Return of the Middle Power

Canada's future runs on familiar ground

One of Canada’s bright young men thinks the country is in a dilemma.

Philippe Lagassé fears Canada might already be a slave of the United States as he told the American news service Bloomberg earlier this month.

“Are we already a vassal state, and we just won’t admit it to ourselves?” Lagassé told Bloomberg.

“I start to worry that at some point the more concessions you give in order to maintain market access, the more that you are willing to give up in order not to be further threatened, you eventually end up in a situation where you are basically a tributary.”

Lagassé was on X over the weekend, re-marketing his Bloomberg marketing and his earlier paper that was, like the comments to Bloomberg, vague and wonderfully disconnected from anything useful. The paper talked about being able to defend from attacks such that Canada wouldn’t need American help but there was no discussion of plausible attacks or attacks. The whole thing was a classic political science wank about models and theories divorced from reality. He noted on social media that the “fact that the CAF [Canadian Armed Forces] are in Greenland at the moment with the US as part of a NORAD exercise, while also contemplating joining the Denmark-led NATO exercise, captures Canada’s defence dilemma quite well.”

Dilemma. Wishy-washiness. Vassal. All implicitly hawkish language.

Trump and Venezuela

That sort of comment puts Lagassé in a league with Francis Fukayama or Niall Ferguson these days, which would likely make Philippe pleased to no end but that really means he’s got nothing of substance to offer. He’s playing to the galleries and padding the CV in the fashion of modern academics. At least he tries to sound insightful but like Lori Turnbull from Nova Scotia, townie CBC’s go-to on Churchill Falls, which she knows bugger-all about, Lagassé falls short.

You see, in dealing with the incoherence of Donald Trump’s second administration every country is in a dilemma. They face a choice among options with neither appearing to be a clear one let alone a good one. They try to deal with Trump cautiously, which is as smart as one can be. In the broadest sense, that’s nothing new as many times on many different issues, many countries, great and puny, over many centuries find themselves in just such a situation as Canada and the rest of the non-American NATO bloc is today. Any leader will describe their job as Barack Obama does in his stock public talks. Other people deal with the easy stuff. He gets the 50/50 stuff. The conundrums. The dilemmas. Their cause this time may be odd, ally attacking allies as enemies but the challenges of finding the path ahead? This is normal.

In its relationship with the United States since the end of the Second World War as in its relationship with Britain before that, Canada has had dilemmas of all sorts, routinely. Iraq in 2003. Afghanistan. Vietnam was a big one. We turned down requests to send soldiers and instead helped out with an international monitoring team in 1973 for the cease fire. Pierre Trudeau’s peace crusade in the 1980s bothered Ron Reagan’s White House but Canada has been generally very good at making sure people could see daylight between the two countries when needed.

Before that, Canada was at odds with the British now and again, especially in the 1920s. But not always. Canada joyously sent soldiers off to fight the Boers for the British in 1900. Newfoundland did not. The British were not amused but then again, the British hadn’t amused the Newfoundlanders in 1890 and again in 1894 or constantly over the French Shore so Newfoundland had no trouble quietly giving Whitehall the finger diplomatically. The idea that the self-governing parts of the Empire only started to squawk in the 1920s when Canada balked at Chanak is Canadian nationalist twaddle.

Last weekend the global commentariat was in a flap about Trump’s threats to tariff everyone in Europe who disagreed with him about Greenland. Monday it was a note to the Norwegian Prime Minister in which Trump rambled about the Nobel prize he didn’t get, as if the Norwegian government decided who does, and as a result how he now felt he was no longer limited to just peaceful means to get what he wants in Greenland or possibly anywhere else.

Norway was one of the countries taking part in a NATO exercise in Greenland, which, as we learned later from Kier Starmer’s readout of a call between Trump and the United Kingdom’s prime minister, Trump did not have the rights of the NATO exercise when he ranted about Greenland and which the Danes had advised NATO allies about in advance.

Meanwhile, the Speaker of the American House of Representatives and notorious Trump enabler Mike Johnson was at Westminster, telling members of parliament that the west was united, that the special relationship of the Americans with the UK was strong and enduring, and that all the current stuff would blow over. No biggie. In Davos, at the world economic forum a day before Trump is due to arrive to ramble on about Greenland, commerce secrfetary and perpetual Trump fart-catcher Scott Bessent said everyone just needs to step back, take a breath, and let everything work out. That is actually good advice since Scott and his boss are hideous incompetent. A few days before Bessent told American news organizations the Greenland thing was about the Golden Dome missile defence scheme, and implicitly not therefore about Chinese and Russian teams that lurk beneath the ice ready to conquer Greenland as Trump has been going on about when not displaying any of the other signs of someone whose brain is rotting by the minute. The only people doing congitive ability tests as often as Trump is are people people about whom there are doubts about their mental health.

