By Jeremy Kinsman

March 8, 2025

In the late 1990s, in response to a request from the Ukrainian foreign minister, Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Lloyd Axworthy asked me, as someone with deep experience in both Washington and Moscow, to go (from my post in Rome) to Kyiv to mentor the Ukrainian government on how Canada, as a smaller neighbour of a superpower, manages its principal bilateral relationship.

After a briefing week in Ottawa on the myriad treaties and commissions we have built with the Americans since our border treaty in 1908, I travelled with Ian McLean — a former director of Canada-US affairs — to Kyiv, where we explained how a smaller country can meticulously isolate vital issues of shared management via specific bilateral functional agreements that can negate the potential of the more powerful partner to use as leverage its asymmetrical power advantage.

The Ukrainians were underwhelmed, to say the least. They weren’t interested in how to get along with the Russians, whom they did not at all trust, given the relatively recent quality of their post-Soviet independence. They wanted tips on how to boost their advantage, not on how to cooperate.

We left saddened by the depth and extent of their suspicion, compared to our good fortune in having a superpower neighbour we could trust.

That was then. The New York Times today reports that Donald Trump told Prime Minister Trudeau that he “did not believe that the treaty that demarcates the border between the two countries was valid and that he wants to revise the boundary…(and) mentioned revisiting the sharing of lakes and rivers…which is regulated by a number of treaties.”
Canadians are Ukrainians now.

Trump’s threats to Canada, his alignment on the Ukraine war “with my friend Vladimir,” and his betrayal of America’s leadership role among democratic countries as defender of the rule of law in international affairs, all mean that Canadian trust in partnership with the US government is a thing of the past. At least under this president.

Canadian leaders and the Canadian public are fed up with the antics of Donald Trump. After he again (partially) reversed direction this week and granted a 30-day suspension of 25% tariffs on the import of Mexican and Canadian goods that are “compliant” with the USMCA (aka CUSMA in Canada), Canadian Foreign Minister Melanie Joly responded, “it’s not true that we will go through this psychodrama every 30 days.”

It is indeed a psychodrama, but with existential stakes.

President Trump’s state of mind has long been a topic of wide and active speculation in policy and political circles. Over two hundred psychiatrists and mental health professionals signed in his first term an open letter purporting that Trump suffered from a “severe, untreatable, personality disorder – malignant narcissism” – that rendered him “deceitful, destructive, deluded, and dangerous.” Trump’s behaviour does tick a lot of boxes of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th edition — notably a “tendency to lie, manipulate, and deceive others.”

A signatory then was mental health specialist Dr. Vince Greenwood. He added that people with Donald Trump’s apparent mental condition”exhibit a grandiose sense of self-importance, derive pleasure from causing harm, and are incapable of caring about other people’s feelings.”

Trump’s March 4th speech to a joint session of the US Congress, the longest ever by a president, packed with false claims, outright lies, and harmful antipathy, indeed reeked, as have so many of his public pronouncements, with “a grandiose sense of self-importance.”

Of course, Trump is the world’s most prominent and, nominally, most powerful person. The problem is what Trump wreaks on the world from his nationalist and nativist platform of power.

On the US political front, it remains to be seen if America’s “checks and balances” curb his autocratic aspirations for unprecedented executive — and hence personal — power over the American system.

But, as Real Time host Bill Maher put it recently, the “American public just don’t want to see crazy stuff,” such as the exhausting onslaught on government by partner-in-chaos Elon Musk. It, and Trump’s mania for tariffs, are destabilizing markets and sapping his support from the big business leaders who believed that slashing the power of government to regulate and tax is a good thing.

Trump boasts to MAGA supporters he is only “draining the swamp.” But the foremost “drain” will be to his popular support as courts, markets, state houses, municipalities, and countless Americans who depend on reliable government services and stability process the price they’ve paid for his derangement.

In his toxic speech to Congress, Trump promised “The most dominant civilization ever to exist on the face of this Earth.” Never before has the hyperbole of reality-show Trumpian showmanship clashed so spectacularly with American presidential context. It sounded like the self-aggrandizing propaganda of a Central Asian despot, not the carefully calibrated rhetoric of a world leader.

Meanwhile, the psychodrama keeps everybody on edge, making Trump the centre of US media attention every day, as he wages a war of narrative domination with increasingly preposterous behaviour.

Two authoritarian leaders harbour similar ambitions, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. Indeed, Trump seems to be gravitating toward their claims, conceding to each a respective geographic sphere — Central and Eastern Europe and part of Eurasia for Putin, East Asia for Xi, and the Western hemisphere for the US, including Canada, which Trump insanely imagines will be the “51st state.”

