On Saturday afternoon, at a news conference on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, the Prime Minister of Canada was asked about the United States and said this.
You’re at war when you get attacked. We got attacked.
I want to be exact about who said it, because the identity of the speaker is the entire story. Not a backbencher. Not a provincial premier playing to a crowd. Mark Carney, a former governor of the Bank of Canada and a former governor of the Bank of England, a man whose entire professional reputation is built on saying careful things in measured language during emergencies.
That man said his country had been attacked by the United States of America.
What happened
Trade negotiations collapsed on Friday night, shortly before a midnight deadline.
At midnight, fifty percent tariffs took effect on roughly twenty billion dollars of Canadian goods. Customs and Border Protection had issued a bulletin to businesses that same day, notifying them that officers would begin enforcing the new rates the moment the deadline passed, with no grace period of any kind.
Nothing on the product list is a strategic material.
Dairy products. Alcoholic beverages. Cement. Hockey equipment.
Additional tariffs at the same rate are hitting paper and wood products under Section 338, a provision of the Tariff Act of 1930 that had gone essentially unused for ninety years before this administration.
Canada will match them, dollar for dollar, beginning September 8.
What Canada offered
Carney laid out what had been on the table, and it matters because it disposes of the idea that Ottawa was being unreasonable.
Canada offered to drop its remaining retaliatory tariffs on steel, aluminum, and autos. Those are the sectors where Canadian retaliation actually bites, and Canada offered to give them up in exchange for preserving tariff-free access for most Canadian businesses.
What Canada would not do, in Carney’s words, was compromise Canada’s sovereignty or undermine its key industries.
Sovereignty is a strange word to reach for in a dispute about dairy quotas, and he reached for it deliberately.
Why he used it
Overnight on Saturday, the President of the United States posted this.
Canada wants the benefits of being a State, without being one.
He has been saying versions of that for a year and a half. The fifty-first state. Governor Trudeau. The line about how the border is an artificial line drawn with a ruler. It has been treated throughout as a joke that got out of hand, a bit he does because it gets a reaction.
The Prime Minister of Canada does not appear to be treating it as a joke, and the reason he used the word sovereignty in a press conference about cement and hockey equipment is that he has concluded the tariffs and the annexation talk are the same policy.
I do not know whether he is right. I know that he is the person who has spent the last eighteen months in the room, and that his read is now on the record, and that the read is: we were attacked.
Six days
Now put the calendar together, because this is the part that should stop you.
On August 16, at four minutes past two in the afternoon, the President posted that he had instructed the Secretary of War to substantially reduce joint military exercises with South Korea. His stated reason was his very good relationship with Kim Jong Un, and his stated standard was that North Korea has been, as long as Donald J. Trump has been President, unthreatening and respectful.
North Korea had launched a ballistic missile days earlier and had described the exercises that same week as a rehearsal for an aggressive war.
Six days after that, a fifty percent tariff wall went up against Canada and the Canadian Prime Minister said his country had been attacked.
One week. Two treaty allies downgraded. One nuclear-armed dictatorship rewarded.
I have not arranged those events to make a point. That is the order they happened in.
What Canada is
Because it is possible to forget, given how routine the insults have become, here is what the country on the other end of this actually is.
Canada and the United States jointly operate the air defense of the North American continent. NORAD is a binational command, headquartered in Colorado, in which Canadian officers hold operational authority over American airspace and have done since 1958. There is no other arrangement like it on earth. If something comes over the pole, the people watching for it are Canadian and American in the same room.
Canada is a founding member of NATO and one of the Five Eyes. It invoked Article 5 with the rest of the alliance after September 11 and sent troops to Afghanistan, where 158 Canadians were killed. That is a higher per-capita loss than most of the coalition.
On the day of the attacks themselves, when American airspace closed and two hundred and fifty-five aircraft had nowhere to land, Canada took them. Thirty-eight of those planes went to Gander, Newfoundland, a town of about ten thousand people, which absorbed six thousand six hundred stranded passengers and fed and housed them in schools and church halls for days. Nobody asked Gander to do that and nobody paid for it.
That is the country that has now been hit with fifty percent tariffs on hockey equipment and told it wants the benefits of statehood without the responsibility.
The thing about allies
Here is what I think is actually going on, and it is simpler and worse than a strategy.
An ally is, by construction, a country that will not hit back. That is the whole definition. Alliances work because both parties have agreed to absorb friction rather than escalate, and the agreement holds because everyone expects it to hold.
Which makes allies the safest possible target for a man who needs to demonstrate strength and cannot afford to be seen losing.
North Korea would respond. Iran responded, and the response is why interceptors are being rationed and why American approval is at thirty-three percent. China would respond in ways that show up in the price of everything by October.
Canada was, until Friday, the country least likely to respond.
Hitting the country least able to hit back is the behavior of a man who cannot risk a real fight, and every foreign ministry on earth has now watched it happen twice inside a week. They will draw the obvious conclusion, which is that an American security guarantee is worth roughly whatever the President’s mood is worth on the day you need it.
Dollar for dollar
The tariffs Canada announced take effect on September 8, which is two weeks from tomorrow.
They will raise prices in American stores and close American plants that sell into Canada, and the people who lose those jobs will be told it was necessary, and nobody who made this decision will be within a thousand miles of them.
Meanwhile the actual policy question, whether the United States can compel a sovereign neighbor into economic submission by hurting it enough, has already been answered. Carney offered concessions. The concessions were not enough because the objective was never the concessions.
The Prime Minister said the government was not prepared to compromise Canada’s sovereignty.
He said it because somebody in Washington keeps asking him to.
One last thing
There is a version of this where it all blows over. Deals get made, tariffs come off, and in a year the whole episode is a chapter in somebody’s book.
Even in that version, something has already happened that does not come off.
The Prime Minister of Canada stood in front of cameras on Parliament Hill and said that his country had been attacked, by us, and that he considered it a war. Canadians heard it. Every ally heard it. Beijing heard it, and Moscow, and Pyongyang, where a man was told six days earlier that he has been unthreatening and respectful.
You cannot unsay that. It is in the record now, and it will be in the record for as long as anyone studies how the postwar alliance system ended, and the last people to understand what it means will be the ones who caused it.
One of our oldest allies. Attacked. And he’s cuddling up to the murderous North Korea regime … yet again? He is undercutting US national security, our military, gutting treaty alliances, acting without regard to citizen well being. Acting it almost seems on behalf of US adversaries…oh wait … didn’t Nancy Pelosi say long ago that he was acting like a man who was being blackmailed? This is no longer a Left vs Right political struggle for advantage. This administration is an absolute threat to the continuation of the United States as a democracy, and as a world power nation state opposed to fascism, and a one man rule cult of an imperial presidency. A coherent, unified response is called for. Now. If the DNC and the progressive left walk into the midterms without a strong united front, they will find they’ve run out of options. Especially if ICE does patrol voting day election locations. The current Oval Office occupant is itching for reasons to use his detention centers. Locking up US protesters opposed to his de facto coup takeover would give him that opportunity. Time to “Come Together” NOW y’all arguing DNC and democrat party operatives and voters.
It’s almost like a foreign actor is deliberately running the USA into an iceberg, with the goal of sinking this country and its allies to the bottom of the ocean. Gee, who knew?