Donald Trump is a vulgar, swaggering braggart and a shameless liar. His re-election to the American presidency Tuesday may well trigger an unprecedented crisis in the functioning of American constitutional democracy. You never know. What appears by all evidence to be inevitable and unstoppable now, though, is the final abdication of American leadership in what used to be called “the free world.”
From the end of the Cold War in 1989 to the election of hipster isolationist Barack Obama in 2008, the American-led rules-based international order had a pretty good run. At around the half-way mark there were two shocks to the system that the liberal democracies never quite recovered from: the al-Qaida atrocities of Sept. 11, 2001, and the self-inflicted disaster of Beijing’s admission to the World Trade Organization later that same year.
It was around that time that democracy’s post-Soviet advances began to sputter and stall. There was still enough bipartisan pluck left in Washington to occasionally stare down the United Nations’ police-state bloc, but by 2005 the democratic world’s contraction had begun. By the reckoning of the venerable Freedom House agency, which has been tracking the trajectory of political rights and civil liberties since 1973, the year 2024 began with democracy in its 18th consecutive year of retreat.
On Monday, Jan. 20, 2024, Donald Trump is expected to be sworn in as the 47th president of the United States. And then it will be over, for at least as long as Trump remains president, and it’s no sure thing that the United States will ever regain its global standing.
By all accounts, and going by his own boorish and only vaguely intelligible speeches, Trump’s first capitulation will be Ukraine. As far as genuine intention can be discerned from the self-aggrandizing drivel that tends to clutter his every utterance, Trump proposes to give Russia’s Vladimir Putin everything he might want and stick an American knife into the back of Ukraine’s gallant Volodymyr Zelenskyy as deep as he can plunge it. But again, you never know.
The bipartisan consensus on restraining Beijing might well survive a Trump presidency, but Trump should not be expected to sustain an effective and useful American presence within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The 32-nation military alliance that has served as the sword and the shield of the world’s democracies since 1949 has got a lot of reckoning to do. It may well be that we’ll all have to get along without the immense military capacity the United States reliably contributed to the NATO alliance for so many years. In the long run, that may not be a bad thing; ever since the Obama years, the United States has not been what you could call reliable.
At least a Trump White House may prove a more reliable friend to Israel than the Obama-era coterie around a Kamala Harris administration would have been. During his first term, Trump’s “Abraham Accords,” which normalized diplomatic ties between Israel and several Arab states, were no small achievement. According to a poll conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute, about two-thirds of Israelis favoured an American partnership with Trump.
The immediate implications for Canada are a bit cloudy, but the prospects look pretty dark. Is Trump really serious about imposing a 10 per cent tariff on all imports? Canada is far more reliant on foreign trade than the United States is, and nearly 80 per cent of our exports are America-bound. So that’s not propitious.
Whine about the choice American voters made as much as we might like, the Democrats share as much of the blame for what happened as Republican campaigners can claim credit. How can you lose an election to a guy like Trump?
It’s fast becoming received wisdom that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau should be, in a way, happy with the result. He’s bottoming out in the polls, he’s facing an election within a year, and he can cast the Conservatives’ Pierre Poilievre in the mould of a Canadian Trump, with all the weird far-right smell that comes with it.
But even if the Trudeau Liberals were to try that, you can’t easily write off the majority of American voters as a pack of howling gun-crazy yokels. It wouldn’t be easy to dismiss the millions of Canadians who can’t afford to feed their kids or pay their rent and know they’ll never own a house as just a bunch of slack-jawed MAGA-hat hillbillies who refuse to appreciate just how wonderful Trudeau’s Canada has become.
Although it wasn’t by a wide majority, most Americans had simply had it with the Biden-Harris Democrats. Out-of-control immigration, runaway inflation, a toleration of creepy “anti-Zionists” and Black Lives Matter insurrectionists, weird obsessions with race-and-gender quotas and transgendered men in women’s sports — it turns out that these things just don’t appeal to as many people as the “coastal elites” would have liked to believe.
The Trudeau Liberals represent the extreme edges of the Biden-Harris political milieu. And like it or not, the Democrats lost, the Republicans won (they’re also back in control of the Senate and the House is up for grabs), and Angus Reid’s polling shows that 38 per cent of Canadians reckon Poilievre is better suited to handling a Trump White House, compared with 23 per cent of Canadians who think Trudeau would do a better job. One in four Canadians say neither Poilievre or Trudeau will have an easy time of it, and 14 per cent admit they have no idea.
Canadians are hurting, they’re fed up, and they’re increasingly angry. Americans in that same frame of mind voted for Trump. The angrier they got, the less likely they were to be persuaded by evidence of Trump’s boorish manners. They didn’t care. If your house is reeking because your toilet’s backed up, you’ll be just fine with some slob who’s ready to roll up his sleeves and clean out your septic system.
Owing to Canada’s open-borders calamity, there are roughly three million non-citizens in the country already and there aren’t enough jobs to go around or ridiculously expensive micro-suites to house them all. Trump has pledged mass deportations to deal with the American version of that same problem. How would Trudeau respond if millions of the prospective deportees from America headed to the Canadian border?
In the early innings of Trump’s first presidency, when he started making rude noises about barring Muslims immigrants, Trudeau thought he’d be clever by declaring: “To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength. Welcome to Canada.”
That’s not going to work this time. At just one illegal border crossing in Quebec, the infamously unofficial Roxham Road crossing, nearly 100,000 “asylum seekers” ended up being welcomed into Canada.
So what’s left for Trudeau to do? Lecture Trump about NATO? The Trudeau government isn’t now and never was serious about meeting NATO’s two per cent of GDP target for defence spending.
So we’re all just going to have to step out into the dark, plan for the worst, hope for the best, resist the urge to sneer at Americans for the choices they’ve made and start thinking seriously about the choices we’ll be making a year from now.
National Post