Politics – Returning To Source

Frasier Institute and Biased Analysis

There presently exists a defining political disagreement in Canada between those who ache to retain Continentalism at all costs (re: Poilievre’s Conservatives) and those who perceive an irreparable and enduring rupture in trade relations between Canada and the USA (re: Carney’s Liberals). It makes for a more engaging politics than the typical pedestrian muddle.

In response to this ruptured understanding, Carney proposed to restructure the economy in October 2025, such that annual trade and services exports to non-American destinations would increase by $300B in ten years, nominally doubling from the current amount. Conservative pundits, relying upon a recent Fraser Report, itself a financially conservative and pro-American think tank, think “Mark Carney’s non-U.S. exports target far-fetched.”

Doubling non-US exports in ten years might seem like a pipedream if one does not consider compound interest. This target is merely 7.2% annual growth nominally. After accounting for 2% inflation, based upon government and central banker targets, this is merely a 5.1% increase annually.

The Fraser Report notes (p.2), “Canada’s merchandise exports to the United States jumped from $108 billion in 1988 to $206 billion by 1995, almost doubling (in nominal dollar terms) within the span of seven years.” The services component of Canadian exports more than doubled between 2014 and 2024 (March 2014: $9.235B; March 2024: $20.587).

Hence, I hardly think that this target is improbable and merely aspirational. Indeed, I suspect that Carney may have understated the likelihood. But let history be the true judge of such punditry, and let us then stone false prophets (LOL).

The Fraser Institute Fallacy

The Fraser Report’s claims are largely based upon the fallacy of what has been shall ever continue to be, facilitated by geographical proximity which reduce transportation costs, common language, and similar legal standards and business practices (p.3).

On the basis of trade patterns between 1999 and 2024, the Report found that “the total share of goods exported to the U.S. from Canada decreased only modestly, from 86.7% in 1999 to 76.3% in 2024.” This does not include services, in which presently the US share is only 50.2% ($109.3B out of $217.8B). In 2023, the US share was 53.2%, slightly higher in the years prior.

The Fraser Report does not “identify and evaluate policy measures that might reduce Canada’s high degree of trade dependence on the United States, particularly as an export market” (p.1). Considering that on both sides of the border, policy measures have already been and likely will continue to be instituted, which will reduce Canadian exports to the US, it makes the value of this Report dubious, at best.

For already, the US share of total merchandise exports has declined from 79.5% (Feb 2025), when Trump began his tariff campaign, to 66.4% in February 2024, this before the Iran War. (The higher than normal February 2025 share was extra loaded in anticipation of the coming tariff regime.) In this time, however, total merchandise exports to other non-American destinations increased from $14.3B (Feb 2025) to $22.3B (Feb 2026) on a monthly basis, a 50+ percent increase, consistent with a growing pattern in the last year. This growth, it must be admitted, is but low hanging fruit of any diversification efforts.

The Fraser Report and conservative pundits point out that Canadian governments have made periodic feints to diversify our trade patterns for 50 years (i.e. Trudeau Sr., Chretien) without much avail. But these seemed half hearted attempts to me at the time, especially compared to what Carney has achieved in this last year.

A smoker may know that his/her habit is detrimental to health and life all throughout life and make periodic feints to quit. But only when an X-Ray comes back, showing a tumor, might that smoker have serious resolve to quit. The peril of having over 20% of Canadian GDP dependent upon US exports has long been well known. But the Americans, until the last decade or two, operated upon a “first among equals” geopolitical principle. All allies benefit, even if America benefitted most by its rules-based liberal order. Consequently, allies became all too comfortable under their prosperous semi-vassalage to the U.S.

But when a geopolitical superpower feels its real loss of relative power and influence, it becomes less magnanimous, moving away from enlightened to unenlightened self interest, becoming self-serving and self-aggrandizing, duplicitous, even evil. Our own short Canadian history is witness to this dynamic of decadence with regard to the British Empire, the first to introduce concentration camps in the Boer War, making false promises to both Jews and Arabs during WW1, while conspiring to carve up the Middle East with France. Canadian and ANZAC abhorrence at the way the British conducted WW1, to which our semi-vassal states were subject, instigated further autonomy away from the UK (i.e. The Statute of Westminster, 1931).

