The Sunday Editorial: Trump’s break with the post-war order is a direct shot at Canadian sovereignty |
The atmosphere that sustains life in U.S. President Donald Trump’s world is a toxic mix of nativism, bullying and the chaotic rejection of democratic norms. These three elements cause dizziness in those not from the same world, keeping Mr. Trump’s critics and allies off-balance. They also lie at the heart of his government’s new National Security Strategy, which was released last week.
The NSS is being interpreted correctly as a eulogy for the rules-based liberal order that the United States and its democratic allies jointly conceived after the Second World War to preserve peace and to spread prosperity. It takes the U.S. backward more than 100 years, to when it walked away from the Treaty of Versailles after the First World War, refusing to join the League of Nations and choosing a policy of isolation over one of international co-operation.
This is shocking but not surprising. It has been clear since Mr. Trump’s first term in office that the era of global free trade and the alliances of the past 70 years, most notably NATO, were under threat. The strategy document merely puts on paper what everyone sort of knew was coming – a return to the isolationist era of great powers that dominate their regions through economic and military power, and that jockey for control of the globe.
Where the NSS breaks new ground is its implicit vision of Canada, Mexico and Central and South American countries as vassal states that exist to serve America’s interests. The document invents what it calls “the Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine” – a philosophy that says that any foreign investment in strategic sectors in the Western Hemisphere will be treated by the U.S. as a security threat to be dealt with firmly.
China and Russia are among the obvious targets, and ones that Canada can agree on. It is very much in Canada’s interests that those two countries not be able to secure critical beachheads in any of the Americas.
But the vague language of the strategy leaves it up to the U.S. to decide which “foreign” countries Canada will be able to do business with as it goes about building energy infrastructure, ports, military capacity and other strategic projects in response to Mr. Trump’s tariffs and threats of annexation. Is the European Union on that list? This is not clear.
What is clear that the world that the Trump administration envisions would represent an existential threat to Canadian sovereignty.
In a document that contains the good, the bad and the ugly, this is the biggest take-away for Canada. It serves as a dire warning that this country will likely have to absorb more economic punishment as it tries, on its own terms, to balance its reliance on the U.S. with its need to make its economy more resilient to Mr. Trump’s chaotic economic warfare.
The U.S. National Security Strategy, released in November, outlines a policy of isolation over one of international........