Canada is taking an outsized role in the construction of the post-American world

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Annual gatherings of the great democracies in the age of Donald Trump have acquired a certain … rhythm. There is the meeting that takes place before the President arrives, when all is as it usually is between world leaders of the same broad ideological hue: convivial open sessions, chummy photo-ops, urgent side-conferences.

Then there is what happens after he gets there, and the desperate scramble to reconcile the chaos that ensues with the serene normalcy that went before: to insist that the torrent of lunacies foaming out of the President’s mouth from the moment of his arrival, making hash of everything the other conferees had agreed upon – not to mention decades of settled international law – were in fact in perfect harmony with the rest.

This year’s NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, was no different. The meeting had been intended to be a carefully staged show of support for Ukraine in the war with Russia, coupled with an equally carefully staged display of Europe’s commitment to its own defence, all in the service of proving to Mr. Trump that the bargain struck at NATO’s 2025 meeting in The Hague – higher non-U.S. defence spending in return for continued U.S. engagement in Europe – was actually being implemented.

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Then Mr. Trump arrived. He had been attacking and ridiculing NATO, and individual NATO leaders, for months prior to the summit, particularly over their failure to involve themselves in the Iran war – a debacle that has nothing to do with NATO or its core mandate. At the summit things escalated. Mr. Trump revived his demands to be given Greenland, called for a boycott on trade with Spain, and threatened to withdraw all U.S. troops from Europe, on his way to redeclaring war on Iran.

But by the time it was over all was supposedly sweetness and light. The post-conference declaration insisted on the alliance members’ “ironclad” commitment to defend each other under Article 5 of NATO’s founding treaty, mentioned “the long-term threat Russia poses,” boasted that European allies and Canada had increased spending on core defence requirements by US$139-billion last year, and pledged the allies’ “unwavering support for Ukraine.”

Mr. Trump, for his part, seemed pleased, not least by the flattery the other leaders laid on him, which he interpreted as love. “They said, ‘We love, sir, we love you.’ These are grown people saying that, isn’t that nice? … I’ve never seen anything like it. Every one of those countries, they love us, they love each other.” Whatever it was, it seemed to work. Mr. Trump even promised to license Ukraine to make U.S. Patriot air defence systems.

Of course, at most NATO summits, it would not be news that Article 5 was still intact, that the U.S. was still in it, or that the alliance viewed Russia as a threat. But that was before Mr. Trump came onto the world scene. The meeting might have succeeded in papering over the deep cracks in the alliance, but no one takes seriously Mr. Trump’s commitments, such as they are. The test of Article 5 is not what NATO partners say about it now, but what they do in the event of an attack.

To say that there is now profound doubt about the United States’ willingness to defend its allies is to understate things considerably. To say that there is almost complete certainty in NATO circles that it would not is still to understate matters. The most recent, and serious, threat to the territorial integrity of a NATO member, after all, did not come from Russia. It came, and comes, from the United States: over Greenland. And it lingers still over Canada.

The Wall Street Journal this week revived controversy over a conversation first reported last year, in which Mr. Trump had allegedly threatened, in a phone call with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, to abrogate the Treaty of 1908, defining the border between the United States and Canada. “I tear that up and your whole country unravels,” Mr. Trump reportedly told Mr. Trudeau.

However much Mr. Trump’s belligerence may have changed relations with the rest of NATO, it is nothing compared to how it has transformed relations with Canada – and changed Canada with it. Never, since 1867, have we had to take seriously the prospect that the President of the United States might attempt to seize a part of our territory, by one means or another.

Quite the opposite. The United States became our benefactor: our largest trading partner, closest ally, and military protector. No major democracy is more dependent on another country for trade, nor does any other depend as much on another for its defence.

That Canada combines both is a measure not just of how much we had come to rely on the United States, but how uniquely ill-prepared we are for the world we are now in – a world in which we not only cannot rely on the United States for our defence, but must prepare to defend ourselves from it.

