Opinion: Trump’s National Security Strategy is hostile to Canada – and the democratic world
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The NSS views the Western Hemisphere (including Canada) as a zone of exclusive U.S. economic and strategic influence.Evan Vucci/The Associated Press
Kerry Buck is Canada’s former ambassador to NATO and a senior fellow at the University of Ottawa.
Without much fanfare, the U.S. government has launched what could be a seismic shift in American foreign policy with its new National Security Strategy. And for Canada, the impact of the NSS could be profound.
We already know Donald Trump’s approach to relations with Canada has complicated our economic and security environment. But the NSS tries make coherent a foreign policy that, so far, has appeared to centre on the changing whims of the President – a vision that is inherently hostile to Canada and other allies in alarming ways.
The NSS views the Western Hemisphere (notably, not limited to Latin America) as a zone of exclusive U.S. economic and strategic influence. The U.S., it says, will “deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces… and to own or control strategically vital assets in our Hemisphere,” defining “strategically vital assets” broadly to include critical minerals, cyber communication networks and infrastructure, too. It makes U.S. alliances contingent on countries in the Hemisphere “winding down adversarial outside influence” and buying American.
The sentiment might be aimed primarily at China but the language of the NSS would apply to any outside power. This runs counter to Prime Minister Mark Carney’s plans to diversify Canada’s trade and defence relationships away from the United States. The NSS delivers a vision of extraterritorial economic nationalism that sees the sovereignty of allies, including Canada, as something “lesser” to be dominated – particularly worrying in the context of Mr. Trump’s repeated musings about using economic coercion to make Canada the 51st state. Those who thought the age of imperialism ended more than a century ago might have just been proven wrong.
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The second major trap the NSS creates for Canada is in relation to Europe. The NSS might have been expected to deprioritize Europe, but instead it declared the continent to be of “critical strategic importance” to the United States. It mentions Europe 49 times, far more than in the last two National Security Strategies. Russia is mentioned only 10 times, and seven of them are devoted to how Europe’s perception of the Russian threat needs to be managed. It is extremely worrying how the NSS mirrors Moscow’s positions and has been endorsed by the Kremlin. The call to re-establish strategic stability with Russia, coupled with the NSS‘s approach to the EU and Ukraine, would effectively cede Europe to Russia’s sphere of influence.
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It also attacks the core of the transatlantic relationship. When Canada first negotiated the NATO treaty, we insisted it include a commitment to freedom, democracy, the rule of law and collaboration among allies to strengthen their free institutions and build a stable North Atlantic community. The NSS’s language on NATO upends those common values with gratuitous and abhorrent white-nationalist far-right rhetoric: “Over the long term it is more than plausible that… certain NATO members will become majority non-European. As such, it is an open question whether they will view their place in the world, or their alliance with the U.S. in the same way as those that signed the NATO charter.” The NSS even goes so far as to call for direct U.S. intervention in European political processes by “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.”
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The Kremlin has welcomed U.S. President Donald Trump’s new National Security Strategy as one that corresponds “in many ways to our vision.”Julia Demaree Nikhinson/The Associated Press
The NSS might not be a binding statement of strategic intent, but it was written by insiders high enough in the Trump ecosystem to mean something. In any event, Canada and the rest of the world can’t afford to assume the new NSS is mere political posturing. Its potential impact on the transatlantic bond and European security risks being catastrophic if the U.S. is serious about any part of its implementation.
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For Canada and its allies, the NSS means we have to move faster to deepen defence co-operation, particularly on procurements, cyber, the Arctic and support to Ukraine. And as we do so, we should anchor that co-operation as much as possible in NATO, without making it subject to formal NATO decisions. For Canada, the transatlantic bond is worth keeping alive, even in a radically altered form. We also need to strengthen sovereign control of our cybernetworks and think hard about the degree of intelligence sharing with the United States. Finally, Canada and our European allies need to co-operate more on democratic resilience and fending off foreign interference in our democratic processes.
In Canada’s own awaited National Security Strategy, we should reiterate the values of human rights, freedom and democracy that were in NATO’s founding documents. That’s in our collective security interests, in a world where the U.S. isn’t just leaving behind its role as friend and protector – it might be turning into an active strategic risk.
