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Canada’s Trade War Is a Fight for the Free World

Mark Carney is showing other countries how to stand up to Trump

S omeone of my generation remembers an imagined place called the free world. In our mental geographies, “we” Canadians, Americans, and Western Europeans grew up inside “the free world,” while Eastern Europeans, Russians, Chinese, and others were on the other side of the barbed wire. To say this world of ours was “imagined” is to say it air-brushed out members of the club, like the Shah’s Iran, Pinochet’s Chile, and Franco’s Spain, who were anything but free. We also drew a veil over the fact that the free world was led by a country that didn’t accord its own Black citizens the vote in the American south until 1965.

The “free world” was a noble lie, but even noble lies can inspire. It helped leaders, from Kennedy to Reagan, to understand that the Berlin Wall was a moral abomination. It created bonds of solidarity that linked the best people of my generation to the cause of Polish Solidarity and Czech Charter 77. The people of Portugal, Spain, and Greece, who overthrew their own tyrannies in the 1970s and ’80s, and the Taiwanese, South Korean, and Philippine peoples, who overthrew theirs too, believed their national battles would enable their countries to rejoin this imagined world of freedom. The tears of joy on people’s faces in Berlin on the night the wall came down were tears of recognition. That night, at least, “the free world” didn’t feel like a dream. It had suddenly become real.

These days, we are like mourners at an excruciating funeral for that world. Even as late as a decade ago, automatic alignment on the side of fellow democracies against authoritarian and totalitarian regimes was supposed to be the guiding principle for the foreign policy of free peoples. Now there isn’t a tyrant or autocrat the American president doesn’t praise while shaking down his democratic allies. He plays up his friendship with North Korea’s odious tyrant while downgrading US military exercises with the country’s erstwhile democratic ally in Seoul. He........

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