Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal.
We’re into five or six months now of the Canadian-American trade wars. It’s kind of Orwellian in the sense that the dispute only involved about 2% of the half-trillion dollars of trade that goes back and forth across our northern border.
And because Canada has been running up a $50 billion to $60 billion annual trade surplus, and that’s not the greatest contributor to our trillion-dollar—prior trillion-dollar—trade deficit, you would think that they would make a gesture, just say, “We’re going to lift the 250% tariff over a certain level on American dairy, cheese, etc., and maybe we’ll just go down from about $50 billion or $60 billion in surplus, just for appearances, optics, to maybe $20 billion.” And they could solve it.
Instead, Prime Minister Mark Carney has taken this trade dispute and used it for his political future, his political career. He basically was given somewhat of a vote of confidence in Quebec and Alberta.
That was the point. He got elected by drumming up this hatred of Donald Trump, and I’ll be candid, of the United States. But here’s what’s really strange. He’s now posed, as I said earlier, as a leader of the middle nations.
So get this: He has 75% of his trade with the United States, with almost no transportation cost, and over a small dispute over agricultural products that at most might cost Canada $10 billion or $20 billion of its huge trade surplus, he’s really destroying the entire American-Canadian relationship.
And here’s what he’s doing, and everybody thinks it’s because of Donald Trump’s crudity, his bombast, but this is more existential. He’s doing three things:
He’s reaching out to make special agreements with China that make no sense because he’s always talking about Canada’s superior moral stature. But Canada is now dealing with a country that put a million Uyghurs into labor camps and has the worst record—worst record in the modern era—of cheating on trade by dumping products below the cost of production, by currency manipulation, by flagrant disregard for patents or copyright.
I could go on, but why would you want to reach out to this communist country, which in some ways is the logical descendant of Mao’s government, which was responsible for the greatest mass murder in history, killing 70 million of its own people, and is a fanatical autocracy?
It makes no sense, but that’s not the end of it.
Now he’s reaching across the Atlantic to capitalize on anger at the United States in the EU and NATO countries, and he wants a special relationship. But it’s like he’s now reaching out to a ship that’s sinking. Paris is engulfed in five weeks of existential rioting. It spread to Italy. Britain is a mess.
The German economy is stalled. GDP is about half of the United States’ GDP. Its economy is $10 trillion smaller than that of the United States, which has 100 million fewer people. It can barely suffice to make its 2%.
Now, I understand that the Canadian economy is in worse condition than the European economy. It’s the lowest of the 30 or so Westernized economies in terms of annual GDP. It’s got a more acute first- and second-generation immigrant problem than does the EU. It has a worse fertility problem than does the EU.
But you would think, given all of those problems in this socialist command economy that Canada has turned into, you would want to be bolstered by developing relationships with the United States, which is booming and will boom even further.
Instead, he’s reaching out to a collapsing economy, and that’s not the end of it, unfortunately, for Canada. There’s a third thing that Carney is doing. Now he wants a special relationship with Turkey.
The EU that he worships would not let Turkey into the EU because Erdoğan is sort of a president for life. His elections are show elections. They’re not real referendums where the people have an open choice. He has persecuted ethnic minorities, like the Kurds and, earlier, the Armenians, mercilessly.
He took Hagia Sophia, a U.N.-protected site, which was for a millennium the largest church in Christendom, and he’s turned it away from U.N. protection into a Turkish mosque.
He persecutes Christians. He has threatened Israel, and I’m quoting almost verbatim, that one day he would send missiles into Tel Aviv. He’s threatened Greece. He’s told the Cypriots, the Greeks and the Israelis that we don’t want you to ship natural gas to Europe, and we may disrupt you.
He’s told the Greeks that their Dodecanese islands and other islands off the Turkish coast are really disputed, and he’s hinted that, in neo-Ottoman fashion, one day they may revert to Turkey.
He has said to the Greek people, “You may wake up and find missiles coming into Athens.” He has said that if Greece did not recognize the Turkish occupation of Cyprus, it might be in deep trouble and its allies, quote, “could not save them.”
So Carney is posing as the moral superior to the United States as he’s reaching out not just to illiberal China, but to Turkey, which is occupying 30% to 40% of northern Cyprus, and only one country in the world recognizes it. Turkey does.
And this is supposed to be the moral alternative to the United States?
What’s the problem? The problem is, as we’ve said so many times earlier in so many different contexts, if you take a naturally robust people endowed with a treasure house of natural resources—timber, fossil fuels, minerals—that have a Western tradition, work ethic and a strong military, and performed brilliantly in World War II as one of the major allies of Britain and the United States, and you take that potential and that record, and you socialize and regulate the economy, you start to introduce euthanasia, you have a high abortion rate, you have a low fertility rate, you open your borders, you don’t acculturate, integrate or assimilate 45% of your population that’s either first- or second-generation immigrant.
You cut back on your military, so you just scarcely can make 2%, and you welched on your promises because you didn’t have the money to protect yourself.
And now you’re in this surreal position of counting on the United States geostrategically to protect the entire North American continent, and you’re part of it, from any potential North Korean, Iranian, Chinese or Russian missile, and you don’t even contribute to the North American defense because you can’t, because your economy is moribund, because you took a different path than the United States did.
A final thought: There’s roughly 33 or 34 nations in the Western Hemisphere, that is, North, South and Central America and the Caribbean. We are witnessing one of the most radical changes in the last 50 to 60 years, where nation after nation after nation in Latin America is flipping to an open economy, a transparent society, a democratically elected president, a pro-American stance, a pro-Western stance, whether it’s Colombia, Argentina, Chile or Bolivia.
There’s only about three or four nations that are anti-American and communist now: Nicaragua. I think Brazil’s about ready to flip Western in the next election, if it’s held in transparent fashion. (Note: Socialist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won reelection in a disputed contest, with opposition candidate Flavio Bolsonaro forced to flee to the U.S.)
Maybe Mexico, but Mexico is getting closer and closer to the United States, at least it wants to. And Cuba, which is about ready to implode.
And now there’s Canada. So, in other words, this huge Western Hemisphere that is now gaining wealth, gaining power, gaining influence because of the United States is creating a whole Western alternative both to the Russian-Chinese paradigm and to Europe.
And what is Carney doing? Rather than capitalizing on this, he’s holding out. He’s not only going to be orphaned from the United States, he’s soon going to be orphaned from the Western Hemisphere, and he’s reaching out to the most illiberal regimes in the world.
And why in the world would you pick China over the United States? Why would you pick autocratic, illiberal Turkey over democratic and free Greece?
And why would you look to the stagnant, ossified, calcified economy of the EU as your model rather than the United States, over a mild $10 billion or $20 billion that you could settle in trade like that?
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