Vox EU

By Jeremy Kinsman

November 26, 2024

The economic weight in the world has shifted. As of this year, the BRICS countries configured by China as a new world order power bloc and recently expanded to nine countries, have a greater share of world total GDP (PPP) than the overtaken G7, 35% vs. 30%.

The G20, which first met in 2008 in Washington, was meant to be something of a hybrid but has never really reached meaningful compromises on world economic issues. When it met most recently this month in Rio de Janeiro, two members missed the family photo: President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau were lost in their presumably elegiac tête-à-tête. And with Biden in the last weeks of his presidency and Trudeau besieged by bad polls and their attendant political strife, their two countries’ relationship has already shifted away from friendship.

The man responsible, and who concerns the rest of the world most, is Donald Trump. Trump is determined that his second term be felt by the whole world, and his attack on his neighbours is the opening salvo. The question every leader at international gatherings since Nov 5 – the Rio G20, COP 29 in Baku, and APEC in Lima – has privately asked the others is “How far will Trump try to go to “make America great again?”

Now, Trump has given his first clear indication, by vowing to impose a unilateral 25% tariff on all goods exported to the US by America’s NAFTA partners, and an extra 10% on America’s nominal economic nemesis, China, putting all three top US trading partners in the same adversarial basket.

The Canadians have been kidding themselves for months that Canada would get a pass from Trump’s nationalist rampages because we are, after all, the friendly neighbour, which has linked our economy to America’s. Why would he devastate our economy? Confused, they are scrambling to hope it’s just a bluff, a demo to all others of just how far he intends to troll the existing world order.

It’s only a conditional threat, they reassure themselves, maintaining we can get a reprieve on his conditions, by taking action on our border to stem even the small number of illegal immigrants (not Canadians) and fentanyl trying to sneak into the US. But incoming fanatic border czar Tom Homan insists that terrorists are coming in via the US Northern border. We have heard that one before, from the-US Senator from NY Hillary Clinton, after 9/11. It took months to have her accept that the 9/11 killers entered the US from their home countries (mainly Saudi Arabia) with US Visas.

As to the US Fentanyl crisis, America has always pretended their addiction issue is a problem of outside supply, not domestic demand. In fact, 90% of Fentanyl carriers across the southern border are cartel-employed Americans.

Of course, there is some traffic across the northern border of illegal people and drugs, despite the real effort of Canadian security agencies to cut it off. Well, Canadian optimists urge, we can do more to help the Americans control their own border. On Fentanyl, they argue we can be even tougher toward China, whose e-cars and Huawei we have already basically banned to please US authorities. Perhaps once our borders become a virtual outer perimeter for American security, our businesses can compete again in the adjacent US market.

If this outrageous threat and Trump’s misleading cover of America First were meant to get the world’s attention, it’s worked. Across the Atlantic, there is a new veil of dread apparent.

The Canadians have been kidding themselves for months that Canada would get a pass from Trump’s nationalist rampages because we are, after all, the friendly neighbour, which has linked our economy to America’s.

In Britain, from where I write, there is an ominous anticipation in the Labour government of being caught, post-Brexit, home alone, unless Keir Starmer’s government makes common cause rapidly with ex-EU partners. Opposition Conservative operators (and Tony Blair) always over-celebrated the presumed “special relationship” with the US, especially for its reward of a junior military partnership. Sore losers among the now-defeated Tories pretend that Trump’s court, which detests the “socialist” EU and lauds Brexit, would have given Boris or Liz or Rishi a pass on a tariff on UK exports, whereas Trump won’t give the time of day to the globalist Starmer.

The fact is that the UK is about as tense about Trump as is Canada.

So, it goes across the Channel. But there is a growing conclusion that “Europe” has to take into European hands European security and defence issues. Emmanuel Macron has been pressing on this for years. Trump’s threats to pull the US back from, if not out of, NATO (crazy as it seems for the US to pull back from a US-run organization that operates in US interests, see above: “trolling the existing world order”), are actually prompting serious thoughts about stronger and more self-sufficient European security capability on defence procurement, defence of Ukraine, and within a “European pillar” within NATO itself.

Europeans are indeed wed mentally to the European social model, whether Trumpian courtiers really consider it “socialism” or worse. The fact that politics are trending to the right within most European countries right now doesn’t mean they are going toward Trump-world, except for oddball impersonators in Hungary and maybe Romania.

New or likely leaders in Japan and Germany may be conservative, but aren’t likely to chuck away what’s left of the global trading system, or essential rules and norms for global governance, such as the Paris Agreement, which Trump may well quit again. Conversations among these leaders are converging on the need to stand ground against Trump’s unilateralist diktat and weaponization of trade as a power game.

Intergenerational DNA counts. There are few people still alive in Europe who heard as adults that Hitler had invaded Poland in 1939. But most responsible Europeans know how that generation normalized Anschluss in Austria, then the Munich grab of Czechoslovakia, before finally declaring a real red line over Poland. Even then, most Germans (as recounted in Walter Kempowski’s great 1971 novel An Ordinary Youth) didn’t think Hitler would go farther, and personally maintained the distinction between themselves and the Nazi regime. A lot of urban Russians pretend the same today about Putin and the war in Ukraine. And without wishing to stretch the comparisons, most Americans won’t recoil about tariff bludgeoning against Canadian neighbours unless they connect it to negative effects in American pricing.

So, in determining counters to Trump’s outrageous remarks that declared open hostility to the Canadian state and people, start with the need to see with one set of like-minded eyes with our European and Japanese – and Mexican – partners, to evoke a single response: “No… You don’t do things this way in this world, which is not yours to redesign. We shall retaliate, reorganize, and resist such tactics. We shall negotiate anything of merit, but not under a threat.”

I thought today of how a Pole in England would have felt 85 years ago to wake to hear his country had been attacked. As a Canadian in England, I frankly felt some slight sense of that today. It’s not war. But if taken through to foreseeable consequences Trump’s “vow” could also prompt global breakdown, to the great diminishment of the United States of America. And to the great satisfaction of Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin.

In professional discourse over the years with diplomats and friends from the Middle East ‑ Arab and Israeli ‑ and more recently from Ukraine, I have heard more times than I can count, the retort, “Well, we sure would prefer to live in a nice neighbourhood like Canada’s.”

Good job, Donald.

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.