This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, June 1st, 2018. I'm Caleb Brown.

Now that the president has imposed steep tariffs on steel and aluminum on Canada, Mexico, and the European Union, the retaliation begins.

Cato's Colin Grabo and Simon Lester comment on what comes next.

The US delayed its implementation of

threatened tariffs against Canada, Mexico, and the European Union pending some

sort of deal. What were we waiting on? For Canada and Mexico, the

NAFTA renegotiation was the deal that we were waiting on. In theory, if the US

Canada and Mexico concluded a new NAFTA, then Canada

Mexico would have gotten a permanent exemption from these tariffs. In the case the

EU it was a little more vague. There was some talk of restarting maybe US-EU trade talks or coming

to up with the smaller sectorial deals that could grant the EU a permanent exemption. But all of that was lost when the

Trump administration gave up and decided they were going to impose these tariffs on

Canada, Mexico, and the EU. So what does this mean with respect to retaliation? I know that at least a couple of those countries have threatened retaliation.

The leader of Canada basically, you know, gave a very sort of out of character fiery speech damning the

tariffs because the United States gets a lot of aluminum from Canada.

So what are the threat in retaliations?

Well the retaliation steps are in place.

It won't happen tomorrow.

It'll take a couple of weeks for the terrorists from each country to be imposed.

But basically what each one is going to do,

the U.S. terrorists are just broadly on steel and aluminum. The other countries with their retaliation

are going to focus on specific U.S. products that are designed to cause pain in particular

...