In his recent address before Congress, President Trump delivered a clear and unflinching message: The U.S. will no longer squander its power on utopian projects or endless commitments to a fading rules-based international order.

Instead, his administration will focus on hard-nosed realism, prioritizing national interests, blunting the ambitions of revisionist powers and shoring up America’s defenses.

This is not a vision for a new Cold War but a pivot to a grand strategy of restraint — a shift long overdue and one that will inevitably reshape the contours of global power.

There is a growing, almost hysterical, strain of thought in Canadian foreign policy commentary that insists that America has abandoned the respect and goodwill that defines the Canada-U.S. relationship — that the U.S. has given up on the world we have long known and that Canada and its allies may ultimately even have to “defend” themselves against it.

This argument is not just wrong — it is a caricature of serious strategic thinking. It reflects an astonishing degree of parochialism, a simplistic reading of world affairs and an anachronistic understanding of both the actual international order and U.S. foreign policy discourse.

At the heart of these arguments is a belief that the U.S. is not only stepping back from its role as the world’s democratic leader but is actively becoming a destabilizing force. The fear is that Washington’s foreign policy is becoming transactional,

© The Hill