Inadvertent Advantages of Still Being Hewers of Wood

Another analyst at the Fraser Institute, an American who works for the American right-wing think tank, Cato Institute, bemoans the natural cause-and-effect consequence of Trump’s tariff regime to American fortunes.

Yet the 50 per cent tariff and removal of the Canadian exemption in 2025 pushed major Canadian producers to divert exports to Europe. Aluminerie Alouette, North America’s largest smelter, shifted its European sales from 4 per cent to 57 per cent of production in a matter of months. Rio Tinto stopped selling in the U.S., and even Alcoa reduced cross-border shipments. The troubling consequence of this shift was increased U.S. reliance on Middle Eastern suppliers—the UAE and Bahrain together accounted for nearly one-quarter of U.S. unwrought aluminum imports—but these sources have now been disrupted because of the Iran conflict. With global demand for non-Gulf aluminum sky-high and Canadian smelters operating at full utilization, there’s little chance producers in Canada will redirect back to U.S. buyers in the near term.

Relevant to Canadian concerns, be damned American self-interest, the remarkable thing is how quickly Canadian aluminum companies, even one owned by Americans, could switch clients so quickly. Considering how wildly variable, US trade policies presently are and will continue to be for at least another 30 months, even this American understands that Canadian producers will not be soon returning to the US.

The advantage of still being a resource economy, at least from the perspective of exports, is that the market is global. If global supply and demand are in rough equilibrium, then the actions of one self-serving actor merely shifts trading patterns. This is not so true with other trade goods and services.

Commodities and refined commodities constitute about 40% of all Canadian merchandise exports. Build a few pipelines, even Canada’s greatest export type can be diverted from the US to new customers. Europeans are most willing to replace unstable Persian Gulf sources, for instance, with more secure and stabler Canadian sources, especially if it becomes coupled with defense contracts that replace American military contractors. Everybody wins but the Americans who are not at the table.

Conservatives in the Wilderness

Poilievre’s Conservatives would probably be competent managers of the nation in the style of Stephen Harper, certainly heads and shoulders above the inconsequential fop, Justin Trudeau. However, in the depths of their heart, Continentalist Conservatives still perceive that America is now what it was 50 years ago. Canadians could then go to Washington, placate American concerns, plea for amendments or exemptions, which it more or less acquired.

This is certainly not true of Trump’s America, which weaponizes its sizeable power and leverage, extorts its trading partners while deploying the lamest of pretenses, and openly humiliates those trading partners which they have just extorted. I do not believe, going forward, that American hubris will differ in kind after Trump, just in degree. America is not now the America that we knew in our youth.

Canadians, it seems, have no appetite for a semi-vassalage that is openly exploitative. They just might be willing to suffer a period of sacrifice while the nation undergoes necessary restructuring of its economic, military, diplomatic, and foreign policy to meet new realities.

This might also be Canada’s maîtres chez nous moment. Canada might have weaned off mother Britain after the First World War. But it seems that Canada merely began to suckle at the breast of America instead. Those breasts are drying up. There just might be a youthful appetite in this country to finally strike it on our own, to get out from under the shadow of the American Woman.

Poilievre and the whole conservative movement is behind the curve on this political development against one who is a conviction politician, a most unusual anomaly within a party whose only conviction has hitherto been to govern for its own sake.

They are losing my family of cultural, yet politically moderate, conservatives. They are losing me, who has never before voted left of center. For Carney’s Liberals are doing the very thing I proposed back in 2017, having been fully aware of the American zeitgeist at that time.

Roughly seventy-five percent of our exports go to the United States, constituting almost thirty percent of our economy. If there be economic disruption, whether because of social/civic or economic causes, those exports, just like happened in the aftermath of the 2008/9 Great Recession (re: a 25% decline), will be inordinately affected. Should not the diversification of our trade become first and overriding priority, especially with an American administration devoted to a Realpolitik bullying of other nations into a regime of permanent economic advantage for the United States? (Even apart from the present politicos, the existential economic sclerosis in the United States will incline them to increasing self-serving and myopic trade policy).

