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Terry Glavin: Trump's rule-breaking belligerence lowers the bar everywhere

If you act like an unprincipled rule breaker with no scruples about betraying friends, other heads of state will start acting the same way

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It’s a peculiar, rarely acknowledged but readily measurable effect of the pugnacious truculence President Donald Trump has adopted in his treatment of the United States’ traditional friends, allies and trading partners. The American abandonment of principled global leadership is lowering the bar for competent and disciplined statesmanship in democratic states almost everywhere.

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It’s quite true that the decline in the United States’ reputation for diplomatic integrity and fair dealing did not begin with Donald Trump. It’s also true that several European leaders have managed to maintain their standards, and the American president’s compulsive tariff manipulations and the trade anarchy his administration has loosed upon the world does require fairly dramatic adjustments in response.

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But within the political classes of the NATO countries and Latin America, Trump’s vulgar excesses have tended to allow the vice of petty animosity towards the United States to be reconfigured as virtue. Policies that were only recently understood by democratic governments as irresponsible, unseemly and reckless have been recalibrated against the degraded standard the White House is setting.

It’s a state of affairs that may be most pronounced in Canada, owing to this country’s unique economic and cultural proximity to the United States, and Canada’s extraordinary vulnerability to the president’s disordered mood swings.

It allows Prime Minister Mark Carney to speak in breezy terms about our historic trade relationships with the United States being “weaknesses that must be corrected,” and lets Carney cast the president’s contempt for a Canada-U.S. trade consensus going back decades as a “permanent rupture.” Prime Minister Carney will not allow himself to speak so candidly about Beijing’s globe-encircling subversions, mind you. At last October’s APEC summit in South Korea, Carney pledged to Chinese President Xi Jinping that he would not subject him to public lectures.

Trump’s boorish “51st state” disdain for Canadian sovereignty provided cover for the concordats the Carney government entered into with Beijing in January. The Canada-China “strategic partnership” is the same economic and political alliance with China that a powerful faction within the federal Liberals had been pursuing for decades but could never quite get away with owing to public revulsion. But the nasty new American disposition allowed that long-term objective to be dressed up and hurried through as a necessary and prudent hedge against Trumpist havoc-making.

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Carney’s multi-tiered and still partly secret “new world order” undertakings with Beijing were not without the advantage of Trump-induced shifts in Canadian public opinion. As recently as 2023, 62 per cent of Canadians said Ottawa should treat Beijing as an enemy or a threat. As recently as a year ago this week, when pressed, just days before he led the Liberals to a minority government in the April 28 federal election, Carney said China was the primary national security threat facing Canada.

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Carney made specific references to Beijing’s interference operations in this country, China’s growing presence in the Arctic, Xi Jinping’s bankrolling of Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine and China’s geopolitical belligerence throughout Asia, especially its military encirclement of Taiwan. No worries now, apparently.

By January, the proportion of Canadians who told Angus Reid’s pollsters that China should be treated as an enemy or a threat had been reduced from 62 per cent to 23 per cent, and the proportion of Canadians who once wanted Canada to engage China cautiously had doubled from 26 to 51 per cent. A few weeks later a Politico poll showed that 57 per cent of Canadians said they’d prefer to depend on China than the United States, and 60 per cent of respondents said Donald Trump was the reason.

Among other things, this has allowed the Carney government to get away with capitulating to Beijing in allowing a big chunk of China’s catastrophic overproduction of electric vehicles to be dumped into the Canadian automotive market. It was less than two years ago that Canada joined Europe and the United States in imposing tariff barriers of up to 100 per cent on Chinese electric vehicles to wall off what former deputy prime minister Chrystia Freeland called “China’s intentional, state-directed policy of overcapacity and oversupply.”

Since 2009, China has poured more than $230 billion into electrical-vehicle subsidies in a frenzy that has saturated its domestic market and forced its EV industry to offload more and more of its production overseas in the hope of creating dependencies in western markets. Of 120 Chinese EV manufacturers, only a fraction are financially viable on their own. Thirty firms have gone bankrupt in recent years.

The deal Carney struck in Beijing in January abolishes the previous tariffs and allows China to export 49,000 electric vehicles into Canada annually, growing to 70,000 within five years. Auto industry leaders say the deal poses a mortal threat to an industry already disrupted by Trump’s tariffs, and security experts consistently warn that Chinese EVs pose software threats ranging from spying and illicit data collection to remote manipulations from China.

The Chinese EV industry has also been implicated in forced labour practices in China, and even Chinese plants in Hungary and Brazil have been found to engage in slave labour practices.

While Europe has generally held the line against China’s vast economic reach, Prime Minister Carney has a soulmate in Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, who last week signed his own “strategic partnership” deals in Beijing.

Sanchez has consistently ventriloquized Carney’s comments about the American disruption of the rules-based trading order. With the resounding April 12 electoral defeat of the far-right Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán — the most actively disruptive saboteur within the European Union for both the Trump administration and Russia’s Putin — the ostensibly “left-wing” Sanchez is now China’s best friend in the EU.

Xi Jinping has praised Sanchez as being “on the right side of history” and has nominated Sanchez as his EU interlocutor. Beijing has invested massively in Spain in recent years, and Sanchez has welcomed Chinese EV manufacturers to set up shop as an end-run around EU tariffs. He’s also broken with Germany, France and the United Kingdom on firewalls against Chinese investment in emerging technologies.

Meanwhile, as the Trump White House persists in alienating Latin America with a national security strategy that revives the Americans’ hemisphere-subjugating 1823 Monroe Doctrine, a legacy of resentment to Yanqui bullying has been mainstreamed, giving force and effect to China’s Latin American expansion. China has entirely eclipsed American economic influence throughout the South American continent by a combination of building and often outright owning a great portion of the region’s port, rail and road infrastructure.

Beijing’s grand strategy is moved along at a brisk pace in public opinion thanks to content-sharing arrangements between the Chinese Communist Party’s various propaganda platforms and 47 Latin American state and private television networks, radio stations and newspapers.

Not even Argentina, led by the colourful, clownish Trump enthusiast Javier Milei, is immune to Beijing’s enticements. A third of Argentina’s lithium exports went to China last year and China is the top customer for Argentinian beef and soybeans.

America’s standing in Latin America hasn’t been exactly helped by the Trump administration’s Jan. 3 exfiltration of Venezuelan caudillo Nicolas Maduro to face drug-running charges in New York, only to cut an oil deal with Maduro’s regime back in Caracas, leaving the Bolivarian dictatorship firmly in place.

It’s a lesson the Trump administration is unlikely to learn, but it turns out that if you act like an unprincipled rule breaker with no compunction at all about betraying friends and colluding with America’s traditional enemies, quite a few democratic heads of state will start acting the same way.

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