U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff war against Canada is just one battle aimed at a much larger goal than getting a better deal on trade or less fentanyl and human smuggling coming across America’s northern border.
What he wants is the end of the post-Second World War consensus that the best way to prevent global conflicts — both economic and military — was through multi-national alliances of like-minded countries.
That led to the creation of NATO, a defensive military alliance intended to deter an invasion of Europe by the former Soviet Union and now, Russia.
It resulted in the founding of the United Nations to prevent and contain future wars and today, ostensibly, to preside over issues such as the global response to human-induced climate change.
Finally, it is evidenced by the many international agreements on trade between nations — including the Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA) ratified by the leaders of all three countries in 2020.
At that time, Trump, then in his first term as president, praised CUSMA, or as he calls it the USCMA as, “the fairest, most balanced, and beneficial trade agreement we have ever signed into law … the best agreement we’ve ever made.”
But that was then and this is now.
Now, Trump describes USCMA as a massive rip-off of the U.S. asking, apparently without any irony, “Who would ever sign a thing like this?”
What Trump wants is a new world order where Trump, America and future U.S. presidents are no longer constrained by economic treaties, military alliances or even the boundaries of other nations in acting unilaterally in what they perceive as their best interests.
When it comes to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it’s why Trump gets along so well with Russian president Vladimir Putin and not with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
It’s because Trump and Putin want the same thing — the weakening and dismantling of NATO, while Zelenskyy wants the opposite — for NATO to save Ukraine under its multilateral approach to ending global conflicts.
As for Canada’s role in all this, Liberal and Conservative federal governments have strengthened Trump’s hand over many years by freeloading under the protection of the U.S. military umbrella, while failing to meet the NATO target we agreed to of spending 2% of GDP on our military.