Trump has sent mixed messages about U.S. trade over its northern border in general. “People don’t realize Canada’s been very rough on the United States,” he said Tuesday. “Everyone thinks of Canada being wonderful and civil. I love Canada. But they’ve outsmarted our politicians for many years, and you people understand that.” But Trump seemed to get along well with Trudeau when the two met in February, and he was very eager to restart construction on the Keystone XL pipeline, a major Canadian priority Obama had tried to kill. (Trump and Trudeau spoke on Tuesday, though a White House readout shed little light on the call, except that they discussed wood and dairy and that “it was a very amicable call.”)

“You’re trying to find a pattern, and it’s really difficult to say whether we should expect that there would be a pattern in the way that this White House behaves in its foreign relations,” Dawson said. “I think it’s going to go more or less the way it has gone in previous negotiations. The things that are more worrying here are the leakage between the issues that are known to be systemic irritants and the broader trading relationship. We all know that we’re not going to get along on softwood, but that’s not a reason to blow up the NAFTA.”

Whether the Trump administration will feel the same way remains to be seen. It has been slow to begin formal renegotiation of NAFTA—a process about which Canada has been outwardly supportive—but says it remains committed to the process. The U.S. is effectively asking Canada to hobble its dairy and timber industries, but it’s unlikely Trump would make any concessions on Canadian priorities, like dropping “buy American” provisions and opening up labor markets to Canadian workers. A drawn-out trade war between Canada and the U.S. would harm U.S. exporters and increase some prices for American consumers, but it would likely hurt Canada more, since trade with the U.S. represents a larger percentage of Canadian GDP than trade with Canada represents for the U.S.

But Canada is aware of this and has begun trying to diversify, as a government Twitter account pointedly noted Tuesday:

Asia is a growing market for Canadian #softwoodlumber: pic.twitter.com/jmpNU2bplR — Canada Trade (@CanadaTrade) April 25, 2017

Canada is now pursuing closer trade relationships with China and other Asian markets. Ironically, the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiated under Obama would have opened up the Canadian dairy market to American exports, but Trump withdrew the U.S. from that agreement.

Although the lumber and dairy disputes are not new, Trump’s very public excoriation of Ottawa is unusual. It’s especially remarkable because his attacks on the closest American trade partner come as he has softened his line on two of the countries he has most aggressively criticized in the past. During the presidential campaign, he accused Mexican and Chinese leaders of outsmarting the U.S. in negotiation, and vowed to take a tougher line with them. Instead, he has blinked on demanding funding for his border wall and softened his language toward China, recognizing both that Beijing has not devalued its currency for years and that he needs Chinese assistance to contain North Korea.

Meanwhile he has transferred his complaints about those countries over to Canada, right down to the “outsmarted” terminology. The current approach is a nearly perfect embodiment of the old maxim that one should keep one’s friends close and one’s enemies closer—give or take the closeness with friends.