Pipelines, both east and west, must be approved; not because there are not environmental dangers and detriments to carbon-based energy; but because the welfare of the nation is dependent upon more than just one aspect of life. Oil and natural gas should be used as a trade lever (through long-term guaranteed supply) to open up foreign markets which are effectively closed through tariff and non-tariff barriers. An activist inculcation of extensive balanced trade deals with other nations of similar economic status should be pursued.

The goal should be the reduction of our exports to the United States to considerably less than 50% of total exports, not only for economic reasons of safety, but to reduce any threat to political autonomy by a more bullying American foreign and trade posture. There will be disruption. There will likely be economic loss, at least in the interim. However, such is the need for inoculation to make us less vulnerable to the most likely outbreak of American disease.

While we are thinking of the unthinkable; because America is showing itself to be a less reliable defense partner, and because conflict in the United States may induce military incursions into our country, we may need to acquire our own weapons of mass deterrence.

The Folly of Assassinating Ali Hosseini Khamenei

One of the subthemes in Woody Allen’s Bananas (1971) was the possibility, even likelihood, that in toppling one abhorrent regime, one might spawn something even more abhorrent. In taking out the 86-year-old Supreme Leader, Iran, which despite Israeli and American propaganda, had become a relatively sclerotic regime, weakened by sanctions, geopolitical isolation, internal divisions, and decline of unifying ideological fervor.

An Iranian academic, some of whose students rose to senior government positions in Tehran, once told me that at the revolution’s beginning, the regime consisted of “80 percent indoctrinated believers—largely ignorant of global realities—and 20 percent charlatans and chameleons.” By Khamenei’s final years, he said, the ratio had inverted: 20 percent believers, 80 percent opportunists who flocked around officials for wealth and privilege.

Khamenei was 86 years old. He was enfeebled and about to die anyhow. One cannot emphasize this trite fact enough. What Trump’s America and Netanhuyu’s Israel has accomplished for this Islamic clergyman is his greatest wet dream. Having already lived a full life and then dying a martyr (with promises of 72 virgins), his death now constitutes a rallying cry in the immediate and ensures him a legacy long lasting.

WHAT MAROONS! WHAT BUFFOONS!

Falling into a Pit of Their Own Making

During the 1920s, the Weimar Republic attempted to repress the NSDAP (a.k.a. Nazis) through hate speech laws, often deployed to close an indeterminate number of Nazi newspapers. Goebbels was jailed for three weeks for insulting a Jewish police official in Berlin.

The problem with such machinations is that they are endemically contrary of the spirit of free civic polities and hence prove none too effective, especially in light of sentiments favoring right-wing factions by those in the police and military.

But having established the precedent, if and when those who have been repressed acquire power, especially if they are authoritarian in nature, those powers of repression will be deployed most ruthlessly. Democratic factions, who complained about such repression when conducted against themselves, were rightfully scorned in 1933.

In like manner, in establishing the precedent and new standard of assassinating heads of state and other high officials of adversarial powers, Trump and Netanhayu become themselves legitimate targets, even within their own country, Netanhayu especially since he has been found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court.

Validating and Perpetuating the Narrative of Jewish Control Over America

There already exists increasing recognition that the Israeli government and Jews in America have outsized influence on American policy (“the AIPIC lobby”). Whenever that perception has occurred or has been perceived to have occurred throughout history (i.e. Weimar Republic, Seneca the Younger), a Maîtres Chez Nous (re: “Masters of Our Own House”) counterreaction ensues, much to the denigration or worse for the Diaspora.

Jews constitute 2.4% of the American population. Yet they constitute 36 of 535 members of Congress (7%) and 10 of 100 Senators (10%). Jews dominate Hollywood, journalism, and social media corporations. Jews have often betrayed the arrogance of their outsized influence.

