By Jeremy Kinsman

March 24, 2025

Canada has now entered an election campaign amid what Prime Minister Mark Carney terms “the most significant threat of our lifetimes,” based on a previously unthinkable menace from the White House to end Canada’s existence as a sovereign country. Both Carney, the current prime minister and Liberal leader, and Pierre Poilievre, the Conservative leader, swear with certainty that existential threat will never come to pass.

Canadians will now choose as prime minister the man they believe most able to deal effectively with Donald Trump and bury this horrendous notion.

The mercurial U.S. President is upending U.S. foreign policy assumptions and abrogating loyalties that have been bedrock over several generations.

In the reality show Trump stars in daily from his desk in the Oval Office before captive journalists and MAGA propagandists, he calls longtime allies “nasty” (especially Canada), depicting the EU as an “adversary.” He promises that April 2 will be a “Day of Liberation,” when the U.S. will impose tariffs on trading partners, whom he accuses of “ripping us off” for decades.

As if the impending tariff war against US trading partners weren’t enough of a shock, Trump’s amplified second-term alignment with Vladimir Putin, a devoted believer in the maxim that might makes right, has further alarmed  longtime U.S. partners in NATO and the G7.

His breaches and threatened breaches of the CUSMA have actively undermined America’s credibility as a treaty signatory by violating the principle of pacta sunt servanda under international law whereby treaty parties are committed to honour their agreements in good faith. 

It is all a far cry from 1989, when the fall of the Berlin Wall seemed to herald a new era of emerging global inter-dependence, further ensconced by the interconnectedness enabled by the internet during the decade that followed. That small-world vision now seems a bygone illusion, born as Emmanuel Macron put it, of our “innocence,” vividly articulated in 2015 by Justin Trudeau’s depiction of Canada as the world’s “first postnational country.”

Nationalism roared back to the fore. Putin’s Russia, the inheritor state from the wreckage of the Soviet Union, disrupted by a failed transformation to a democratic and open society and dismayed by loss of global stature in a US-dominated unipolar world, reverted to anti-Western, anti-liberal, anti-secular vindictive nationalism. Putin proclaimed a great new Russia, a “civilization state”, rooted in traditional conservative values and Orthodox Christianity, an enemy of the West’s decadent “woke” culture.

Putin’s national self-concept eventually attracted empathetic attention from anti-woke, evangelical Christian American conservatives. Putin has played Trump’s predispositions as an isolationist contemptuous of democratic principles and disdainful of American alliances like an oboe, with the Kremlin describing their recent 90-minute telephone call in a readout as “ushering in a new world order”.

Western democracies have witnessed with incredulity the propaganda echo chamber contagion of this double-down on Trump’s first-term Putin crush as the specious US Vice-president and various MAGA mouthpieces extend their support to pro-Russian far-right political figures in Europe. We all watch in horror Trump’s daily diatribes recasting the world in vengeful, delusional terms.

An America with an autocratic president complicit with Russia in an anti-democracy world order whose idea of diplomacy includes threatening to annex neighbouring democracies cannot possibly be an honest broker

But first and foremost is the urgent and profoundly real goal of ending the deadly war in Ukraine that Trump had promised to bring off in “24 hours.”

Wars usually end in wary negotiated settlements once respective patriotic support begins to cede to public exhaustion and grief, increasingly evident in Ukraine and also Russia, as the war has ground down to a murderous attrition with no end in sight.

But each side retains a patriotic bottom line: Ukrainians don’t want to lose independent Ukraine; Russians don’t want to see Russia “lose” their war of choice. Unable to trust Russia, Ukrainians need security guarantees to accompany an interim ceasefire. However, Putin objects to outside military support or security guarantees for Ukraine.

The notion of using the unique power of the U.S. presidency to force an agreement had merit. But U.S. mediation needs to be evenhanded, and an America with an autocratic president complicit with Russia in an anti-democracy world order whose idea of diplomacy includes threatening to annex neighbouring democracies cannot possibly be an honest broker.

Indeed, Trump has sided with Russia in this dynamic, threatening coercive force only on Zelensky, evident in the disgraceful attack on the Ukrainian President in the televised encounter in the Oval Office. Trump, Vance, and MAGA courtiers don’t care about defending an independent Ukraine.

Trump’s phone call with Putin produced hardly any progress. The White House claimed the two leaders had agreed that Russia and Ukraine would immediately halt aerial attacks on energy and civilian infrastructure (Russian readouts mention only the energy part). Yet, massive Russian attacks on Kyiv and Odessa continue.

The White House says Ukraine’s bottom-line need of security assistance didn’t even come up, whereas the Kremlin insists Putin clearly objected to any such ongoing and essential military support. Britain and France are organizing a multinational military presence to reassure Ukraine but US Presidential envoy Steve Witkoff dismissed Starmer’s efforts as “a combination of a posture and a pose.”

Russia’s unwavering retention of maximalist goals was encouraged by Trump pre-emptively declaring Ukraine could never join NATO, while Zelensky would have to defer to the “reality” that Russia had spent hundreds of thousands of lives to occupy 20% of Ukraine.

Putin almost certainly wants the war to continue. The wartime economy is keeping the country afloat, and national security restrictions keep Russians well suppressed. But actual fighting might well be suspended, kicking “final status issues” and borders down the road, setting the stage for a new Cold War between Russia and what remains of the West for as long as Putin is in power.

Poland and Baltic NATO members have already defected from the iconic Land Mines Treaty in order to shore up defences against the potential for Russian aggression.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration aims to re-engage with Russia as economic partner and geopolitical peer.

Where does this leave America’s European, Pacific, and Canadian allies who can no longer trust the United States as long as Trump is president? Who can count on the US to respect NATO’s article 5? Will Japan, South Korea, or Saudi Arabia now rush to acquire nuclear weapons?

The democratic world can’t just wait for Trump’s term to expire. It needs to act in concert now. The shock of Trump’s unprovoked economic aggression against Canada and his alliance with Russia against democracies are forcing the European Union, the UK, Canada, and others to stand together to keep international cooperation alive, and to build it back better.

The outcome of Canada’s election, unless it somehow replicates the ironically anti-democracy victory that re-installed Trump in the White House, may help.

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.