Local youth skate with a large Canadian flag on the Rideau Canal to launch celebrations for the 60th Anniversary of the National Flag of Canada Day, on Feb. 14, in Ottawa.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press
JD Vance is worth listening to not because he has real power – in the Trump 2.0 White House, all have become impotent quislings – but because, when the U.S. Vice-President speaks, he aims to impress an audience of one.
Last week, Mr. Vance went to Munich, where NATO allies were eager to hear more about American plans for ending the war in Ukraine. They were ready for realpolitik and constructive criticism. They were unprepared for an attack on the alliance itself.
Mr. Vance said “there’s a new sheriff in town” – and left the impression that this sheriff isn’t interested in protecting the townsfolk, but is instead leaning toward abandoning them, or taking the side of the outlaws on the edge of town.
President Donald Trump wasn’t in Munich, but he was Mr. Vance’s real audience. The former critic of Mr. Trump has become his most apt pupil; like a self-ventriloquizing Charlie McCarthy, he intuits what the man working him like a puppet wants to hear. Which is why Mr. Vance’s words bear listening to, and taking seriously.
The message delivered in Munich is closely related to the one Canada has been hearing since last fall, when Mr. Trump started talking about Canada as the “51st state,” and the Prime Minister as his “governor.”
The Europeans are now fully acquainted with our sense of dread. Free trade was already on death row, and now NATO has joined it.
Which country is most threatened by all this? Canada.
Mr. Trump doesn’t have territorial designs on Europe – well, aside from Greenland. As for a global tariff war, the European Union and Britain are, by dint of geography, far less dependent than Canada on trade with the U.S.
And a NATO without the U.S. is not impossible. The EU plus Britain are an economy far bigger and more technologically advanced than Russia, with a population three times as large. The continent has severely underinvested in defence since the end of the Cold War, but Europe has an extensive military-industrial base. And France and Britain have nuclear weapons.
Europe is much stronger relative to Russia than it was versus the Soviet Union. Even a U.S. pullout from NATO, if it comes to that, need not be an existential threat to the EU or its members.
And Canada? If Mr. Trump erects a tariff wall along our southern border, the level of economic pain would range from mild to severe. The Bank of Canada recently estimated that a 25-per-cent U.S. tariff on all trade partners, with equal retaliation by those partners, could knock as much as 4 per cent off Canadian gross domestic product in the first two years, after which the economy would begin to recover.
Canada in 2030 would still be a prosperous country – just slightly less prosperous because of barriers to trade with the U.S.
But it’s worth remembering that, until the postwar era, U.S. tariffs were almost always higher than 25 per cent, and Canada had its own tariff walls against the U.S. We traded less with the Americans, and our economy was less efficient, but we survived. We even thrived. We can do it again.
Mr. Trump’s economic threats, however bad, are not existential. They will not end us.
But what if the U.S. decides it wants to end Canada, by force?
That was once Canada’s reality. From Citadel Hill in Halifax to The Citadel in Quebec City, and from Fort Henry in Kingston to Fort George in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont., today’s lovely tourist sites were once real defences against American attack. So too was the Rideau Canal, built at great cost not to provide a skating rink, but to maintain east-west communication in the event of a U.S. invasion.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukraine agreed to give up the nuclear weapons on its territory in exchange for guarantees from Washington and Moscow. It has reason to regret that decision, as Russia has since 2014 done to Ukraine what the U.S. will never do to nuclear-armed North Korea.
Canada supplied uranium and brain power to the Manhattan Project that developed the first atomic bomb, and we also built the first nuclear reactor outside the U.S. But Canada nevertheless chose not to develop our own atomic weapons, nor did we partner with Britain to do so. Being under the American nuclear umbrella made it unnecessary.
It was, at the time, a perfectly logical choice. But in this strange new world, we may have reason to feel the same regret as the Ukrainians.