US ban on Canadian alcohol and dairy comes into effect as trade war drags on

The composing stick in my hand, the smell of ink and damp paper — Philadelphia, 1723, and I am setting type for a broadside advertising Barbados rum at three shillings the quart. A merchant from Burlington walks in, counts his coppers, and grumbles that the new duty on molasses has made his rum dearer than French brandy smuggled down the Delaware. I nod, take his order, and think: the Crown taxes the sugar, the merchant raises his price, the customer drinks less, the printer sells fewer broadsides. Every hand in the chain feels the pinch.

Tariffs are a heavy hand on a light scale. You lay a duty on Canadian whisky and cheese, the Canadians answer with a duty on your steel and apples, and before the ledger is balanced the farmer in Vermont cannot sell his cheddar, the distiller in Kentucky watches his barrels sit, the printer in Boston finds his paper stock risen because the pulp came north of the border. I watched this logic play out in '74 when the non-importation agreements emptied the London warehouses — the merchants there screamed, the ministry fell, but not before the colonial shopkeepers had eaten their capital and the poor had gone without tea and cloth for a winter. No timeline for talks.

That is the dangerous word. When the post road breaks, the letters pile up at the crossroads and no one knows when the rider will come. Trade is a conversation; tariffs are a shout. And the longest shout I ever heard was the one that ended in a separate peace at Paris, after eight years of cannon and Congress.

The cheapest treaty is the one signed at the table, not the one won on the field.

Franklin trusted the table. He believed men who count coppers can also count consequences, and that the ledger balances if only the parties sit long enough. I grant him the ledger. I grant him the table. But look at what sits on it now. Alcohol. Dairy.

Tariffs dressed as principle, retaliation called justice. The negotiators walked away in August — two nations, one border, the same old structure: my country, your country; my interest, your interest; my leader, your leader. We have known the causes for two million years and more. Nationalism. Economic separation. Prejudice against prejudice. The priest justifies the liquidation of the other for the good of your country.

The industrialist feeds the armament because profit requires an enemy. Bohm and I used to sit in a room at Brockwood and watch thought turn on itself — the physicist's equations, the philosopher's questions, both revealing the same movement: thought creates the division, then thought proposes the treaty to heal the division it created. The computer in the corridor at CERN could calculate trajectories but could not ask why the trajectory was aimed at another human being. The machine has no insight. Neither does the diplomat who calls his calculation statesmanship. The table is not the solution. The table is where the pattern repeats, polished and renamed.

When the mind that creates conflict sits down to resolve conflict, what actually changes?