But there has been a bottom-up groundswell of resentment towards the outsized influence of these Jewish “aliens,” first from the Left and now from the Right, as America becomes involved reckless ventures which might regional benefit the nation of Israel but has dubious benefit for Americans, and may, indeed, prove detrimental to America.

A consistent pattern throughout Diaspora history is that Jews ingratiate themselves to the elites of the host country in which they dwell, hoping that these elites will protect them from the masses. However, whenever the groundswell of antipathy from the commons threatens the survival of these elites, Jews are hung out to dry (Hanna Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism).

This latest venture into Iran has no honest and coherent rationale, no coherent criteria for success, and no exit strategy. Indeed, the arrogance of Donald Trump deems offering any explication to his own people unnecessary for this very unpopular war from the get go.

There exists a consistent pattern in America wherein support for military adventures, which are not the result of threats to the homeland, declines with the passage of time. It explains the stereotypical quickie “get in, get out” nature of most American military adventures. The world knowing this, and a culture given to martyrdom, it behooves the Iranians to rag this current war for some time. As the Taliban demonstrated, patience triumphs over “shock and awe.”

Should this latest military adventure rag on, and American body bags pile up, American treasure be squandered, and the genuine concerns of Americans continue to be neglected, the ensuing resentment and antipathy just might be redirected towards Netanyahu’s Israel and the Fifth Column of Jews dwelling among True American Patriots, especially since there is not even an attempt this time to distinguish between American from Israeli interests. I can imagine a future moment when Americans ask, “who did this to us?”

Pushing Iran Ever Closer to the Russian Orbit

An alliance of very weak sorts already exists between the Iran and Russia. Putin’s Russia did not exactly risk its neck out for Iran in the June 2025 war. And an Iranian theocracy is not likely desirous to come under the “Christian Orthodox” orbit.

However, what would happen if the Iranian military (IRGC) became dominant (or more dominant), while continuing to be supportive of Shiite Islam, which is obviously necessary in that cultural setting. Being constantly denigrated by economic actions, and facing constant, sometimes even unprovoked, foreign incursions like the current one, will not necessity and Realpolitik override existing clergy objections to closer ties with Russia after Putin?

It must be recalled that in 1953, the CIA executed a coup against a legitimate democratic government in Iran in favor of the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in order to protect mostly British oil interests from nationalization efforts. This foreign adventure gave impetus to the Iranian Revolution of 1978.

Americans might have twittered memories. The rest of the world does not. The notion that any regime change in Iran would result in the recovery of love for the Americans (or for western-style democratic capitalism) is febrile self-delusion or blatant lie to fool a people who can nowadays be fooled all of the time.

One of the self-delusions, abetted by American cultural ignorance, is that there is widespread antipathy against the existing theocratic regime. No one can say that with any certainty. And the appearance of much protest and opposition, the type of protest and opposition which actually might sacrifice lives, liberties, and livelihoods in support of an overthrow, suffers from the mistake of only considering urban populations. In Iran, as elsewhere, the political base of theocratic and conservative regimes lie in the rural towns, villages, and farmlands. The wet dreams of Trump’s America and Netanyahu’s Israel just might find that replacing a feeble supreme leader ruling over a sclerotic regime with a competent and aggressive military junta, more pliable to a thicker alliance with the Russians, and a population even more and justly antipathetic towards the Americans, a far worse outcome than presently exists. Even some Israelis demonstrate concern for this possibility.

International Contempt and Hatred towards America and Israel

In 1979, when I backpacked around the Mediterranean, I kept finding myself having, or thinking that I had to, defend America against the aspersions of largely north-western Europeans. This was after the folly of the Viet Nam War, which was entered into through duplicitous pretenses and upon false rationales. (At least, there were rationales.)

There are no pretenses and no genuine rationales this time. It is raw 19^th century imperialism in order to make a proud heritage and people bow to a lawless Narcissist-in-Chief in an already unpopular war in America, entered into by defying the Original Meaning of the American Constitution and blatantly ignoring International Law (ius gentium).

How long can one anticipate the overhang of contempt and detestation towards America and Americans ensuing this unprovoked military vanity? Any lifelong student of world history can anticipate the accelerating decline of American power and influence, even within the decade. For history emphatically demonstrates that on the coattails of the loss of moral authority and the legitimacy to govern, a decline and/or loss of power ensues.

