At a moment in the American Revolutionary War when things seemed bleakest for George Washington’s troops, in the dark winter that followed the retreat from New York, the English-born revolutionary Thomas Paine wrote a small pamphlet that Washington ordered read aloud to his soldiers, because it spoke to the need at hand. It began: “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”
I begin with Paine deliberately, and with a certain irony, because the pamphlet that once rallied Americans against an empire to the north now reads, from where I sit, like a description of our own predicament—with the roles reversed.
Canada is not at war with the United States, in any formal sense. But something close to a trade war is underway. For months, Canadian and American negotiators had been trying to reach a new trade arrangement to replace the shaky truce that followed Donald Trump’s initial 2025 tariffs. Those talks broke down at the end of August. In the aftermath, Washington raised tariffs on a wide range of Canadian goods—from steel and aluminum to all sorts of consumer products—up to 50%. Earlier this month, on Sept. 8, Ottawa responded in kind: Canada’s matching tariffs targeted American steel, dairy, and electronics.
These are two of the world’s most integrated economies—but billions of dollars in trade between them are now being taxed as though they were adversaries rather than close allies. President Trump has stated, on more occasions than anyone can count, that he believes Canada should become the 51st state; that the border between us is an artificial line; that our conduct as an ally has been so weak and self-serving that we have forfeited any claim to be taken seriously as an independent neighbor. No American president has combined this kind of rhetoric toward Canada with tariffs of this scale against a treaty ally.
An American Tradition
It would be a mistake to imagine that American designs on Canada are an invention of the present moment. This is not the first time the United States has looked north with covetous eyes; it is, if anything, one of the oldest themes in the relationship. At the very moment Paine was composing his appeal to American patriotism, a message was being sent north—in French, no less—from the Continental Congress sitting in Philadelphia, inviting the Canadians living under English rule to make common cause against the English yoke. The letter received no direct reply. It was followed soon enough by something less rhetorical: an invasion led by Benedict Arnold, then still an American patriot, and the siege of Quebec, an enterprise endorsed and supported by no less a figure than Benjamin Franklin.
The War of 1812 carried the same ambition forward—a war of annexation fought across what is now Ontario and Quebec, resisted by British troops and their Indigenous allies (many of whom had themselves been brutally displaced by Washington’s armies), and settled at last by the Treaty of Ghent in 1815, after the Americans concluded that the conquest of the whole continent was, for the time being, beyond their reach.
After Confederation in 1867 the new country fell almost at once into a deep argument about how it could possibly endure, with most of its population living within a few miles of the United States. Canadians sought reciprocity—a freer trade relationship—and were rebuffed. The country then consolidated behind a National Policy of tariff walls meant to nurture a domestic manufacturing base, much of it built as the branch plants of American firms seeking to vault those very walls. It did not produce great prosperity—the recession of the 1890s sent a wave of Canadians south—and in 1911 the question was put again, when a free-trade agreement was negotiated and then defeated at the polls by a protectionist Conservative party. The economic and political forces binding the two countries never disappeared. Both were battered by a Great Depression to which the trade walls thrown up on both sides of the border surely contributed; the beggar-thy-neighbor world that John Maynard Keynes had foreseen was finally ended, and blown apart, only by the Second World War.
I rehearse this history not to diminish the present danger but to sharpen our sense of what is genuinely new about it. The covetousness is old. The novelty is that the threat now comes openly, and from an ally—not spoken in the chambers of a hostile Congress but proclaimed from the most powerful office in the world, by a president who treats our independence as a matter for negotiation.
The second, and graver, change is that the rules and institutions painstakingly built after 1945 precisely to protect smaller nations from exactly this kind of pressure are themselves being dismantled—and by the country that did more than any other to build them.
It is worth emphasizing how profound this rupture is. American leaders have long spoken differently about this relationship. “Geography has made us neighbors,” John F. Kennedy told Parliament in 1961. “History has made us friends. Economics has made us partners. And necessity has made us allies. Those whom nature hath so joined together, let no man put asunder.” In 1987, Ronald Reagan, acting on a law passed by Congress, proclaimed days of peace and friendship between our two countries, calling Canada the closest friend and ally of the United States and naming the ideals we share—freedom, democracy, human rights, justice, and a shared commitment to the rule of law.
Decades before, in early 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt in his State of the Union address told the American people that there was strong agreement among all the allies that the common goal was “security.”
He went on to say:
And that means not only physical security which provides safety from attacks by aggressors. It means also economic security, social security, moral security—in a family of Nations.
The best interests of each Nation, large and small, demand that all freedom-loving Nations shall join together in a just and durable system of peace. In the present world situation…essential to peace is a decent standard of living for all individual men and women and children in all Nations. Freedom from fear is eternally linked with freedom from want.
There are people who burrow through our Nation like unseeing moles, and attempt to spread the suspicion that if other Nations are encouraged to raise their standards of living, our own American standard of living must of necessity be depressed.
The fact is the very contrary. It has been shown time and again that if the standard of living of any country goes up, so does its purchasing power- and that such a rise encourages a better standard of living in neighboring countries with whom it trades. That is just plain common sense.
The same pathologies of isolationism, protectionism, and authoritarian thinking surround us today, as they have in the most difficult days of our past. The contrast between the sensibility of President Roosevelt and the current incumbent in the White House could hardly be clearer.
Beyond Canada
The implications of the rupture go much further than our own two countries. We are talking about the collapse of a fragile world order and the institutions intended to fulfill a broader vision of mutual interest.
