In his approach to the carrot-versus-stick equation that is central to statecraft, Donald Trump always opts for the stick. Apparently unaware of, or unconcerned with, the advantages offered by the canny use of public diplomacy, coercive tactics have become a main feature of his Presidency. On the international stage, Trump has used rhetorical bluster, unleashed financial sanctions, and threatened military action against adversaries such as Iran, Venezuela, and North Korea, and has deployed withering tariffs to initiate an ongoing trade war with China. It is not only against nations with which the White House has ideological differences that Trump has chosen such an approach; he has also made rumblings about slapping tariffs on imports from long-standing American allies, including Canada, France, and Germany.

The weaker the country, the more bullying Trump’s behavior. In March, for instance, in a bid to pressure the nations from which much of the current surge of migrants is arriving, he announced cuts to U.S. humanitarian aid to Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. On May 30th, he moved to punish Mexico over immigration, as well. He peremptorily announced, via a pair of tweets, that he had decided to tax all Mexican imports with a five-per-cent tariff, beginning June 10th, “until such time as illegal migrants coming through Mexico, and into our Country, STOP. The Tariff will gradually increase until the Illegal Immigration problem is remedied, at which time the Tariffs will be removed.” His idea was that the tariff would rise by five per cent at the beginning of every month until it reached twenty-five per cent—the same rate he has levied against China.

Trump’s action took Mexico’s government by surprise, even though he had previously threatened to close the border altogether. But it was probably an inevitability, given the country’s centrality to the MAGA fever dream that Trump has kept alive since launching his Presidential run, in 2015. He began by stoking feelings of fear and loathing toward Latino migrants, and now he has returned to the idea that Mexico is a threat to the peace and prosperity of the United States. In a pair of follow-up tweets, Trump ranted, “Mexico must take back their country from the drug lords and cartels. The Tariff is about stopping drugs as well as illegals!” He went on, listing the horrors that he believes Mexico is guilty of inflicting on its neighbors: “90% of the Drugs coming into the United States come through Mexico & our Southern Border. 80,000 people died last year, 1,000,000 people ruined. This has gone on for many years & nothing has been done about it. We have a 100 Billion Dollar Trade Deficit with Mexico. It’s time!”

Mexico’s President, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known as AMLO, a political leftist who took office last December, and who has taken care to affect a cautious bonhomie in dealing with Trump, wrote him a polite but firm letter, stating, “You can’t solve social problems with taxes or coercive measures. How does one transform, overnight, the country of fellowship with immigrants from around the world into a ghetto, a closed-off space that stigmatizes, mistreats, chases, expels and cancels legal rights to those who are seeking—with effort and hard work—to live free of misery? The Statue of Liberty isn’t an empty symbol.”

AMLO might well be accused of naïveté on that point. But, apart from the damage that Trump’s obstreperousness is doing to the international image of the United States, most close observers of the U.S.–Mexico relationship agree that his approach is counterproductive. “Linking immigration with trade is something that we and the Mexicans have long resisted,” Eric Farnsworth, a former Clinton Administration official, and the vice-president of the Council of the Americas’ Washington, D.C., office, told me. “Why? Because certainty for the business community is key to investment, which, in turn, is key to job creation. Good jobs and opportunity keep people from a desire to migrate. Now, scrambling the business climate further, even as Mexico’s economy is already struggling, could lead to job losses in Mexico, increasing immigration. It’s exactly the opposite of what should be done.” Luis Miguel González, the editorial director of the Mexican financial daily El Economista, warned that Trump’s tariffs could have a seriously destabilizing effect. “If the tariffs go ahead, they will be a severe blow to the Mexican economy. If that happens, there could be a major deterioration in social aspects of life, mainly public security. In terms of bilateral relations, it will oblige the government to assume a nationalistic policy, similar to that which we had forty years ago, with an enormous component of phobia toward the United States. The thing to take into account here is that the government doesn’t have a Plan B. It’s either get along with the United States, or get along with the United States.”

In the end, last Friday, after a week of tense meetings in Washington, a deal was hammered out that allowed both nations to claim victory. But, as with everything else to do with the U.S.–Mexico relationship in the Trump era, the latest solution feels provisional. Mexico agreed to send troops to more effectively seal off its southern border, so as to slow down the exodus from Central America. In return, Trump called off the implementation of the tariff, at least for now. On Saturday, at a rally in Tijuana, AMLO asserted, not altogether convincingly, that Mexico’s “dignity” had been preserved.

As a neighboring state with an economy intertwined with that of the United States to an extraordinary degree, Mexico is uniquely vulnerable to American pressure. (So, of course, are American consumers who would be adversely affected by Trump’s tariff.) In countries where the United States exercises less leverage, Trump’s posturing is more blatantly hostile. Last week, for instance, in the midst of its brinkmanship with Mexico, the Trump Administration levied new restrictions on Americans seeking to go to Cuba. Among other things, those restrictions prohibited travel there by cruise ship, to take effect literally overnight (apparently, some eight hundred thousand cruise reservations were affected) and it banned the category, known as “people to people” travel, led by educational or cultural groups—the two most popular means that U.S. citizens use to visit the island. The restrictions were the latest in a recent series of measures that the White House has taken that are aimed at punishing Cuba for its support of the embattled Maduro regime, in Venezuela. As the Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin, explained, “Cuba continues to play a destabilizing role in the Western Hemisphere, providing a Communist foothold in the region and propping up U.S. adversaries in places like Venezuela and Nicaragua by fomenting instability, undermining the rule of law, and suppressing democratic processes.”

In fact, there is little evidence for Mnuchin’s assertion, other than the fact that Cuba maintains close relations with Nicolás Maduro and receives crucial supplies of oil from Venezuela, as it has for the past two decades, in exchange for sending a large contingent of Cuban medical personnel to work in the country’s slums and rural backwaters. There are also, reportedly, some Cuban security and intelligence advisers in the country, but it is not clear either what their role or their influence might be. Nonetheless, Trump has taken an increasingly hostile tack on Cuba, evidently motivated less by ideological reasons than by a desire to woo Florida’s sizable and still mostly conservative Cuban-American population, with the 2020 elections in mind. As a result, the atmosphere of tentative good will that was established between the United States and Cuba after Barack Obama and Raúl Castro restored diplomatic relations, in 2014, has been almost completely undone. Previous measures have included a near-total drawdown of the U.S. Embassy presence in Havana and the transfer of U.S. immigrant-visa services for Cubans to Guyana, a country nearly two thousand miles away.