I’m not much of a soccer guy. I have friends who are, and they have tried to describe the intricacies of the game to me, but mostly I’m happy when their team wins because they’re happy. That changes to an extent during the FIFA World Cup. I become more invested in the games, at least when America makes it. The good news is that America is guaranteed a spot in next year’s tournament because they are one of three host nations. Next year will mark the first multinational hosting of the World Cup as Canada, the United States, and Mexico will all serve as host nations. When the idea was proposed the three hosts served as a symbol of cooperation and friendship between the three major powers on the continent.

That was 2017. Fast forward to last week when videos from around Canada started showing up on social media of fans booing “The Star-Spangled Banner” before athletic events. Before both NHL and NBA matchups between American and Canadian teams, Canadian fans showed their current displeasure with the United States by vocally booing during the anthem and cheering during “Oh Canada!”

While booing at sporting events isn’t exactly front-page news, what makes these recent events notable is that national anthems are usually off limits. What makes it even more notable is that it is Canadians, famously and stereotypically the nicest and most polite people on the planet, doing the booing. It also shows how far our relationship has deteriorated with our neighbors to the north since the tri-country World Cup host plan was introduced eight years ago.

In a departure from many of my friends on the left, I have long been a proponent of free trade and globalization. I wrote about the benefits of the Trans-Pacific Partnership in this very column almost a decade ago. The TPP was one of the first free-trade victims of President Trump’s economic isolationism.

Which leads us to the booing in Canada. If anything, Trump’s myopic economic world view has narrowed even more over the past 10 years since he torpedoed the TPP, something that became clear when he announced that he intended to implement 25% tariffs on goods imported from Canada and Mexico. Tariffs can be a useful tool in both economic and foreign policy, but that tool should be used as a scalpel, not a sledgehammer. In this particular case, President Trump tried to use them to bully our neighbors into slowing the flow of fentanyl and illegal immigrants coming across the border. Both of these are reasonable policy goals, but Trump’s threats hurt our relationship with our neighbors and he got nothing in return. He blinked first and postponed them in return for commitments from Canada and Mexico that had already been secured by President Biden. Of course, Trump cares more about the drama and visuals than the actual policy so to hear him tell it, he was able to muscle Canada and Mexico into capitulating.

The other issue is Trump and his disciples’ complete misunderstanding about how tariffs actually work. Tariffs are taxes paid by consumers on imported goods. Foreign countries don’t pay tariffs, nor do foreign companies. You and I will end up paying any tariffs that the Trump administration actually implements, raising prices and hurting the economy. We just avoided an economic disaster coming out of the pandemic. The Federal Reserve performed the economic equivalent of landing a plane on the Hudson. They successfully brought inflation down without plunging us into a recession. Trump’s tariffs could bring back the bad old days of inflation, undoing all of the Fed’s hard work.

A North American trade war would be even worse for Canada and Mexico. Weaker neighbors on the continent makes us weaker. Trump has floated the idea of making Canada the 51st state. The images of Canadians booing “The Star-Spangled Banner” should tell us what they think about that idea. As a father, I wonder about the messages my son is getting when he watches our nation’s leaders, but I think in this case he could teach those leaders something about the importance of being a good friend.