Prime Minister Mark Carney meets with U.S. President Donald Trump in the Oval Office in October, 2025.Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters

The Prime Minister’s speech at Davos was on Jan. 20. In the days since then, Donald Trump or his officials have:

Perhaps you will detect a certain pattern. It is of a piece with the President’s previous declarations of his intent to make Canada the 51st state, his posts of maps with Canada as part of the United States. But it is more precise, more frequent, and more intense.

The Prime Minister’s speech, and the response it aroused, have clearly got under the President’s skin. The irritation may be as simple as his displeasure at someone else getting all the attention. But it may be something darker.

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The point of the Prime Minister’s speech, after all, was to rally the world’s middle powers against domination by the world’s great powers – to urge them to stand together, rather than to allow the great powers to play them off against one another; to form new trade alliances, rather than allow the great powers to exploit their dependence on trade with them as a means of subordinating them. He never mentioned the United States, but it was clear to whom he was referring.

For the leader of a country that depends on the United States for 75 per cent of its exports to say this – one that is on the verge, moreover, of renegotiating its existing trade treaty with the Great Republic, the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) – took considerable sang-froid, some would say cheek. It was not only a declaration, if you will, of Canada’s independence, but a call for other countries to reclaim their own. We know what empires think of revolts by the colonies.

So they are, at the very least, trying to make an example of us. The message is aimed, not just at Canada, but at other middle powers: This is what happens to those who try to resist American overlordship. We will not just hit you with tariffs. We will malign your leaders, give aid and comfort to seditious elements within your borders, disregard your territorial sovereignty, and beyond.

But it pretty clearly signals something of their intentions toward this country. The suggestion that we have been taken over by Communist China is in line with Mr. Trump’s earlier declarations that the border between us is “unnatural.” It is an attempt to delegitimize our existence, to imply that we are not a real country, or not one whose independence the U.S. need recognize. Add in the invocations of........

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