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Posted July 22, 2026 at 10:45 am
Accusing its second-biggest trading partner of discriminating against American cheese (among other things), the US is planning a 50% tariff on Canadian imports.
The US is threatening Canada with a trade war – and that’s not the only economic tussle brewing.
The American administration said on Monday that it’s planning to hit its second-biggest trading partner with 50% tariffs in 30 days, after accusing Canada of “unfair business practices”. Stateside officials say their northern neighbor stopped buying American booze, slapped tariffs on US cars, and even “discriminated” against the country’s cheese.
▶ The new taxes wouldn’t apply to energy and critical minerals, but they’d still affect about $20 billion worth of Canadian goods.
Zooming in: Not just Canada.
As soon as this Friday, the US could hit around 60 other trading partners with tariffs of 10% to 12.5%, alleging their exports are linked to forced labor practices. But renewed fighting in the Middle East has pushed gas prices back above $4 a gallon, squeezing American consumers. That might convince the US president to negotiate rather than go big on new duties.
Zooming out: Tariffs schmariffs.
Import taxes might not help the US in the race that really matters – the one for AI dominance. For a while, it looked like the country’s superior models from Anthropic and OpenAI had the edge over Chinese rivals. But last week, Chinese lab Moonshot released Kimi K3, whose performance surpassed Anthropic’s flagship Opus model on both cost and performance. And that might be prompting China to reassess its AI strategy.
▶ See, unlike America’s frontier models, many top Chinese models are open-weight – meaning users can download and adapt them to proprietary data without sharing that information externally. China’s labs distribute these widely and cheaply to get their tech embedded in global systems.
▶ But Chinese officials have reportedly been discussing export restrictions to prevent their best tech from being snapped up by the West – a sign that the country thinks it may have a lead to protect.
aianthropicenergygeopoliticsmacroeconomics
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