Canada and Mexico blinked Monday in their trade standoff with President Trump, agreeing to take steps to strengthen border security and curb the smuggling of deadly fentanyl, hours before the U.S. was set to impose crippling tariffs on both countries.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum each secured a one-month pause on Mr. Trump’s plan to slap 25% tariffs on Canadian and Mexican imported goods.

The agreement staves off a trade war at least for now, particularly with Canada, which planned a retaliatory 25% tariff on $155 billion worth of U.S. goods and was already pulling American liquor off store shelves.

Mexico and Canada, however, stood to be clobbered economically by the tariffs as both export heavily into the U.S.

Mr. Trump secured tangible commitments and money from both nations to combat the flow of illegal immigration and help halt the deadliest drug epidemic ever to impact the U.S.

“This has been the baseline negotiating tactic for Trump,” said Andrew Hale, a senior trade policy analyst for the conservative Heritage Foundation. “To threaten this, the proposal of it, and usually before it’s implemented, people give him what he wants.”

Mr. Trump has railed against trade imbalances with Canada especially, but insisted his tariff threat was aimed largely at fentanyl crossing the U.S. border.

According to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, more than 107,000 people died of drug overdoses in 2023 and nearly 70% of those deaths were attributed to opioids including fentanyl, which is smuggled mainly across the border from Mexico and increasingly from Canada.

“As President, it is my responsibility to ensure the safety of ALL Americans, and I am doing just that,” Mr. Trump said in a social media post after both deals were secured.

Tariffs on China, which produces much of the fentanyl, are still on. Mr. Trump imposed a 10% tariff on all goods from China beginning Tuesday and threatened to ramp them up.

“China hopefully is going to stop sending us fentanyl, and if they’re not, the tariffs are going to go substantially higher,” he said.

Mexico on Monday agreed to reinforce its northern border with 10,000 members of the Mexican National Guard to prevent drug trafficking, particularly fentanyl, from entering the U.S. More than 21,000 pounds of fentanyl was seized on the border in 2024, which White House officials said is enough of the deadly drug to kill 4 billion people. An unknown quantity of the drug made it into the U.S. undetected.

Canada’s fentanyl problem is much smaller but growing. More than 43 pounds were seized coming into the U.S. from Canada last year, up from 14 pounds in 2022 and 2 pounds in 2023.

Mr. Trump, in a late afternoon call with Mr. Trudeau, secured a pledge from the prime minister to appoint a new “Fentanyl Czar” and list the drug cartels as terrorists. Mr. Trudeau also agreed to launch a Canada-U.S. Joint Strike Force to combat organized crime, fentanyl and money laundering.

“I have also signed a new intelligence directive on organized crime and fentanyl and we will be backing it with $200 million,” Mr. Trudeau said, describing his conversation with Mr. Trump as “a good call.”

Canada will continue implementing an ongoing, $1.3 billion border security plan that includes 10,000 “frontline personnel working on protecting the border,” Mr. Trudeau said.

Mr. Trump’s tariff brinksmanship rankled economists, who warned it would trigger a trade war that could upend the U.S. economy and lead to more inflation.

In addition to the 25% tariff threat on Canadian and Mexican goods, Mr. Trump threatened to tack a 10% tariff on “energy resources,” from Canada, which supplies most of U.S. energy imports.

U.S. stock markets were down sharply in early morning trading Monday, but pared some of their losses later in the day. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 122 points, or 0.2%, to close at 44,421.

Mr. Trump threatened Canada and Mexico under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which has never been used to justify sweeping tariffs. It likely would have faced court challenges.

“Many U.S. energy producers will never have imagined that supply chains in Mexico and especially Canada would ever face 25% tariffs. Consequently, some energy sector business models will break down if these tariffs are sustained,” Joseph Webster, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Global Energy Center and Indo-Pacific Security Initiative, warned.

Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer, New York Democrat, warned of higher-priced avocados and Mexican beer.

The president “is slapping consumers right where it hurts — their wallets,” he said.

But so far, the tariffs remain just a threat. Mr. Trump walked away Monday away with pledges from two border nations to provide troops and resources to combat illegal immigration and drugs. Tackling the scourge of fentanyl and stopping the flow of illegal immigrants was the president’s number-one campaign promise and the issue he believes delivered him the White House.

“For literally three days, I heard the far-left in this country say that these tariffs would make Americans’ lives worse off,” Vice President J.D. Vance told a crowd in East Palestine, Ohio on Monday. “And what actually happened is that they actually are taking their border enforcement and their anti-cartel activity more seriously.”

• Susan Ferrechio can be reached at sferrechio@washingtontimes.com.

• Tom Howell Jr. can be reached at thowell@washingtontimes.com.