U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to the press as Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller looks on at Mar-a-Lago, Fla., on Jan. 3.JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images
“We take the world as it is,” said Prime Minister Mark Carney last week in Beijing, “not as we wish it to be.”
What is the world as it is?
“Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize,” U.S. President Donald Trump wrote to the Prime Minister of Norway on Sunday, “I no longer feel obligated to think purely of Peace.” He then reiterated his demand for “Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you!”
What is the world as it is?
“In this world there’s two kinds of people,” Clint Eastwood’s character says in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. “Those with loaded guns, and those who dig.”
Fingering his firearm, he advises his interlocutor to dig.
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Mr. Trump may not be the smartest man in the room, but like the hedgehog, he knows a simple truth: That he has the guns.
What is the world as it is?
“We live in a world,” Trump-whisperer Stephen Miller recently said on CNN, “that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world.”
The White House Deputy Chief of Staff spent the rest of the interview insisting that, under the law of iron, the United States should run Venezuela and take over Greenland, since no one would dare stop it.
Mr. Miller might as well have been channelling that scene in Conan the Barbarian where the protagonist is asked: “What is good in life?” and he answers: “To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women.”
What is the world as it is?
Canada’s second-largest trading partner is a huge and innovative economy, but also a surveillance state that took Canadians hostage a few years ago and would think nothing of doing it again.
Mr. Carney travelled there because Canada’s largest trading partner, our erstwhile best friend and ally, is now run by a great white shark.
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And the country Mr. Carney visited after China is, according to NGO Freedom House, a state where a “hereditary emir holds all executive and legislative authority and ultimately controls the judiciary … most of the population consists of noncitizens with no political rights [and] few civil liberties.”
It’s also economically successful, which is why the PM was there shaking the cup.
What is the world as it is?
There’s been a lot of talk lately about the Melian Dialogue, a 2,500 year-old story about a superpower making demands of a small, neutral state. My colleagues on The Globe and Mail editorial board wrote about it a few weeks ago, and I raised it last year, before Mr. Trump’s inauguration.
As told by the ancient historian Thucydides, the Athenian empire demanded that Melos cease its neutrality in a war between Athens and Sparta and submit to the former’s leadership.
Athenian envoys brushed away the Melians’ moral outrage with the story’s most famous quote: “You know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”
The line contains a hard truth about international relations and life, and Mr. Trump. But in all other respects, the President is standing the Melian tale on its head.
Canada and Europe are not neutrals refusing to co-operate with the U.S. We’re allies of more than 80 years and partners in the greatest alliance in history. We’ve welcomed American leadership of the alliance.
But in Mr. Trump’s adaptation of the Melos story, friends and partners are informed that their friendship and partnership is no longer desired. It’s not a policy of growing the alliance, but destroying it.
At the same time, however, Mr. Trump has made it clear that, even if erstwhile allies yield, whatever new arrangements they submit to will not be honoured.
Last year, the European Union and Britain agreed not to retaliate against Mr. Trump’s tariffs – punch us and we won’t punch back – in the hope that would be the end of it. But last week, in response to their support for Denmark and Greenland, Mr. Trump announced additional tariffs on eight countries, thereby ripping up the “deal” he’d celebrated a few months earlier.
A year ago, former prime minister Stephen Harper said that, along with making plans to strengthen our economy and our national defence, Canada had to be prepared to “accept any level of damage” to preserve our independence, and even “impoverish the country” to fight annexation.
Mr. Carney has talked a lot about strengthening the economy and our defences, and there is hopefully much more to come. But nobody is levelling with Canadians about the costs, and the losses, that we may have to endure to keep our country.
Sir Winston Churchill came into office promising ultimate victory, but also that “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.”
Canada could use such honest words.
Sunny uplands may one day welcome us back, but there will be valleys to cross. They may be deep. They may be dark.
That is the world as it is.