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Colby Cosh: America told 'middle powers' to step it up and is now angry they did

The under-secretary of war launched a direct attack against Carney’s talk of pragmatic detachment from an increasingly unreliable U.S.

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Do you suppose it’s a sign of Twitter/X’s continued indispensability that the American government is communicating foreign-policy doctrine on the bird site? Or is the U.S. under-secretary of war using lowly Twitter to criticize Canada’s prime minister as a gesture of snide contempt? On Tuesday, Elbridge Colby, President Donald Trump’s top policy architect in the re-branded Department of Defence, tweeted out a multi-tweet retort to what he describes as “current hubbub about a collective ‘middle powers’ strategy.” There can’t be any possible confusion about who he’s addressing here: this is a direct, if belated, reaction to Prime Minister Mark Carney’s talk of pragmatic, co-ordinated international detachment from an increasingly unreliable United States.

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Colby’s message is: this won’t work. He highlights the inherent productivity and technological supremacy of the........

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