Foreign Leaders Face the Trump Test
5 min read
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In a news conference today, President-Elect Donald Trump previewed his second-term approach to foreign policy. One theme was force: He didn’t rule out using the military to seize the Panama Canal or to acquire Greenland, and floated the idea of employing “economic force” to compel Canada to operate as an American state. Some of his ideas seem largely symbolic; at one point, he suggested renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. But these statements also fall into what my colleague David Frum has called a zero-sum attitude toward the rest of the world. Either a foreign country is with Donald Trump—and ready to collaborate with American interests—or it is against him.
Trump’s transactional outlook has put foreign leaders in a difficult position—including Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who announced his resignation yesterday. Trump has threatened in recent months to impose 25 percent tariffs on Canada, and he’s relished taunting the nation, repeatedly making comments about Canada joining the United States, including calling the prime minister “Governor Trudeau.” Almost immediately after Trudeau announced his decision yesterday, Trump wrote on Truth Social that the Canadian prime minister was stepping down because “many people in Canada LOVE being the 51st State,” and suggested that Trudeau had resigned in direct response to the threat of tariffs.
Trump is tying himself more to Trudeau’s resignation than he should. The prime minister’s downfall was rooted in factors that have bedeviled him for years: Canada has suffered from high inflation and cost of living, and Trudeau has also faced backlash over immigration. And though the first few years of Trudeau’s term came with progressive policy wins (and international celebrity), it also produced a series of ethical and personal scandals. His approval ratings have tanked in recent months.
Trudeau’s attempts to stay on good terms with Trump, including by visiting him at Mar-a-Lago, seemed to contribute to the perception among some on his staff that he was not equipped to handle a second Trump term. In a pointed resignation letter, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland said that she was “at odds” with her boss over the best way forward, arguing that Canada needed to take Trump’s threats more seriously and not resort to “political gimmicks.” Freeland’s resignation, which came as a surprise, only hastened the prime minister’s downward trajectory; by this month, many of his allies were pushing him to step down. He will remain in office until a new party leader is selected later this year.
In Trump’s first term, Trudeau managed to frame himself as a progressive foil to Trump. The leaders had some open differences, and Trump did impose some tariffs at the time, a narrower set than what he is threatening now. But Trump’s policy agenda, especially at the start of his term, was less about antagonizing allies than it was about domestic and culture-war issues (and shortly after he started focusing on tariffs, the coronavirus pandemic derailed everything else). But the approach Trump seems to be taking in his next term posed a new challenge for Trudeau. If Trudeau’s “domestic political position had been just a little bit stronger,” David wrote to me in an email, “he might have tried to gamble on a confrontational policy—bad for the Canadian economy, yes, but good for his own survival.” President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico seems to be navigating a similar dilemma; she first threatened counter-tariffs in response to Trump’s warnings, then appeared to walk this back, stating that there was no possibility of a tariff war with America.
Trump is pleased with Trudeau’s demise right now. But in reality, the president-elect is making it harder for the U.S. to work productively with Canada in the future. Cooperating closely with the Trump administration may now become a political liability in Canada, David predicted, and Trudeau’s Liberal Party will seek to embarrass any future Conservative government that gets too close to Trump. Ultimately, David warned, Trump is playing a “dangerous game.”
Related:
- America’s lonely future
- The political logic of Trump’s international threats
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Today’s News
- A New York appeals court denied Donald Trump’s request to delay the sentencing hearing in his criminal hush-money case.
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- The House passed a bill that would require ICE to detain undocumented immigrants charged with nonviolent and minor-level crimes.
Dispatches
- Work in Progress: Republicans have promised to deliver “crypto-friendly regulations” that will supposedly “bring an unheralded era of American prosperity,” writes Annie Lowrey. But the clock is ticking on a crypto crash.
- The Weekly Planet: Climate models can’t explain what’s happening to Earth, Zoë Schlanger writes.
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Evening Read
The Agony of Texting With Men
By Matthew Schnipper
My friend’s boyfriend, Joe Mullen, is a warm and sweet guy, a considerate person who loves dogs and babies. When I see him in person, once every month or two, he makes a point to ask me what I’ve been up to, how my life is going. Joe is a big music fan, and we share a love of music made by weird British people. I once got excited for him to check out an artist I thought he’d like. So I asked him for his number, and later I sent him a Spotify link to an album. “Hi 🙂 It’s Schnipper,” I wrote. “I think u would dig this guy’s stuff.” I figured this might be the first step into a portal of greater closeness, a relationship of our own. Man to man. Except it wasn’t, because Joe did not text me back.
Read the full article.
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Culture Break
Explore. Adaptations of Sherlock Holmes stories are exploding now that the detective is in the public domain. Critics believe that it should have happened decades ago, Alec Nevala-Lee writes.
Examine. At the Golden Globes, nobody had much to say about the presidential election—or politics at all, Hannah Giorgis writes.
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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.
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