Underneath the ersatz golden glitter of Trump’s America is a crud of moral, social, and economic rot, of an economy buttressed by annual deficits which rival those of the Great Depression, and shakily supported by the wealth effect from inordinately and irrationally expensive equity markets; of extreme economic disparities which overflow into civic and political inequality and two-tier justice which precursors civic tumult, even civic conflagration, as has happened often before.

Even before Trump, the weaponization of Reserved Currency status in 2022 has quickened the demise of that status which had given America exorbitant privilege. If the Chinese and Europeans joined hands, they could plausibly replace the U.S. dollar as Reserved Currency.

And Trump has done everything in his power to provoke the Europeans and their politicos out of their complacent subservience to their once American patrons. As much as I like Mark Carney’s revival of ‘non-aligned nations’ notion in his Davos speech, cynical realism suspects that Trump’s animosities will only project another (latent) superpower into an already unstable geopolitical situation, a superpower which will be at times hostile to America, one which will be eventually surpass America in the West, especially after the latter loses Reserved Currency status and it must address the many facets of its decadence.

A Canadian Declaration of Independence

So, while a solipsistic America, or portions thereof, saw in the Carney Doctrine, espoused at Davos, a surreptitious dig at their idiot emperor occupying the White House, I perceived a coherent, cogent vision and plan, one with general geopolitical ramifications, to be sure, yet ultimately a pronouncement, Maîtres Chez Nous!

I once visited an old work colleague who went into business for himself after the company to which we had both worked had folded up. His factory seemed [to be] a thriving place. However, there was flaw in the business model. His company had only one customer.

I recall reading about suppliers in the Great Depression, whose only clients were Simpsons or Eaton’s. These flagship department stores had such greater leverage over their suppliers that they could literally dictate the price that they were willing to pay.

This lesson, learnt in adolescence, never left me. When I became self-employed as an IT consultant, I had six main clients with roughly equal revenues, such that the business could easily survive the loss of one or two clients.

All my life, Canadian politicos have permitted this nation’s economy and, indirectly, this nation’s sovereignty to be vulnerable to the caprice of American dictates. Currently, three quarters of our exports flow to the U.S., with exports constituting a third of our economy. In effect, over 20% of our economy currently involves exports to the U.S. Only 1.64% of the U.S. economy involves exports to Canada. While the collapse of all trade [to the U.S] would not result in the same degree of decline in GDP, that is one whopping economic leverage.

But while Canada has been vulnerable to the caprice of American dictates, only on rare occasions has this become a real crisis of modest proportions. We have generally benefited from the goodwill and prudence of multiple administrations since WW2. And when crises of modest proportions have occurred, it has been the policy of Canadian politicos to placate the U.S.

But as America has become a hubristically evil and unjust nation, we can no longer count upon the goodwill and prudence of their politicos. Nor has this nation the military and economic might, in of itself, to fight against the American behemoth, as impressive as the recent chutzpah and bravado may have been. Moreover, as one Globe and Mail pundit put it, kowtowing to Trump’s narcissism and rapine will only encourage more predatory feints.

This nation is left with but one alternative, which should have been deployed many decades ago. . . Canada must stop playing in the same sandbox as the Bully of the sandbox. Our trade must circumvent the Americans. Let us strike a balanced deal with the Japanese, Koreans, and/or Germans: An Auto Pact in exchange for the type of goods that the Americans are tariffing (i.e. aluminum). Place a cease and desist on all American car plants in this country and end all purchases of their cars. Most of our automobile employees could be transferred to the new Japanese, Koreans, and/or Germans plants that are built here. Car part plants are to be redirected towards these new auto chains. . .

This was written in February last year. Yet, it seems that another Canadian of far greater stature and political clout has thought likewise, independent of my nickel’s worth. Mark Carney went further than I, suggesting that our country should participate in a mesh of overlapping alliances based upon different shared interests and realms of concern. Taking my cues from Otto Bismarck, I am dubious about bringing such policy complication into government which requires a genius level of statesmanship to navigate and sustain. For after Bismarck was unceremoniously dismissed by Kaiser Wilhelm II, his balancing act was left in the hands of that selfsame idiot.