Lagassé or other commentators who claim the Europeans are falling apart, are weak and divided, and that NATO is falling to pieces chronically ignore much that is in front of their eyes. Both the Europeans and Canadians have been very carefully and very deliberately working their own agendas quietly and to the obvious frustration of Donald Trump and his enablers. A few weeks ago, there was a meeting about Ukraine in which the Europeans and Canadians did not do as Trump wanted. Mark Carney has been traveling widely, demonstrating his plan to shift Canada away from the United States in every sphere. Even in the texts from European leaders Trumped leaked on Tuesday to make them seem weak or fawning, they were actually doing normal things, like trying to find a deal even with a dullard like Trump. They think long-term while Trump does not think.

Carney’s Chinese deal is a domestic boost for his Liberal party against the fumbling Conservatives, their pro-Trump rhetoric, and Trumpian tactics that are clearly alienating voters hungry, according to David Coletto’s latest poll, for a stable government and decidedly anti-American and not very pro- Poilievre. The poll also shows Canada is shifting away from the Americans, a point that all the people who matter saw clearly. The ones who don;t and who don;t understand say that Canada has caved to the Chinese or is foolish to leave the Americans. That deal does nothing for Trump domestically, much for Canada. As with the way to catch a monkey, in diplomacy, Carney’s quietly, quietly gets the job done.

Canada and its European allies are trying to manage through the Trumpian interlude to see what comes out the other side in three years’ time. But they also see, as the commentariat ignores, that Donald Trump and his incompetent band of grifters in the White House have been spectacularly unsuccessful in their first year of Trump’s second term at doing anything beyond blowing up a few speed boats and sending an astonishing amount of military force off the coast of a half-assed country to snatch its dictator and his wife only to haul ass back to the United States as fast as they could. That’s not how great powers act.

Trump’s tariff threats since last year have made a mess of its trade relationships and the threat of tariffs over Greenland as with Trump’s note to Norway about the Nobel are literally nothing more than the pathetic ravings of frustrated grifter working well beyond his abilities on any level. Just as American foreign and military relationships are collapsing, at home, the cartelish goon squads murdering and abducting people in Democratic states all combine to make Trump 47 second only to himself in his first term for having the lowest approval rating among American presidents after a year in office.

Trump slides downward toward the mid-terms with republicans and MAGA voters abandoning him. He spent two hours on Tuesday rambling to the White House press corps about his incompetent communications people. That is always the excuse of people who are not leaders who find themselves in leaderships jobs. 100%. All day long and twice on Sundays. Egocentric incompetents. Bunglers. Fools. Make no mistake about it.

The Carney doctrine

Mark Carney’s great quote from the China trip was that Canada is dealing with the world as it is, not as we wish it to be. He repeated it again and said much more besides at Davos on Tuesday. “The powerful have their power,” Carney said. “But we have something too — the capacity to stop pretending, to name reality, to build our strength at home, and to act together. That is Canada’s path. We choose it openly and confidently. And it is a path wide open to any country willing to take it with us.”

This is Carney’s approach to the world. The path ahead is familiar territory, since it is Canada as a Middle Power, which is how the country has seen itself for almost a century. Picking a way between and among the greater powers in the multipolar world before 1939 or the years of the Cold War with two and now back at it again in this time that seems more bipolar than ever. The dominant powers are different as are the mix of middle powers and the economic, political, and military strengths of them all. Trump will be left with Festung Amerika and bootlickers like his sturmfuhrer Bonino at the rate things are going. Trump and his heirs will run a lonely and much weaker place than many assume if trends continue and those Middle Powers, when aligned, could assume the role of a very different sort of greater power. There is more to heaven and Earth than in the heads of Fergie, and Frank, and Phil and their like.

Hedging our bets is now the route, as Andrew Coyne put it. Moving away from the US to open some daylight but not snuggling with the Chinese, although Republican Bible-thumping, Christian-value-ignoring, Gilead commander-wannabes, their ambitions grasping more than their skulls can, say we have lost our minds and are already measuring up for the Mao jackets. They say the same nonsense of our French packaging or the “u” in our spelling of some words or “socialised” medicine but that sort of arseholery is the squawking of a once-great power on the down slope. America is failing. The price of research monkeys is but a clue as the rest of the world outstrips Amerika in everything except stupidity.

Chartbook 426 Greenland v. the price of lab monkeys.

There is much more to that Davos speech that speaks to the world and to Canadians. Federal policy since Justin Trudeau has been wonderfully pragmatic for Canada. Unflinchingly nationalistic and therefore aligned perfectly with Canadians’ view of themselves in the world. Genuinely conservative in the sense of being quiet, cautious, and not rushing into things. Carney is eager to go to the polls, a majority now in easy reach, and all of that is why Can Cons are blue with anger. The federal government since JT is also how a Canadian government ought to act, at least if you look at the world as it is, and not in the wishes of whatever the punditocracy in Canada or anywhere with something - usually themselves - to hawk.

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