The U.S. has a 60 billion dollar trade deficit with Mexico. It has been a one-sided deal from the beginning of NAFTA with massive numbers...



— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 26, 2017

of jobs and companies lost. If Mexico is unwilling to pay for the badly needed wall, then it would be better to cancel the upcoming meeting.



— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 26, 2017

WASHINGTON: The genteel comity of democratic nations has never seen anything like it, but it had better get ready for a new Trumpian style of diplomacy -- blunt, abrasive, and premised on ''America first,'' to the extent of dispensing with diplomatic niceties and social graces.US President Donald Trump on Thursday asked his Mexican counterpart Enrique Pena Nieto to stay at home if Mexico is not willing to pay for the border wall that he (Trump) has pledged to be built. Trump’s insulting message came even as a Mexican team led by its foreign minister Luis Videgaray arrived in Washington for talks centering on trade and immigration issues, ahead of Pena-Nieto’s proposed January 31 visit.The snarky tweet left Pena-Nieto with little choice but to cancel the visit, which he did some four hours after the graceless snub."The US has a 60 billion dollar trade deficit with Mexico. It has been a one-sided deal from the beginning of NAFTA with massive numbers of jobs and companies lost. If Mexico is unwilling to pay for the badly needed wall, then it would be better to cancel the upcoming meeting,'' Trump said in snippy morning tweets on Thursday, just ahead of the talks, setting up a public negotiating position even before the two sides could engage.It is possible Trump was only elevating his gamesmanship to one-upmanship by pre-empting the Mexican side that had already signalled Pena-Nieto might not come after the US President signed executive orders to initiate building of the wall . But the snarky public rebuff added to Trump’s image as someone who would not hesitate to play hardball to fulfill campaign pledges he has made to his core constituency of white blue-collar workers.Thursday’s Twitter-insult was preceded by indirect exchange through the media between the two leaders.Trump insisted in an interview to ABC News on Wednesday that Mexico will pay, or will be made to pay, for the wall. "We'll be reimbursed at a later date from whatever transaction we make from Mexico," he said, amid suggestions that trade revenues and remittances could be held hostage to payment for the wall. He added: "I'm just telling you there will be a payment. It will be in a form, perhaps a complicated form."Pena-Nieto jabbed back, saying, "Mexico does not believe in walls. I've said time again; Mexico will not pay for any wall." Without the decorum of office, his predecessor Vincente Fox was more colorful in his response, tweeting "Mexico is not going to pay for that f***ing wall."Social media memes showed Mexico digging tunnels to counter Trump’s proposed 20-feet walls, and jokes about Americans investing in companies that make ladders 21feet and over. Other reports suggested the biggest beneficiaries of Trump's proposed 1000-mile plus wall will be Mexican construction companies and Mexican workers, who would by the way figure out how to get through.Beyond the mirth loomed the prospect of a new dynamic in a region where the United States has reigned supreme for a century, with two benign neighbors to the south and north who have given it peaceful borders and bounteous trade. It has allowed Washington's expeditionary military an oceanic sweep across the Pacific and the Atlantic without being tied by in regional headaches.All that could change quickly if Mexico looks beyond its borders for trade and security, evoking tensions that last flared up in the 1920s when President Calvin Coolidge called the country "Soviet Mexico" and threatened to invade it because of the communist influence. Remarkably, in the decade before that, it was the Indian revolutionary Manabendra Nath Roy who had moved from New York City to Mexico to found the Communist Party of Mexico – years before he co-founded the undivided Communist Party of India.In the decades since, Mexico has gradually moved closer to the US despite occasional revolutionary fervour, thriving on trade and both legal and illegal immigration that has put more than 35 million people north of the border (nearly 65 per cent of all latinos in U.S are Mexican-Americans), many of them in states (such as Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico) that formerly belonged to Mexico.Inasmuch as illegal border crossing remains an issue, previous US administrations have maintained that trade, even if it is tilted in favour of Mexico as Trump has argued, gives Mexicans economic opportunities and keeps them at home, as attested by undocumented immigration from Mexico now being at a 40-year low.