One hundred per cent. We're not prepared at all, not in the slightest. It's purely performative.
I've been involved in this. The U.S. now has a thousand experts on 26 committees by law of Congress, and they've been preparing. When we got into USMCA.... Imagine 26 committees. There are a million words in the USMCA, and you will not find the words “free trade” in it. Each of them gets 40,000 words for their sector to say what they want. They've spent six or seven years preparing, and we show up with an ad hoc group saying, “Yikes.” Then we run the clock, and they say, “Either sign it, or we're pulling the plug.”
Do you remember how that all happened? I wrote a piece saying this is going to be bad, and they've weaponized ambiguity, because they can restart in six and a half years. Our economy has diverged since then. They've put us over a barrel. We weren't prepared, and there is no preparation right now. I know the people who are in it. What will our response be when they put their next million words into it?
Again, we had a 1970s conception that it's hands-off, get out of the way, let it flow, because it's all shared. In fact, it's a win-lose, landlord-tenant situation, and we had no strategies to be the landlord, so we progressively became the tenant. We have so much potential and so many blessings, but now we're vulnerable to leverage in every aspect of our sovereign, democratic nation.