Canada, explained.
Trucks heading into the United States on the Gordie Howe International Bridge, a new international link between Windsor, Ontario and Detroit, Michigan (Zou Zheng/Xinhua via Getty Images)
The United States is Canada’s biggest asset and its biggest risk – a lesson the Indo-Pacific learned first.
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Canada’s Trump trouble has answers in a Pacific hedgeCanada’s Trump trouble has answers in a Pacific hedge
Canada’s trade battle with the United States has left it confronting a problem long familiar to America’s Pacific allies: how to remain closely tied to Washington without allowing it to become a single point of failure.
For generations, North America’s three countries built their security and economies around borders they did not expect to fortify. Donald Trump has spent much of his six years as President introducing a new cost to that assumption.
In recent weeks, negotiations between Canada and the United States over trade agreements and a bridge between the two countries have collapsed. In response, Trump has imposed 50% tariffs on US$20 billion worth of Canadian goods and threatened to place a 50% tariff on the automotive industry – a move that would devastate a huge sector of the North American economy.
The threat exposes the depth of continental integration, once seen as a major advantage for both countries. A car sold under an American brand like Ford or Chevrolet crosses borders between the US, Canada, and Mexico an average of seven times (Opens in new window) before manufacturing is complete.
Canada’s deep ties with the United States have opened a position that Washington could exploit, inverting the circumstance that allowed for North American prosperity for generations.
Canada’s problem is not that it lacks other allies. It’s that it lacks redundancy.
US President Donald Trump greets Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney in May 2025 at the West Wing entrance of the White House (Gabriel B Kotico/Official White House Photo)
Canada has long understood its geopolitical position as part of the Atlantic relationship. Its historic ties to Britain and France and its geographic relationship to the United States have made that logic unavoidable for two centuries.
But its circumstances now differ fundamentally from those of its European partners as the postwar order comes apart.
A European government facing Trump’s Washington has NATO and the EU, a political, economic, and military bloc that carries real collective capacity. Canada too is part of NATO but it remains outside of that political and economic structure that provides security for middle powers outside of the American monolith.
When Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney spoke earlier this year (Opens in new window) of a new reality in which the West can no longer rely solely on the United States, he was pitching Canadian integration into that European political system to buffer against the destabilising threats coming from Ottawa’s south.
This leaves Canada looking east to the Atlantic institutionally but confronting a strategic problem that is much more familiar on the other side of the world.
The objective is to keep Washington present without allowing it to become irreplaceable.
Indo-Pacific democracies have spent years living inside this contradiction that Canada hoped to avoid. The question for countries like Australia, Japan, and the Philippines has been how they can use their connections with the American military and economy without becoming solely dependent on it for future security.
Pacific nations have not wholesale abandoned American alliance amid the destabilisation of the Trump era, but they have begun developing an instinct for redundancy.
Recent months have seen a marked uptick in relationships between Pacific nations that no longer run back-and-forth to Washington but directly between Pacific capitals. New regional institutions and capacities allow for cooperation that continue even when Washington is absent.
Adversaries have taken note of this new approach to alliance in the region. Vladimir Putin spoke alongside (Opens in new window) his Pacific Fleet commander in the Kuril Islands in recent weeks, warning about a newly strengthened bloc in the region – one that he assumes is controlled entirely by the United States.
The Pacific matters less as a destination for Canada to extend economic or even diplomatic power but rather as a model for how a middle power lives alongside America.
Strategic planning in the Pacific in this decade begins from the proposition that alliances and autonomy are not opposites. Australia can want the American alliance to remain extraordinarily strong while also wanting relationships with other countries that do not require Washington to be at the table constantly.
Japan can deepen its American alliance while building its own regional relationships.
The objective is to keep Washington present without allowing it to become irreplaceable.
Canada has already begun to move in this direction. The Carney government has set targets to double its non-US exports in the coming decade. It is strategic redundancy to keep Washington from being a single point of failure that it presently represents.
Even if Carney and Trump reach an agreement, the strategic problem does not disappear. Trump in the future, or another president even more pugnacious than the current one, could threaten sectors built on the expectation that near-total integration with the United States was a safe bet.
The lesson for Ottawa cannot be that Canada needs a better relationship with the next American president, because no one can predict if such a president will be more or less friendly.
Instead, it is that no American president should possess this much unilateral leverage over Canadian choices.
This is not a decoupling from the United States. It remains, and will remain, the largest democratic economy and military for quite some time. But it, like Pacific nations, should accept that some dependence is inevitable while it must resist unnecessary concentration of dependence.
For most of the postwar period, Canada occupied an enviable position. Its only major land border was with the dominant power of the region, deeply integrated with its enormous market, and connected to a resurgent Europe through its Atlantic alliance.
The Trump years have changed the meaning of that geography.
Being at America’s doorstep is still an enormous advantage, but it also now represents a source of asymmetric vulnerability.
For the last decade, this has also been a Pacific problem. One from which Canada can learn.
About the author
Cory Alpert
Cory Alpert is a PhD researcher at the University of Melbourne, where he studies the impact of AI on democracy. Previously, he served in the Biden White House for three years and as the senior adviser to Mayor Steve Benjamin.
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