Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has spent the past several months playing nice with the White House.  He's gone to the theatre with the president's daughter, he mastered the firm handshake.  He's made sure to offer nothing but vaguely passive-aggressive platitudes, so hot with centrists right now, on Twitter whenever the president does something abhorrent.

In other words, Trudeau has tried very, very hard to keep on U.S. President Donald Trump's good side.  Otherwise, the president might go and do something bad for Canada.  Something like raise lumber tariffs, maybe make a lot of noise about our milk regime being unfair, and look to pull the U.S. completely out of NAFTA.

Which brings us to this week where, oh my, it would seem Trump is about to do just that.  Earlier this week, the president announced his government would be imposing tariffs of about 20 per cent on Canadian softwood lumber.  This came after a week of deriding our supply management system of dairy quotas as unfair to American farmers.  Then Wednesday, news started to leak out the White House is preparing an executive order that would pull the U.S. out of NAFTA.

It was only a few hours after news of a NAFTA pull out that Trump took to Twitter to set things straight, "I received calls from the President of Mexico and the Prime Minister of Canada asking to renegotiate NAFTA rather than terminate.  I agreed, subject to the fact that if we do not reach a fair deal for all, we will then terminate NAFTA.  Relationships are good — deal very possible!"

So, now that things have gone all to hell, it's clear Trudeau misplayed things.  Of course, he doesn't bear the entirety of the blame.  The whole time, there was a class of pundit chumps cheering the nice guy strategy.

Unfortunately, I am a pundit chump.  I thought this was a good plan.  The stakes were much — much! — lower for me, I wrote a column in this space advocating for the government to play nice with the recalcitrant child behind the Resolute Desk, lest he throw a tantrum in our direction.  But, it would appear I was wrong as hell.  That bit of punditry hasn't really sat well with me — reading about appeasement will do that to a fellow â€” but I decided I'd sit on my unease and wait for things to either to blow over or blow up.

And so, here we are.  Ka-blammo.

It's hard to say how these new negotiations might go.  It was only a couple months ago Trudeau was in Washington, D.C. where Trump told him the U.S. was only looking to tweak the free trade agreement.  Now, here we are, looking down the barrel of a full NAFTA withdrawal by the Americans if things don't go their way.

We've been taught one hell of a lesson, though.  This is a U.S. president that's not to be trusted.  Who's to say what would be a fair deal to him.  Two weeks ago, it's not clear he'd ever heard of our milk regime, then suddenly he goes to Wisconsin and all of a sudden Canada is packed with trade geniuses, sticking it to helpless American workers.

We can't even put our faith in the idea that this is a logical piece of some grand plan for a reshuffled American trade policy.  Trump has made clear for some time now that he doesn't have policies.  The president governs by whim.  This wouldn't be as much of a problem if the man in the big chair was, say, smarter, or rational, or even decent.  But he's none of those things.  And this is the guy we're left to negotiate with.

There's no telling what we're in for three months from now.  Maybe Trump will forget about how mean and tricksy Canada has been to poor Uncle Sam all these years and this NAFTA thing will seem like a quaint scare.  On the other hand, maybe he'll annex southwestern Ontario because someone on cable news floated the idea.

Which casts Trudeau's strategy of playing nice in a pretty brutal light.  What's the point in going out of your way to twist yourself into ideological knots to prevent offending the man, or going against his wishes?  Even when you do he could turn on you at any moment, for any reason.

I don't know what the solution to that is. It's not clear to me there's a way to deal with a man like Trump, a man without a sense of honour, on level terms.  But I think it's time we cross bending the knee off the list.