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As far as I can tell, there's a real possibility that Trump's new tariffs will face a court challenge, and that he will lose. I'm not an expert on trade law, but I do know a bit, and this looks flatly illegal to me.

But even if these tariffs are blocked, or Trump finds some way to declare victory and call them off, the damage will be immense.

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One way of saying this is that until just the other day there was really no such thing as U.S. manufacturing, Canadian manufacturing or Mexican manufacturing, just North American manufacturing -- a highly efficient, mutually beneficial system that sprawled across the three nations' borders.

But now we have a U.S. president saying that a duly negotiated and signed trade pact isn't worth the paper it was printed on -- that he can impose high tariffs on the other signatories whenever he feels like it. And even if the tariffs go away, the private sector will know that they can always come back; the credibility of this trade agreement, or any future trade agreement, will be lost. So North American manufacturing will disintegrate -- that is, dis-integrate -- reverting to inefficient, fragmented national industries.

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