PATRICK LAWRENCE: Canada & Creeping US Isolation

Canada is not alone in believing that to resist the Trump regime’s aggressions, lawful or otherwise, on the field of battle or at the mahogany table, is what must be done. By Patrick Lawrence Special to Consortium News The thing I loved first and most about those evidently vicious trade talks the Canadians recently attempted with the Americans is how they blew up in the Trump regime’s faces at five minutes to 12 (almost literally) last Friday night. The working assumption on the American side was that, money and profit being all that count anymore, they could pin those ever-understated Canadians to the wall and force them to sign a deal they couldn’t refuse. Then they refused, with other than their customary politesse. The thing I loved second most is how Mark Carney, who ordered his people to abort the talks an hour before the deadline for going to signature, bluntly told off the Americans in a nationally televised address last Saturday, Aug. 22. The Canadian prime minister said during those 22 minutes on air, “We were not prepared to compromise Canada’s sovereignty. We will not allow any nation to determine our future …. You’re at war when you’re attacked, and we got attacked.” In a couple of sentences, the man who served as the Bank of England’s governor before his election last year on the Liberal Party ticket just declared an historic breach with Canada’s southern neighbor from which there seems no turning back. ‘A Pseudo-Democratic Basket Case’ The third thing I love is that the Trumpster’s special trade representative, Jamieson Greer, got caught in broad daylight lying about what happened in his office during the final days and hours of marathon talks. The Canadians didn’t walk away after he offered them “the best treatment of any major exporter to our market,” as Greer lamely insisted over the weekend. This is patently baloney, given that Carney’s decision to confront the United States will cost Canadians dearly in material terms. The prime minister’s negotiators got up from the table when, per usual, the Americans attempted to write all sorts of last-minute terms into the documents, some of which were unabashedly imperial intrusions. Once again, the Americans exposed themselves as “agreement-incapable,” in the memorable phrase of Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, who has long, long experience with Washington’s serial diplomatic perfidies. Or as Carney put it, “We recognize that sometimes, its [Washington’s] signature is written in pencil.” The fourth thing I love about the new U.S.–Canada standoff — and there may be more as events unfold — arrived in a New York Times opinion piece on Aug. 24, under the headline, “America Came for Canada, We said No.” A Toronto journalist named Stephen Marche put the case this way: “For Canada, the choice came down to either severe but temporary economic instability or binding itself to a pseudo-democratic fiscal basket case of a nation, whose only apparent foreign policy objective has become domination for the gratification of its president’s slapdash vanity.” Wow. A pseudo-democratic basket case, the Trumpster’s slapdash vanity: It’s a mess down here, Stephen, and very few people this side of the border have the courage to say so. The just-collapsed negotiations were an attempt to replace the U.S.–Canada–Mexico Agreement (USMCA), which President Trump signed six years ago and from which he withdrew on July 1. The USMCA. replaced the North American Free Trade Agreement, the infamous NAFTA, from which Trump withdrew during his first time around in the White House. It is always fun to deal with the Americans, never more than when the Trumpster sits in the Oval Office. As of midnight Friday, Aug. 21, Canada faced 50 percent tariffs on roughly $20 billion worth of its exports to the United States, notably steel, aluminum products and automobiles. Carney promises to match this punitive regime “dollar for dollar,” and good on him for doing so. Not to be missed, Canada has middle-fingered all sorts of tacked-on demands, the most preposterous of which, for my money, was the Americans’ insistence that Canada drop its practice of bilingual labeling in recognition of the French-speaking population concentrated in Quebec Province. Let’s not miss the significance of all this, coming as it does from those kindly people who shall always say “hoose” instead of “house.” ‘Wrecking Ball Politics’ Placed in a larger context, there is only one way to read this dramatic turn in what have been for so long perfectly ordinary relations. Carney’s obviously daring decision to let the acrimony roll in response to Trump trade tricks is a measure, an important one, of the revulsion some in the West, as well as most in the rest, feel toward this regime’s uninhibited aggression, bullying and duplicity. It was Carney, we ought