When It’s About Trump, Sheinbaum Walks Warily

By Henry Srebrnik, Moncton Times & Transcript

Canadians are, understandably, obsessed with U.S. President Donald Trump as the country begins to negotiate a new trade deal to replace the one signed in 2020 that replaced NAFTA. But Mexico is equally anxious. (By the way, note that in Canada the acronym used is CAMUSA, while south of the border its USMCA.)

Meanwhile, Canada and Mexico have formed a new strategic partnership to present a “united front” in their trade discussions with Washington. Following a meeting in Mexico City Sept. 18, Prime Minister Mark Carney and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum agreed to deepen ties, vowing closer co-operation on trade and security, as both countries grapple with rising economic pressure from the United States.

The two leaders find themselves facing the same challenge: a protectionist U.S. president who has redefined global and North American trade by imposing tariffs on many countries. They agreed to develop further trade and security relationships, but re-emphasized the importance of a North American trade deal.

We in this country may not notice it, but due to drug trafficking by cartels and illegal migration from south of the U.S. border, Trump is far more bellicose when it comes to Mexico. In the first days of his second administration, he took aim at bolstering security along the U.S.-Mexico border. In a number of executive orders, he declared a national emergency at the border, allowing him to deploy military personnel there and unlocking federal funding for border enforcement and construction. Trump also ordered the deployment of 1,500 active-duty troops to the southern border.

On Dec. 15, Trump awarded a group of 13 soldiers and Marines with the recently established Mexican Border Defence Medal during a presentation at the White House. The medals were replicas of military medals created in 1918 that were awarded to U.S. troops led by General John J. Pershing, who fought against the paramilitary forces of Francisco “Pancho” Villa in 1916-1917 during the Mexican Revolution. American warships had also shelled the port of Veracruz in 1914. Those were the last times the United States attacked its southern neighbour. The symbolism was not lost on Sheinbaum.

Mexico’s national identity is deeply entwined with this legacy of U.S. conquest and imperial bullying. The United States took half of Mexico’s land in the mid-19th century and periodically intervened in the decades that followed to protect American interests. Maybe Trump is less aware of this history, given his focus on the current issues of drugs and immigration. “People forget now that the border has been secure for actually seven months,” Trump stated at the Washington ceremony.

Trump also designated the synthetic opioid fentanyl as a “weapon of mass destruction.” The illegal fentanyl tablets sold on American streets are made primarily in clandestine laboratories in Mexico and smuggled across the U.S. border by Mexican trafficking organizations. Now the Trump administration has compared the drug to a nuclear or chemical threat.

Trump has touted his administration’s efforts to halt the influx of the drug into the country, saying at the ceremony that the amount coming in has dropped by 50 per cent since his return to the White House. It might also be seen as part of the administration’s campaign to target drug smuggling vessels in the Caribbean Sea from Venezuela and the capture of President Nicolas Maduro.

Sheinbaum is now walking a tightrope. She has to appease Trump enough to avoid air strikes – which after the Christmas attack by the U.S against terrorists in northern Nigeria is no idle possibility -- while firmly standing up for Mexican sovereignty and maintaining her own domestic political support. She was, after all, elected president as the candidate of the left-wing National Regeneration Movement (Morena) party.

Now entering the third year of her six-year term, she has won widespread praise at home for her handling of Trump so far. Sheinbaum has learned to deal with Trump by separating his political statements from what the United States actually wants.

“We have a president on the Mexican side who is more interested in cooperating than her predecessor was,” Roberta Jacobson, former U.S. ambassador to Mexico, told Nick Miroff, a former Washington Post reporter now with the Atlantic magazine, referring to former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. “I think she has done an amazing job navigating that minefield.”

But treating traffickers as terrorists converts what has been mostly a public health and law enforcement issue into a national security one. Sheinbaum has therefore set firm limits on what it considers to be nonnegotiable matters, rejecting the possibility of joint operations that would allow U.S. forces to embed with Mexican troops. But she has been willing to expand cooperation on almost everything else.

Canada is not the only country whose trade has been overwhelmingly with the U.S. More than 80 per cent of Mexico’s exports now go north, leaving Mexico more dependent than ever on its northern neighbor, and subject to Trump’s whims. Mexico was the United States’ top goods trading partner in 2024 with total two-way goods trade at US$840 billion. In comparison, U.S. goods trade with Canada totaled US$760 billion, while American trade with China totaled US$582 billion.

As for Canada-Mexico trade, it saw nearly US $41billion in goods exchanged in 2024, making Mexico Canada’s third largest partner and Canada Mexico’s fifth.

 

Is This the End of Jewish Life in Western Countries?