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And yet, it must be said, there are opportunities for Canada in this world. Sheltering within the U.S. trade and defence orbit had many benefits – assured access to U.S. markets, security from external aggression – but also infantilized us in many ways.

It convinced us, not only that we did not have to pay for our own defence, but that we had no need to defend ourselves – that we had no natural predators. It dulled our competitive edge, leading us to neglect our sputtering productivity – why concern ourselves with such things, when we could always ship our commodities south?

It allowed us to indulge in self-destructive behaviour like imposing hundreds of interprovincial trade barriers on ourselves, or indulging periodic threats of secession from one province or another. It permitted us to rely on tenuous east-west transportation and communications links that left us more vulnerable than we might have been, had we had to take seriously the threat of sabotage or other coercive measures.

And it encouraged us in that most Canadian of pastimes, preaching to others about matters that do not directly concern us, based on claims to superior virtue we have not earned – a particular irritant when it came to our notorious NATO freeloading, but a tendency to preen that had more generally consigned us to the sidelines of international affairs.

All of this is about to change – is changing already. We have been forced to change course on any number of fronts at the same time, the most radical reappraisal of our prospects and direction in at least the last 40 years, maybe since 1945 – maybe ever.

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At one go, we are attempting to redirect some of our trade to other nations besides the U.S., including by a series of sweeping free trade agreements, while raising our defence spending to levels, whether in proportion to our GDP or to total government spending, not seen since the early 1960s.

At the same time, we are embarked upon a massive infrastructure spree, again of a kind not seen in decades: pipelines and electricity links and railways and more. Rather less has been done as yet on the productivity or internal trade barriers fronts, but these will surely have to follow – there is no way we will be able to pay for all this other spending if we don’t.

And we are beginning to be taken seriously again in international councils. Mark Carney’s personal reputation, as a former central banker and international financier, is only part of this. The reason his speech at Davos, calling on middle powers to get out from under the “hegemons’” thumbs, landed with such enormous impact was not just who said it, or where, or when – at the height of the Greenland fiasco – but that it was a Prime Minister of Canada, of all places, saying it.

This wasn’t Canada preaching from the sidelines. This was a politician with skin in the game, leading a country that was more dependent on one particular hegemon than any of the others represented there – and therefore more at risk. As a consequence, we are taking an outsized role in the construction of a post-American world.

Perhaps the most startling, and sudden, transformation has been our approach to energy development. The Prime Minister’s remarkable “forward guidance” video the other day amounted to a blunt disavowal of the last 10 years of Liberal policy. His reasoning was simple. The world has changed. New threats crowd upon us, that were not anticipated a decade ago, and new priorities must take their place alongside the fight against climate change. Government is about triage.

But it isn’t only Justin Trudeau’s legacy Mr. Carney has been busy overturning, for good or ill. It’s Pierre Trudeau’s. Mr. Carney is in many ways a throwback to a pre-Trudeau kind of Liberal. In style and tone, but even more in policy, he recalls the Liberals of the Lester Pearson era, and even more that of Louis St. Laurent: sober, bankerly, business-oriented, pro-development and pro-military.

We remember Pearson as the father of peacekeeping. We are less likely to remember him as the Cold Warrior who accepted nuclear missiles on Canadian soil, and who spent more than 3 per cent of GDP, on average, on defence.

It was the Diefenbaker Conservatives who objected to the missiles. At the time the Liberals were the continentalists of Canadian politics, seeing engagement with the U.S. as a necessary counterbalance to the imperial connection they were so anxious to be rid of. The Tories were the opposite: fond of the mother country, suspicious of the Yanks. Only much later did the roles reverse, after Britain ceased to be an issue.

Mr. Carney is a continentalist, too – he just has a different continent in mind. But his ardent pursuit of the European connection is in the same counter-balancing mould, not only of Liberal leaders past, but of statesmen through the ages: calling the Old World back into our existence, to redress the balance of the New.