not forget, who spoke forcefully, and to the surprise of many, of “a rupture in the international order” at the World Economic Forum in Davos last year. He attacked the “wrecking ball politics” of the United States, without naming it, and described our time as “the end of a pleasant fiction and the beginning of a harsh reality.” It was at Davos, most notably, that Carney urged “middle powers” to draw together in new alliances and partnerships — economic, military, on the trade side. Carney’s Davos speech was dismissed in many quarters, I well recall, as the phony posturing of another “centrist.” I was not so quick on the draw myself. In now confronting the United States at some material cost to his people — and with their assent, we read — he has put some clothes on the mannequin, it seems to me. Indeed, a lot of people seem to have missed that, four days before the Davos occasion, the Carney government signed a big new trade agreement with China — so risking (and prompting) the Trump regime’s ire. Carney is a centrist, successor in Ottawa to the supercilious Justin Trudeau, O.K. The question he raises as he stands down the Americans is, Where’s the center? Or at least, Where does Mark Carney think it is? During the Cold War, only de Gaulle and to a certain extent Konrad Adenauer, West Germany’s first postwar chancellor, gave any thought to Europe as a pole of power independent of both superpowers. At the Cold War’s end, honorable figures such as Václav Havel urged Europeans to (re)discover their identity and recognize their unique responsibilities. Absent both vision and guts, no such turn has come. Nothing ever came of all the post–Cold War talk of a “third way” — a forgotten phrase at this point. It is almost grotesque to consider the clods now in power in London, Paris and Berlin — centrists all, Russophobes all, obsequious to the Americans all. I do not see Carney’s “middle powers” thesis going very far in the West, in short. But he is precisely on the mark so far as he expresses an ever-more-vigorous contempt for what the United States has made of itself and the need, at last, to counter it. Resisting Trump’s Aggressions In this connection, Trita Parsi, the executive vice president at the Quincy Institute, put out an interesting piece the other day under the headline, “Why so many countries around the world quietly root for Iran.” And the subhead under this: “It’s not about Iran. It’s the threats that an unchecked America poses to others.” Making a pointed exception of the Europeans, as well he is right to do, Parsi elaborates: “I have been stunned by the number of officials from a wide variety of countries who, while hardly favoring Iran or feeling much empathy for the Islamic Republic, have privately expressed to me a huge sigh of relief over Tehran’s success in thwarting US–Israeli aggression…. “This ‘tacit rooting’ for Iran tells us something about the state of global affairs. “There is relief that aggression and violations of international law did not pay off for the US and Israel in Iran, just as they didn’t for Russia in Ukraine. Venezuela was, in the eyes of many, a terrifying case. Regardless of one’s views of [Nicolás] Maduro, the idea that a superpower could surgically kidnap the head of state of another country, install its favored ruler — who must now get her social media posts approved by the US Secretary of State — and gleefully announce that Venezuela is now American territory was petrifying to a lot of countries. So was the fact that European leaders praised the regime-change operation while dismissing concerns about its legality.” Parsi’s topic, although he never puts it in these terms, is the creeping isolation the United States brings upon itself at more or less every turn now. The bombing of Iran, Israeli terror, the kidnapping of the Venezuelan president, the inhumane blockade of Cuba, Greenland, the simmering confrontation with Canada that now comes to a boil: All different, all of a piece. To resist the Trump regime’s aggressions, lawful or otherwise, on the field of battle or at the mahogany table, is what must be done. From what I read in the reporting and in the speeches, Trump has lit the fires of passion among the Canadians. Not easy to do, given Canadians are a measured people. May they keep it burning and may it spread. Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon. Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been restored after years of being censored. TO MY READERS. Independent publications and those who write for them reach a moment that is difficult and full of promise all at once. On one hand, we assume ever greater responsibilities in the face of mainstream media’s mounting derelictions. On the other, we have found no sustaining revenue model and so must turn directly to our readers for support. 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