Watch out!
Or, another big inflection point, right on Pennsylvania Avenue
The United States’ electorate has just put a man in the White House who is manifestly unfit to lead the United States on the global stage. That was an issue that failed to register with most American voters. They had other things on their mind, apparently.
The next four years will be one of the most dangerous in the history of international relations since 1945. The global order has lost its most important anchor. The United States will be diminished, deliberately, on the world stage. Trumps’ boasts about fixing things with a wave of this hand will be just that, boasts. The beneficiaries will be the authoritarians and near-authoritarians of the world, notably China and Russia. It’s a dark day for democracy.
A Trump presidency poses a sustained crisis for Canada across many areas, from the economy, to migration, to defence, to alliance solidarity, and multilateralism. It will be all hands on deck for the foreseeable future, whatever the shape of a future Canadian government. Protestations that Canadian politicians and officials are ready to meet the storm is nothing but that—protestations. No one can say what the future will hold. No one should say everything will be fine in the end. Chrystia Freeland—get a grip.
Watch out will have to be the watch-word. This will be especially true in two areas: national security and intelligence. The United States cannot be considered, henceforth, an automatic ally and friend in either area. Republican control of the Senate (and worse still maybe both Houses of Congress) will mean that Trump can flood his administration with select political appointees and undermine the professional administration of government. Be clear he intends to do that. In this, his last term in office, he will go after the mirage of the “deep state” and in the process with politicise the conduct of US national security and the management of the US intelligence community. A Trump appointee will head the CIA, the same will go for the Director of National Intelligence, and the key positions in the National Security Council and the Pentagon. The State department will be gutted. Key embassies will be emptied of professional diplomats.
Its safe to say that Canada counted on guardrails for the first Trump administration. There won’t be any for Trump 2.0.
Politicisation of intelligence will be especially bad news for Canada, given our reliance on the Five Eyes intelligence partnership, with the US the leading power by far. Conventional wisdom that the Five Eyes could be rock solid in the face of whoever was in the White House will have to be re-thought. Politicisation will upend such reassuring notions.
Trump in the White House means this for Canada—it will have to pursue a determined course of greater sovereignty, greater capacity to defend itself, greater intelligence capacity to see the world through its own eyes. That will be a tall order.
Talk about inflection point.
Perhaps the ascendancy of Trump back into the White House (and Republican Party control of Congress) is the wake up call for Canada to reject its drift towards mediocrity and reestablish a common ground between us to get things done. The days of “social licence” need to yield to national aspirations that lead to productivity, jobs and projects that are undertaken and completed on time and on budget.
If Trump is a threat, bellyaching about it won’t get us far but demonstrating that we have resources and resolve to deploy them will.
So Canada will finally have to start pulling its own weight on the world stage, instead of cowering behind the might of the US military. It is about time! Time for Canada to proactively chart its own course, on a more equal footing with the United States. No one respects a nation that refuses to take its own sovereignty, borders, intelligence-gathering and defence seriously. Either that, or we continue to be relegated to the international "kid's table."