 90-day pause on its countermeasures Thursday.

U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said Wednesday that if Canada keeps its retaliatory measures in place, it “would be a really, really bad choice.”

Verheul served as Canada’s chief trade negotiator from 2017 to 2021 when the Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement, also called CUSMA, was negotiated during the first Trump administration.

He said retaliatory tariffs are an important tool for pushing back on unfair trade actions and can help to balance positions at the negotiating table.

Verheul said the 90-day pause will see dozens of countries attempt to negotiate an end to the tariffs — but Trump could very well decide to reimpose them at some point.

If that happens, he said, and if countries co-ordinate their response, Trump’s tariffs wouldn’t last long and the multinational effort also would send a strong message to the Trump administration.

“And I think that would be a significant rebuke to the U.S. about the merits of going in that kind of direction and completely obliterating trade laws that we’ve all operated under for the last 75 years,” Verheul said.

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