Trump’s National Security Strategy – What it Means for Canada

The Trump administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy, published in November, formalizes the administration’s withdrawal from, indeed opposition to, the post-1945 liberal international order. The document’s explicit rejection of that order’s three pillars of open trade, security through alliances, and the promotion of liberal democracy should at least have the salutary effect of disabusing other national leaders of the illusion that Donald Trump is a normal president, who can be reasoned with and with whom pragmatic bargains can be struck. While Canada is mentioned only once in passing, we are uniquely vulnerable to American abandonment of this global order. As a trade-dependent state with a modest internal market, and a large landmass and limited population with which to defend it, Canada is deeply dependent on the US to secure both our interests and our values, while proximity to a far larger neighbour ensures any purely bilateral relationship is highly unequal.

The Trump document denounces free trade as “predatory economic practices” and promoting democracy and human rights as “misguided hectoring.” American allies are freeloaders on defence spending and “suck us into conflicts and controversies” remote from US interests. China is warned against direct attack on Taiwan or constraining lanes of seagoing commerce, yet there is more emphasis on pressing it to produce more for “household consumption” since others can’t absorb its “enormous excess capacity.”

The special animus towards Europe clarifies that NATO and US-European security cooperation are at best on life support. Immigration, the document notes, threatens Europe with “civilizational erasure” adding that the US should be “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory” and encouraging “the growing influence of patriotic European parties.” This shows a willingness to interfere in others’ affairs at odds with the document’s insistence on the primacy of national sovereignty, as well as support for the far-right parties that share Trump’s hostility to “the European Union and other transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty.” The goal is a world of states without multilateral constraints, in which, inevitably, most bargains will be struck bilaterally, with the stronger imposing terms on the weaker, and the US clearly among the ranks of the stronger.

Such a world aligns with Trump’s affinity for spheres of influence, with the major powers such as the US, China, and Russian ruthlessly policing their respective neighbourhoods and allowing the others to do the same. This is signalled in the document’s criticism of “European officials who hold unrealistic expectations” for the war in Ukraine, meaning anything less than Russian victory, and the tacit acceptance of the Kremlin’s justification for invasion by asserting the necessity of “ending the perception, and preventing the reality, of NATO as a perpetually expanding alliance.” Trump seeks a world in which the US would retreat as a world power but act more brutally in its own region. Such a world is unlikely to be as secure and predictable as the liberal order he is dismantling. Historically, spheres of influence systems are relatively unstable, and a divided West and emboldened revisionist powers like Russia and China hardly bode well for global tranquillity.

Trump also takes the Western Hemisphere as America’s sphere, with its preponderant economic and military power entitling it to overweening dominance. The National Security Strategy asserts a “Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine”, excluding outside powers from the region and seeking control of strategic locations and valuable resources. The US, its noted, “will prioritize commercial diplomacy…using tariffs and reciprocal trade agreements as powerful tools.” US diplomats should also understand “that part of their job is to help American companies compete and succeed.” Nations in the Western Hemisphere are to also see the US as “their partner of first choice” and accept “sole-source contracts for our companies.” Trump’s ghostwriter coyly notes that when others resist American blandishments, “we will (through various means) discourage their collaboration with others.” It is not, perhaps, too cynical to suspect that Trump’s current actions against Venezuela are designed in part to dramatize the costs of noncompliance. He has already shown his willingness to interfere brazenly in the affairs of other states in the Western Hemisphere, as in the use of tariffs to discourage prosecution of his Brazilian ally Jair Bolsonaro, for fomenting a coup to stay in power. Trump also openly provided financial support to ensure Argentina’s legislative elections produced a majority behind another ally, Javier Milei. We have little reason to doubt he would be prepared to intervene in Canadian politics if he thought it profitable, perhaps by aiding Alberta separatists or other forces aligned with his interests.

As for Canada, while Trump is notoriously volatile and unpredictable, despite his musings about “the 51^st State”, it is more likely that he wants to make us an economic vassal. There are precedents. In 1910-11, the administration of William Howard Taft explored commercial reciprocity with Canada not, as once thought, as prelude to political annexation, but to ensure an accessible source of raw materials for a more advanced US industrial economy. There are echoes of this in recent comments by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick that the administration is intent on shifting all North American auto assembly to the US, with Canada permitted to produce only parts.

Soon after taking office, Prime Minister Carney spoke of negotiating a comprehensive agreement with Trump on both trade and security, an increasingly unrealistic goal. The National Security Strategy reflects in its specifics Trump’s rejection of mutually beneficial interdependence. He sees international relations, indeed life, as zero-sum, with my gain requiring your loss. Though unintelligent and undisciplined, he has a feral cunning and an instinct for others’ weaknesses. Deriving personal gratification from his stronger position, he presses his advantage as brutally as he can. As a result, any deal we could negotiate would probably be so disadvantageous as to deserve rejection. And, given Trump’s record, it could be revoked on a whim. Efforts to flatter and appease him may improve personal chemistry but produce no tangible benefits. He sees concessions or eagerness to negotiate as signalling weakness, emboldening him to demand more. Neither Justin Trudeau’s pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago nor Mark Carney’s withdrawal of the Digital Services Tax (pausing it but retaining it as a bargaining chip would have been wiser) brought any concrete gains for Canada. Domestic pressure may limit the damage Trump can do, and resistance from US businesses to his tariffs is welcome, but negotiation with him quickly passes the point of diminishing returns.

Among our fellow democracies in Europe and elsewhere, the new document has clarified that the US is no longer a reliable ally or trading partner and that growing awareness may catalyze greater cooperation to create an alternative to dependence on Washington. Canada, the European democracies, and like-minded states elsewhere, have the collective economic heft to both negotiate a prosperous open world economy without the US and construct collective defences sufficient to counter the revisionist powers. Unfortunately, getting there will take time, and the next three to ten years will be ones of economic adversity and geopolitical risk, with Russia already engaged in aggression and China clearly preparing to do so. Decades of excessive dependence on the US means that the other democracies must ramp up defence spending from low levels and find replacements for the key capabilities the US alone provides. At the same time, negotiations to offset diminished access to the US market must proceed faster than the norm.

Canada’s position has distinct vulnerabilities. Geography makes it difficult to replace the US market, though our internal one will suffice to sustain a decent standard of living as we negotiate other trading arrangements, with Trump musing about scrapping CUSMA in favour of separate, and likely less favourable, bilateral arrangements with Canada and Mexico. While defence spending is rising, it does so from an exceptionally low baseline. And as we work to improve broader Atlantic devices with European partners, we must also ramp up our presence in the Arctic, which falls within what Trump sees as America’s sphere of dominance, and with a shared geography that makes us unavoidably interdependent for continental defence. If we don’t, Trump won’t hesitate to intrude upon our sovereignty with US military assets. Overall, the short term will include both economic sacrifice and geopolitical peril for Canada.

Moreover, we must accept the need to build a long-term successor to the current international order. Trump did not emerge from nowhere, and a reduced willingness to undertake commitments abroad has grown in both parties in recent years. It may be that Trump’s conversion of the Republican Party to his worldview endures. A history of distance from most foreign quarrels and a large internal market have helped shape a strong isolationist tradition in US politics. So, US relations with the rest of the world are likely to be more inward looking and transactional than from Pearl Harbor to the early years of this century, though not necessarily to the gruesome extremes flowing from Trump’s personal pathologies. And it far from clear that Trump’s damage to US power and trustworthiness can be repaired. So, a world in which Canada is tolerably secure and prosperous requires rebuilding what is salvageable in the pax Americana without the US.