From this alternative global reality, Trump has apparently excised like-minded democracies, or even interdependence. Domination of his hemispheric neighbourhood crushes the vision Ronald Reagan presented in the 1979 presidential campaign of a “North American community of peoples.”

That is gone now, as Trump threatens economic force in defiance of the trade agreement (“the greatest treaty ever”) he signed seven years ago.

Meanwhile, the psychodrama keeps everybody on edge, making Trump the centre of US media attention every day, as he wages a war of narrative domination with increasingly preposterous behaviour.

But Canada, for which he has a special animus (Paul Krugman attributes it to Canadian “decency,” a trait that defies Trump’s comprehension), and Mexico are staring him down. “It takes real effort to make Canada fiercely anti-American,” Krugman wrote this week, “and Trump is pulling it off.” Ontario Premier Doug Ford made it clear on US TV networks that great damage from Trump’s tariffs will fall on Americans.

Globally, it gets worse. Trump’s astonishing alignment with Ukraine’s invader, Russia, prompted the stark conclusion in Europe that the US can no longer be relied upon as an ally. As Emmanuel Macron put it, “the innocence of these 30 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall is over,” echoing German Chancellor-elect Friedrich Merz.

The unique power of the US presidency gave some merit to the thought Trump could mediate a cease-fire in Russia’s war on Ukraine. But Trump’s alignment with Putin on all key points cornered President Volodymyr Zelensky, who naturally fears a cease-fire without the security guarantees that Trump refuses to provide. Macron and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer visited the White House to try to re-cement historic and substantive transatlantic ties, and to argue for continued US security support for Ukraine.

But their respectful deference was superceded by the deeply disturbing ambush of President Zelensky by Trump and his specious vice president at the end of the week, in which Trump shouted that “Russia holds all the cards” (an assessment he ventilated in another of his daily press appearances today). Never before has an American president behaved in such an overtly craven fashion toward a strategic enemy.

Zelensky also hesitated over a shakedown surrender to the US of Ukraine’s precious metals, without the commitment of a US security guarantee against Putin. But Trump, as opposed to Ukrainians, said that he “trusts” Putin’s intentions.

Democratic Senator from Oregon Jeff Merkley questioned Trump’s international secuity nominees in confirmation hearings on why Trump is pursuing a settlement entirely in the interests of Russia. They responded only that their president is “the greatest negotiator on the planet.” Expertise has been replaced by cowering and propaganda.

To strong-arm Zelensky, Trump halted vital military supplies to Ukraine, and cut off intelligence support. As a sweetener to Putin, he simultaneously shut down US self-protection against Russian cyber threats and interference and disruption in America.

Ukraine can fight on with existing military stores at least until the summer, unless a fair cease-fire somehow emerges. Meanwhile, European partners are establishing a viably unified foreign and security capability the European political project has long lacked. Its security presence in Ukraine — to which Russia vividly objects—will include the UK, and possibly Canada, urgently deepening ties to like-minded democracies.

But, to Putin’s delight, the “West” is breaking up. NATO, though a distinctly US-dominated organization, will wither. How can the G-7 meet again with Trump? The UN and global system to advance common causes on climate, health, poverty, nuclear weapons, etc., is disabled, as is the “trade system on which post-war prosperity has been built” (Economist Editor-in-Chief Zanny Minton Beddoes). Most important, Trump’s disregard for the rule of law encourages autocrats and mayhem everywhere.

Anne Applebaum sees the emergence of “the brutal American” as a global image. YouGov polls show that in the last six months, European views of the US have dropped to distinctly “unfavourable.” Understandably, only 20% “of threatened Danes indicated a “favourable” view. But also, just 32, 34, and 37% did so in Germany, France, and the UK.

The biggest losers of all from Trump’s manic reign could be the millions of Americans who sustain devotion to international rule of law and to the projection of the US as a source of optimism, relief, and as a standard of success.

Trump’s incompetent administration will harm America, and the world. But four years go by pretty fast. Canada, democratic allies in Europe, and by joint belief and effort, a free Ukraine, will have survived, even strengthened. Trumpism will survive Trump for a while, as a cautionary remnant of the current and ugly madness.

Policy Contributing Writer Jeremy Kinsman was Canada’s ambassador to Russia, high commissioner to the UK, ambassador to Italy and ambassador to the European Union. He is a Distinguished Fellow of the Canadian International Council.