Trump’s National Security Strategy – What it Means for Canada |
The Trump administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy, published in November, formalizes the administration’s withdrawal from, indeed opposition to, the post-1945 liberal international order. The document’s explicit rejection of that order’s three pillars of open trade, security through alliances, and the promotion of liberal democracy should at least have the salutary effect of disabusing other national leaders of the illusion that Donald Trump is a normal president, who can be reasoned with and with whom pragmatic bargains can be struck. While Canada is mentioned only once in passing, we are uniquely vulnerable to American abandonment of this global order. As a trade-dependent state with a modest internal market, and a large landmass and limited population with which to defend it, Canada is deeply dependent on the US to secure both our interests and our values, while proximity to a far larger neighbour ensures any purely bilateral relationship is highly unequal.
The Trump document denounces free trade as “predatory economic practices” and promoting democracy and human rights as “misguided hectoring.” American allies are freeloaders on defence spending and “suck us into conflicts and controversies” remote from US interests. China is warned against direct attack on Taiwan or constraining lanes of seagoing commerce, yet there is more emphasis on pressing it to produce more for “household consumption” since others can’t absorb its “enormous excess capacity.”
The special animus towards Europe clarifies that NATO and US-European security cooperation are at best on life support. Immigration, the document notes, threatens Europe with “civilizational erasure” adding that the US should be “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory” and encouraging “the growing influence of patriotic European parties.” This shows a willingness to interfere in others’ affairs at odds with the document’s insistence on the primacy of national sovereignty, as well as support for the far-right parties that share Trump’s hostility to “the European Union and other transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty.” The goal is a world of states without multilateral constraints, in which, inevitably, most bargains will be struck bilaterally, with the stronger imposing terms on the weaker, and the US clearly among the ranks of the stronger.
Such a world aligns with Trump’s affinity for spheres of influence, with the........