There’s an old saying: “Familiarity breeds contempt.” Now Canada’s Prime Minister has joined some other European leaders who apparently weren’t smitten by their encounters with President Donald Trump and refuse to appease him. So he has decided Canada will chart it’s own path in foreign policy, standing firm with other nations in the Western Alliance and hoping that the Trump era will eventually usher in a more traditional Presidency.
America has left the world, Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland signalled in Tuesday’s landmark foreign policy address. Canada and its allies will hang together, she vowed, awaiting its return.
This was a very dangerous thing to say. But we live in dangerous times.
Although Ms. Freeland never mentioned the words “Donald Trump” in her speech to the House, practically every line was informed by the crisis of his rogue presidency. Clearly, something happened at May’s NATO and G7 meetings to make Prime Minister Justin Trudeau conclude there is nothing to be gained by treating with this man.
“Many of the voters in last year’s presidential election cast their ballots, animated in part by a desire to shrug off the burden of world leadership,” Ms. Freeland told a silent House of Commons.
“The fact that our friend and ally has come to question the very worth of its mantle of global leadership puts into sharper focus the need for the rest of us to set our own clear and sovereign course,” Ms. Freeland said. “For Canada, that course must be the renewal, indeed the strengthening, of the postwar multilateral order.”
So now we get the Trudeau doctrine, which the Globe and Mail’s John Ibbitson goes on to detail Trudeau’s new approach:
The Trudeau doctrine will rest on three pillars. The first is military: Ms. Freeland promised major new investments following the release Wednesday of the government’s defence policy review. We’ve heard such promises before. Doctrines are cheap, but it takes money to buy whisky, or warships.
Second, the minister vowed Canada would spare no effort to preserve and strengthen the Western alliance, citing the deployment of Canadian troops to Latvia currently under way. “There can be no clearer sign that NATO and Article Five [which declares an attack on one NATO member to be an attack on all] are at the heart of Canada’s national security policy,” Ms. Freeland stated – a not-so-veiled reference to Mr. Trump’s refusal to endorse Article Five when he harangued the NATO leaders in Brussels two weeks ago.
Third, Canada will aggressively pursue new trade agreements, Ms. Freeland vowed, not needing to state that Mr. Trump has withdrawn from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, is threatening to scrap NAFTA and generally has thrown the entire global trading order into disarray.
“Far from seeing trade as a zero-sum game, we believe in trading relationships that benefit all parties,” she maintained, adding, “we believe in the WTO and will continue our work to make it stronger.” Again, these words were clearly directed at Mr. Trump, who has called the World Trade Organization “a disaster” and threatens to withdraw the United States from it.
This may be the bluntest repudiation of Mr. Trump and his policies yet delivered by a Western government, and it is high-risk. Ms. Freeland’s address is, in effect, a promise to Canada’s European and Asian allies that we are with them, not with the Americans. Mr. Trump may well lump Canada in with everyone else when he seeks to impose tariffs or other punishments.
But just like another young leader, France’s President Emmuel Macron, Canada’s P.M. seems to believe that Trump and Trumpism can’t be appeased and their country’s positions need to be made abundantly clear. Indeed, Macron delivered an amazing speech in English to the American people in the wake of the NATO summit where Trump nixed the U.S. participating in the Paris Environmental Agreement. Macron ended it with a twist on Trump’s campaign slogan.
In watching some of these younger leaders, I get the feeling that something generational is going on here as well. Trump is a baby boomer.
They’re not — and you get the sense that they feel the forces of consensus will eventually trump the forces of polarization and ideology.
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Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.