My experience at the UN these past years has convinced me that there are countries that are profoundly committed to the idea of a multilateral order, and others that see themselves as unique to themselves, bound by their own set of rules. The gap is reflected in the UN Charter itself. All countries are equal, all value national sovereignty. But then, as in Orwell’s Animal Farm, some countries are more equal than others.
The persistence of the veto power in the Security Council of the “Founding Five” is an expression of this exceptionalism. With the extraordinary rise of China and the end of the Cold War, we began talking more about “P-2” (U.S. and China) and “P-3” (U.S., China, Russia). But in fact all empires die hard. Regional hegemons, the product of past imperial reach, all have their own narratives and competing ambitions.
The publication of the U.S. National Security Strategy by the Trump administration in December 2025 reaffirmed this ideological turn in unmistakeable terms. I had sat in the General Assembly only weeks earlier and heard President Trump tell the assembled representatives that their countries were “going to hell.” The strategy is the considered version of that taunt. It is a misnomer on every count. It is not about America’s national interest; it is about a single movement and a single man. It will not strengthen American security; it will erode it. It is not, in any serious sense, a strategy at all—it is at best a tactical blueprint for national self-harm. Its central irony is that it diminishes the very power it claims to exalt: the isolation of America, its abdication of the role of democratic superpower, its retreat from global policeman to neighborhood bully, amounts in practice to a gift to Beijing and Moscow. The disaster of the war in Iran is living proof of that gift.
Running through the document are two themes, braided together. The first is the absolute primacy of self-interest—everything subordinated to American advantage, every relationship reduced to a transaction. The second is the theme of victimization: the claim, familiar from every autocratic propaganda campaign of the last century, that the nation has been wronged—except that here the alleged villains are America’s own past leaders. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell gave us the precise word for this: “doublethink,” the capacity to hold two contradictory beliefs at once and accept them both. Weakness is strength; fiction is reality; degradation is greatness. There is no contradiction too absurd, no dissonance too jarring. And beneath it all there is a single grim message addressed to every other country on earth: do as we wish, or be punished. So the president becomes Big Brother—wanting not merely our compliance but our love.
This is not a threat to Canada alone. Our friends in Europe have been absorbing what is in effect the second installment of an assault that began with Vice President JD Vance’s speech to the Munich Security Conference in 2025 when he stood before the democracies of Europe and attacked them as the global headquarters of “woke” weakness. Many could not believe their ears. It would be wiser now to believe them. The strategy puts the United States openly on a collision course with the elected governments of Europe, and declares its intention to support the “patriotic” parties of the nationalist right across Europe and the Anglosphere.
The praise for the AfD in Germany is just the latest example. We have been put on notice that the current American government intends to assist political movements around the world that align themselves with its program. Any such intrusion is an outrage. But it is clearly happening.
The Democratic Response
The democratic world’s response has been real but scattered. Mark Carney, Canada’s prime minister, has spoken with unusual clarity, and his government has matched that clarity with a calibrated response: retaliatory tariffs on American steel, dairy, and electronics, paired with a deliberate refusal to escalate reflexively each time Washington raises the stakes.
That restraint has been tested. Even as the two countries traded formal measures, Trump moved past tariffs altogether—threatening outright bans on Canadian goods, doubling auto tariffs, and, in one particularly telling gesture, renaming Lake Ontario “Lake America.” Petteri Orpo, the prime minister of Finland, has spoken with similar clarity. But it is hardly a chorus at this point, and for only one reason: fear.
At Davos in January, well before any of this, Carney did something a serving leader rarely does: he acknowledged out loud that the rules-based international order had always been, in part, a fiction—that its rules were applied asymmetrically, and that the strongest exempted themselves whenever it suited them.
He borrowed Václav Havel’s image of the greengrocer who hangs the official slogan in his shop window without believing a word of it, and argued that the time had come to stop performing the fiction. He also made it clear that democratic middle powers—Canada, Australia, the nations of Europe, Japan, South Korea—together command more economic weight than any single great power, and could therefore shape a new order if they chose to act in concert. The ambition, as he put it, is to build something better than what came before.
But ambition is one thing. Can the world’s democracies come together in their own defense, and in defense of a wider concept of freedom and the rule of law? Therein lies the challenge of our time.
This essay was adapted from the author’s introduction to his new edited volume, Reclaiming Canadian Sovereignty in a Ruptured World (Lorimer, 2026)
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"At Davos in January, well before any of this, Carney did something a serving leader rarely does: he acknowledged out loud that the rules-based international order had always been, in part, a fiction.... He borrowed Václav Havel’s image of the greengrocer who hangs the official slogan in his shop window without believing a word of it, and argued that the time had come to stop performing the fiction."
So Carney is content for the "rules-based international order" to collapse, primarily, it would seem, because it made a place for US hegemony. But is any "rules-based order" going to survive without a hegemon who can enforce the rules, even if it bends them from time to time? The overturning of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait was the one time the UN security apparatus functioned as planned to deal effectively with a major geo-political breach of the rules. Carney should wonder whether this could have happened without US leadership before he becomes too enthusiastic about the fall of the current order.
He’s an idiot. But “backward”? Seriously? I guess everybody does click-bait. But serious topics merit thoughtful headlines and ledes. And please stop trying to sell us the UN, the EU, Australia, and Carney, all of which have revealed themselves as enemies of actual liberalism. Trump is as well, but so are they in different guise. The difference is that he doesn’t pretend to believe in liberalism.