 By Henry Srebrnik, Winnipeg Jewish Post

“Globalize the Intifada” has been the chant echoing through streets since October 7th, 2023. It was never a metaphor, and we now see the gruesome results across the western world, from Australia to Canada: the rise of groups of large, active networks of Islamist and anti-Zionist organizations.

Jews in the West are discovering that the nations they defended, enriched, and profoundly shaped have become increasingly inhospitable. After the Holocaust, explicit Jew-hatred became unfashionable in polite society, but the impulse never disappeared. The workaround was simple: separate Zionism from Judaism in name, then recycle every old anti-Jewish trope and pin it on “the Zionists.”

We have seen the full legitimization of genocidal anti-Zionism and its enthusiastic adoption by large segments of the public. The protests themselves, as they began immediately on October 7th, were celebrations of the Hamas massacres. The encampments, the building occupations, the harassment campaigns against Jewish students, the open calls for intifada, the attacks on Jews and Jewish places have become our new norm. History shows us that antisemitism does not respond to reason, incentive or the honest appeals of the Jewish community. 

Outside the United States, there is no Western political establishment with either the will or the capability to address this problem, let alone reverse its growth. I’m sorry to say this, but future of Western Europe, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand is likely to be increasingly Jew-free.

Today, police stand and watch mobs chant for Israel’s destruction, call for the genocide of its people, harass visibly Jewish citizens, and drive antisemitic intimidation deep into urban life. They now believe their job is to enforce the law only if it does not risk upsetting violent constituencies. This makes Jews expendable, because defending them risks confrontation. This was very clear in the Bondi Beach massacre.

Jews are again donning caps instead of kippot, dressing generically with no cultural markers, and avoiding even a tote bag with Hebrew on it.  A corrosive creep toward informal segregation in retail and service sectors is occurring, as Jewish customers report being refused service.  A mezuzah hanging from a rideshare mirror leads to cancellations. When Jews express frustration, they are accused of exaggeration or attempting to suppress criticism of Israel.  Jewish fear is not treated as a real problem.

“Jews Are Being Sent Back into Hiding,” the title of a Dec. 15 article in the New York Free Press by David Wolpe and Deborah Lipstadt, asserts that the attacks on Jews, including physical assaults, social media campaigns and, most tragically, the recent murders in Australia, are part of a purposive campaign designed to make Jews think twice about gathering with other Jews, entering a synagogue, going to kosher restaurants, putting a mezuzah on the doorpost of their apartments or dorm rooms, or wearing a Jewish star around their necks.

“We know of no one who would consider giving a niece, nephew, grandchild, or young friend a Jewish star without first asking permission of their parents,” they write. The unspoken, and sometimes spoken, question is: “Might wearing a star endanger your child’s well-being?”

Recently, a prominent American rabbi was entering a Target store in Chicago with her grandson, whom she had picked up from his Jewish day school. As they walked into the store the 10-year-old reached up and automatically took off his kippah and put it in his pocket. Seeing his grandmother’s quizzical look, he explained: “Mommy wants me to do that.”

Borrowing a phrase from another form of bigotry, they contend that Jews are going “back into the closet.” No public celebration of Hanukkah took place in 2025 without a significant police presence. Some people chose to stay home.

Lipstadt and Wolpe know whereof they speak. They are respectively a professor of history and Holocaust studies who served as the Biden administration’s ambassador tasked with combating antisemitism, the other a rabbi who travels to Jewish communities throughout the world, and who served on Harvard’s antisemitism task force in the aftermath of the October 7, 2023 pogrom.

What the world has seen over the past two years is a continual, often systematic attempt to terrorize Jews. When political leaders fail to condemn rather than merely “discourage” chants of “globalize the intifada,” we are seeding the ground for massacres like the Hannukah one in Sydney.

If each Jewish holiday will now be seen by antisemites as an opportunity for terror, then the prognosis for diaspora Jewry is bleak. There will be fewer public events, more alarms, more bag checks at doors; there will have to be more security and more police. Unless things change, Jewish life in the diaspora will become more sealed off from the larger society.

Why has this failure come about? Confronting antisemitism, stopping the mobs, challenging the activists, and disciplining antisemitic bureaucrats all carry electoral risk for politicians; Jews are demographically irrelevant, especially compared with Muslim voters, with the U.S. being the only partial exception.

There are those who suggest Jews stop donating funds to educational and other institutions who have turned against us. At this point, I doubt very much that withdrawing dollars will have an impact. For every dollar withdrawn, there will be 100 from Qatari and other sources in its place.

Throughout history, the way a society treats its Jews predicts its future with unerring accuracy. If Jews leave, it will be because a civilization that will not defend its Jews will also defend next to nothing and may itself not survive.