Canadian soldiers patrol near one of the satellite relay domes of the NORAD Shingle Point North Warning System facility in Yukon in March, 2025.Gavin John/The Globe and Mail

There have been two very different Canadian reactions to our shock of realizing, slowly over the last year and then very quickly over the last week, that the United States is no longer an ally or even a competitor, but a tangible threat to Canada’s well-being – and possibly its existence.

One response involves reaching out and renewing connections with more reliable partners. The other involves hunkering down, bunkering in and quite literally choosing the nuclear option.

We heard the outward-facing response in Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Davos speech: We need to forge new alliances with other mid-sized countries, and reconstruct the globalized systems of open trade and collective security that have protected us since the 1940s, but without Washington. It was a summary of what Canada and European countries have been attempting to do for the past year.

The inward-turning response is most visible in the surprising number of people calling for Canada to develop its own nuclear-weapons program.

“Canada needs a nuclear deterrent” has become a widespread message on social media lately; a search of those words on X or........

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