IT’S hard to know if Trump has any specific plans for Ireland but his current strategy of treating friends and allies as enemies may have serious effects in Northern Ireland.
He is currently, as I write, promising trade sanctions against the European Union but not against the UK.
The logic appears to be that there is a trade balance, more or less, between Britain and the United States so, as yet, there is little to be gained by imposing tariffs on British goods and provoking a retaliatory strike against American imports into Britain.
And anyway, he needs an excuse besides the balance of trade, for the only way that he can sanction another country is by using emergency powers.
He accuses Mexico of flooding the US with criminal migrants and drugs. He says he is punishing Canada and China for allowing fentanyl into the US. More likely these represent excuses for using emergency powers to restrict trade when other means are not available to him.
He has said that he loves tariffs because they will enrich America and even become an alternative means of funding the treasury allowing for the further lowering of taxes.
We might also suspect that he is motivated by a simple vengeful and destructive impulse. He likes attention and gets it through creating havoc.
But is he thinking about Ireland? Probably not. Yet imagine a scenario in which the major part of this island is suffering from tariffs because it is part of the European Union while the British part isn’t.
For a start, Irish businesses would lose orders in America because their goods would instantly be more expensive. British Northern Ireland would have a trade advantage over the Republic.
This would incline Irish businesses to relocate north or at least to export through northern ports. The North would like that. It would be good for the economy.
Some of those companies that might see the advantage in relocating are multi-nationals like Apple which have enriched the Irish economy with corporation tax.
Would that affect the border?
Where there are price differentials between goods on one side of a border and the other, people will go to the cheaper side to buy. But that would be America’s problem and it’s unlikely that Britain or Ireland would concern themselves with policing tariff dodgers.
But then comes another stage in the trade war.
If Trump imposes tariffs on the EU, which includes Ireland, then the EU will retaliate as Canada and Mexico plan to, by imposing tariffs on the US. Northern Ireland is in a strange half way house between Britain and the EU.
It was never fully taken out of the EU and remains part of the single market. There is a trade border in the Irish Sea which checks some restricted goods coming into Northern Ireland from Britain, even though both are part of the UK.
If the EU imposes tariffs on imports from the US, then Northern Ireland will have to take part in that too.
So American goods coming into Northern Ireland will be more expensive than American goods going to Liverpool or Edinburgh.
Which will tempt businesses away from both parts of Ireland to relocate to Britain.
Then some of those American goods coming into Northern Ireland through Britain will have European tariffs imposed on them at the Irish Sea border - actually at the ports of Belfast and Larne.
None of this yet takes into account how that Irish Sea border impacts on politics in Northern Ireland where unionists recently pulled down the devolved parliament in protest against checks there.
It would hurt them in their sense of British identity, affronted by the creation of a trade border between themselves and Britain.
They were promised economic advantages from that border and their continued membership of the Single Market and would now see it as the very thing that was draining economic prospects away from them.
British identifying people in Northern Ireland, insisting on equal status with British people living in London or Glasgow would feel discriminated against and a revival of fury over the Irish Sea border could lead to protest and - as before - the collapse of devolved government.
Not that trade with America is high.
But then consider another possibility, that Trump, seeing the trade imbalance grow with the flood of businesses out of the EU into Britain, would then seek an excuse to impose tariffs on Britain. He would need some means of defining Britain as hostile to the US.
This is all speculative at the moment, but it is illustrative of how Ireland gets caught up in disputes that were not expected to concern them.
We made the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, oblivious to the prospect of Britain leaving the EU and how that might affect us and the working of that agreement.
Similarly, Trump, rampaging through the world economic order, may step on us without even seeing us.
(My thanks to John Campbell, BBC NI Economics & Business Editor, for guiding me through some of these issues.)
See More: Donald Trump, Ireland, US
