Say goodbye to the U.S. we knew, and plan for the next one

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Say goodbye to America. The United States we have known is gone. It’s time to plan for the next one.

Sure, Donald Trump was president once before, and the world kept spinning. But when he threatens to use force to take Greenland and the Panama Canal, and to inflict economic harm on Canada, his country’s closest ally and friendly neighbour, that’s a bright neon marker of change.

Already, the world was becoming a colder, lonelier place for Canada. Justin Trudeau will be the last prime minister first elected into a world that felt safe and predictable.

He had to wrestle down Mr. Trump’s first term, but the president-elect’s return to the White House appears to be bringing something bigger and broader. There’s no reason to think the MAGA movement, and Mr. Trump’s zero-sum of international economics, will be gone in four years. Canada’s next prime minister is going to have to rethink a lot of this country’s assumptions.

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Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has already articulated his planned approach to cope with that change at a press conference on Thursday: “Massive” tax cuts for individuals and corporations; fuelling the development of pipelines to ship oil and gas overseas; and the exploitation of mines.

“The message that I have for the Americans, by the way, [is] the days of us just handing over our businesses and our jobs because of our economic vandalism by this big, fat, money-hungry government in Ottawa, are over,” Mr. Poilievre said. “We’re going to have a fierce free-market economy that competes with every country on earth.”

That’s a conservative answer, but it is not a complete answer. In Mr. Trump’s mind, U.S. trade deficits amount to a subsidy or a “rip-off.” In his MAGA math, the more Canada exports to the U.S. – more oil, car parts or critical minerals – the more tariffs are needed. Competing in global markets will be necessary; selling more to the U.S. market will apparently be punished.

For 40 years, Canadian governments of all stripes have pursued a get-closer strategy when the U.S. moved toward isolationism or protectionism, by trying to get inside a common North American tent with trade agreements or joint border-security cooperation.

But that doesn’t make much sense when the president-elect openly threatens to exploit Canada’s economic dependence on the U.S. to annex it.

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What now? The U.S. has been at the centre of Canada’s foreign policy, its security and its prosperity.

Mr. Poilievre’s proposes a low-tax, free-enterprise national makeover which – if he is describing the scale of change accurately – would require deep spending cuts, including to social programs. That would certainly not be a simple matter of axing the carbon tax.

The governing Liberals, in the process of choosing a new leader, haven’t given much sign they’re thinking about the broader implications beyond appeasing Mr. Trump’s calls for increased border security and mobilizing a lobby against tariffs. Perhaps that kind of crisis management will work this time, but MAGA trade math and neighbour-baiting will be back.

And Mr. Trump’s latest threats to other countries aren’t only about trade. You don’t threaten to take Greenland by force because of its commercial potential. As crazy as those threats sound, they are already having a destabilizing effect on the world, especially on U.S. – and Canadian – allies.

It doesn’t just throw a wild curveball into the lives of residents of Greenland or of Denmark, a small but stalwart NATO ally. It’s unsettling for Taiwan, which fears invasion by the People’s Republic of China, or of Ukraine, already fighting a Russian invasion. And others on Russia’s borders.

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The U.S. used to see itself as the exceptional power pledged to stand up for democratic nations that feared powerful autocratic neighbours. Now Mr. Trump, like China’s Xi Jinping or Russia’s Vladimir Putin, asserts his country can and will take territory by force, from democracies and allies to suit its own designs.

Many Americans don’t agree, but there are also many hooting for a seizure of Greenland or posting maps of North America covered by a U.S. flag, and the Republican majority in the U.S. Congress isn’t objecting.

Perhaps that will change. But Mr. Trump has effectively declared that the old U.S. is gone. Canada will have to start governing itself accordingly. That’s in the job description of the next prime minister.