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Canada is standing up to a bullying America.
Dit artikel komt uit The Economist
Entitled Canada has been feeding off America for decades. Like a parasitic bug, it enjoys the benefits of being America’s cherished 51st state without giving anything back. Canadians know they couldn’t live without America’s protection, yet their ungrateful prime minister, Mark Carney, refuses to defer to the great and beautiful country over the border.
That is how Donald Trump sees Canada, and it leaves no room for mutual benefit between the two allies. The bullying president is ratcheting up tariffs. He has renamed the southern side of Lake Ontario Lake America. Canadian consumers, in response, are spitting out their Kentucky bourbon and leaving Las Vegas. Mr Carney, in office for 18 months, remains defiant, the star of an extended, dramatic and riveting stand-off.
De redactie van NRC selecteert de beste artikelen uit The Economist voor een breder perspectief op internationale politiek en economie.
By now you might have expected Mr Carney to have caved in. Canada is only a mid-size power with a so-so economy and puny armed forces. It has vulnerabilities aplenty. One will be evident on October 19th, when the province of Alberta holds a referendum asking if it may one day secede, taking with it more oil in the ground than in the entire United States.
In fact Mr Carney is riding high. Polls suggest that those Albertans will probably vote to stay. And under him, Canada is doing better than you might expect. In January it was Mr Carney, at the annual jamboree in Davos, who argued that what he called the „middle powers” must find ways to take on threatening ones. Nine months on, his country offers lessons for what these middle powers should do when the hegemonic giant pulls the mat from under them.
Those lessons start with a bracing dose of realism. As we set out, middle powers will never replace the hegemons as the force that sustains powerful permanent institutions such as the UN. The world has grown more dangerous because both America and China are exploiting or undermining arrangements and norms in which power was shared. Emboldened, wreckers like Russia and Iran are becoming even more predatory. Co-ordinating the more herbivorous middle powers is often too hard to get much done—as you can see in even the most developed middle-power club, the European Union.
Yet middle powers can still mitigate some of the damage, as Canada and its allies show. Mr Carney has zipped around the world making new trade deals as well as drumming up symbolic agreements, such as talk of associate EU membership. In the same way, after the United States backed out of a big trans-Pacific trade deal known as TPP during Mr Trump’s first term, Japan stepped in to revive it. In the realm of defence, Canada is trimming its old reliance on America, and is considering placing an order for Swedish Gripen fighter jets—just as Norway is buying British frigates and the United Arab Emirates is purchasing Ukraine’s cutting-edge drones.
When middle powers face a particular threat, they can throw around some weight, as when Europe rebuffed Mr Trump’s designs on Greenland. The strengths and limits of this approach are clear in Ukraine. Financial and military support for Ukraine from Europe and Canada, stepping up after America pulled back, shows how middle powers can act in concert. Vladimir Putin’s army pays a dreadful blood price for its small gains in the Donbas. The limits are clear, too, as Mr Trump showed with this week’s diesel diplomacy.
Canada’s most important lesson, however, emerges from what the pragmatic Mr Carney is doing at home. A few years ago the country’s woeful politics and ailing government seemed broken. Income per person had drifted from 90% of America’s in the 1980s to just 71% in 2022, much of it following a recent burst of low-skilled immigration. Today Mr Carney is pushing through overdue measures to boost productivity, open the economy and lift defence spending from a pitifully low 1.3% of GDP to 2%.
Among his first steps, he scrapped an unpopular consumer carbon tax and vowed to build a pipeline to carry oil from Alberta to the west coast. He has started to cut internal barriers to trade, called off a hefty rise in capital-gains tax, cut the lowest rate of income tax and set out plans to trim federal spending. In that trade dispute with America, Canada has also shown that it can stand up for itself, targeting reciprocal tariffs on American imports from swing states in the run-up to the midterm elections and scrambling to cut its long-term dependence on its neighbour.
Mr Carney has so far managed to resist what is known as the „Juncker curse”, named after a president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker. Speaking of reform, Mr Juncker once said: „We all know what to do, we just don’t know how to get re-elected after we’ve done it.” Yet Mr Carney’s popularity has been surging even as he reforms. Two years ago, more than nine in ten Canadians could not recognise his photograph. Today a maple-leaf love-in is under way: polls show the prime minister’s approval rating nearing 70%. Internationally, he has replaced France’s beleaguered Emmanuel Macron as the centrists’ pin-up. The contrast with Mr Trump, unloved by his own voters, is stark.
True, Canada must go further and faster with its liberalising changes. There is every chance that relations with America will improve when Mr Trump leaves office in 2029, but it is not certain. It should therefore work on keeping its options open.
Other middle powers can learn from Canada. Naturally, it has some strengths they cannot copy, such as its vast energy and mineral reserves and its lucky geography, far from the nastiest geopolitical flashpoints. Yet there is room for them to co-operate on one-off projects with tangible and limited aims.
And they can fortify themselves abroad by harnessing the need for change at home. In a way, Mr Trump has done all democracies a favour, by giving them a reason to tackle long-standing problems that seemed too hard. The middle powers need to prepare for a dangerous world. They should look to Mr Carney and Canada for an answer on what to do.
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