In terms of their relations with the U.S., Canada, and Iran have very little in common. One is America’s closest neighbor and second-largest trade partner, sharing the world’s longest international border, extensive economic and cultural ties, and a long history of friendly cooperation. The other has been a U.S. adversary for nearly five decades, including a new war that has now lasted more than six months. What Canada and Iran do have in common is an enemy: they’re both targets of new economic offensives by President Trump — and they’re both equally unlikely to capitulate to them.

Over the past week and a half, the Trump administration has escalated the president’s trade war with Canada by blowing up trade negotiations and imposing 50 percent tariffs on $20 billion worth of Canadian exports, leading Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney to slap retaliatory tariffs on a wide range of American products. Meanwhile, Trump has also escalated his economic war with Iran in the apparent hope that it will succeed where U.S. air strikes have failed. On Monday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced Operation Economic Outcast, a new pressure campaign he likened to “economic D-Day” that would impose sanctions not only on Iran but on other countries and institutions that do business with it.

These are two very different conflicts with very different countries, but both escalations are likely to fail in similar ways, for similar reasons.

Trump lacks the public support and political capital he needs to sustain the fights he has picked, especially as Americans don’t see how or why we got into these conflicts in the first place. Other countries aren’t willing to back the U.S. in either instance, and Trump is rightly afraid to pull the biggest levers he has available, because the potential blowback on the U.S. economy would be too severe. Iran and Canada alike are more prepared to endure significant economic hardship to resist what they see as threats to their national sovereignty by a belligerent U.S. government — and probably far more than Americans are prepared to endure to sustain these threats.

Trump’s tariffs and Carney’s counter-tariffs are both going to cause some pain in Canada, but the prime minister........

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