Nevertheless, after one full term and one year of the Trumpian imbecility, the whole world appears to be navigating around the United States, a facet of natural socioeconomic law, hardly requiring a degree in political science to have anticipated. Trade agreements, inconceivable but a year ago, or having long been stagnating (i.e. EU-Mercosur, EU-India) have been hurriedly signed this last year.

One partisan pundit from the National Post scornfully compared Mark Carney to Willy Loman (re: Death of a Salesman, 1949). But Carney is doing what Canadian politicos should have been doing decades ago.

Carney’s Davos speech is not some fanciful aspiration. Carney has been operating upon this doctrine laid out in his speech this year. Hence, Carney is a conviction politician, something quite rare in our pedestrian politics. This has been especially true of Carney’s Liberal Party, whose pretentions to being the Natural Governing Party, have merely required placing their fingers into the air to discern the current direction of the political winds, and stealing and incorporating the ideas of the Right and the further Left.

A Radical Cultural Difference

The Davos speech shall not be properly understood by contemporary American narcissism which thinks that everything is all about them. American hyperbole on both Left and Right has also acquired the irksome habit of seeing every rhetorical ripple of discourse as constituting some crushing checkmate over their ideological, cultural, and sociopolitical adversaries. This habit appears to be a manifestation of a deeper longstanding cultural motif wherein the American must always be right, to victor, to dominate.

I noticed this when I backpacked around the Mediterranean in 1978/9. The Canadian psyche, on the other hand, appears to be one of just getting along; on reaching consensus. When I visited a suburb north of Pittsburgh in 1997/8 to network a branch office there, a naturalized American from Canada in that office voiced the irritation that his American colleagues had with their Canadian counterparts who delayed their decisions until everybody at their end got on board. For good or ill, this complaint confirmed my observation from twenty years prior. I am not particularly “Canadian” on this count.

Yet it is evident that this American need to victor and dominate contributes to the current profound schism which threatens civic conflagration. Our muddled moderation has so far served the common good by preventing our social fabric from tearing apart, although Trudeau Jr.’s divisive lurch to the Woke Left appeared to inaugurate that devolution that we observe in America and Europe.

Why can’t Americans and Canadians get along? More specifically, why hasn’t talk about a US-Canadian union ever really caught on?

The two countries have far more in common than might be expected. They share a common language, a common geography, even a common economic landscape. Both are nations of immigrants, particularly Scottish immigrants who in the nineteenth century served as “the shock troops of modernization,” in Bernard Aspinwall’s phrase, providing the first echelon of industrial labor for an emerging America — and for a unified Canada.

Given the commonalities, more than one commentator (including media personality and former Canadian citizen Kevin O’Leary) has raised the specter of a U.S.-Canadian economic union, even a North American monetary union, with Canadians retaining their national sovereignty while enjoying the benefits of integration into the much larger, and substantially more tax-free, U.S. economy.

In their general cultural ignorance, even of their own heritage, and an unquenchable avarice for Canadian natural resources, many Americans are conveniently deluded into thinking that our two peoples have much in common.

However, from the very beginning of our own history, Canadians have had a different mindset than the Americans, for better or worse. Beyond (1) the Québécois quadrant, the Anglo-Saxon colonials were largely made up of (2) those escaping or expelled from the losing side of the American Revolution. The (3) Second Great Awakening and other religious revivals largely escaped our borders, most of which were anti-intellectualist. Even as of 1971, (4) Blacks only numbered around 35,000 in Canada, constituting 0.2% of our population, mostly concentrated in Maritimes. Blacks do not figure in any national trauma. We never acquired, nor had opportunity to acquire, (5) an imperialist mindset through which the Americans have arrogantly lost their soul and their virtue. Although most Canadians dwell along a thin line which parallels the US–Canada border, (6) the extensive and barren north continues to figure in our cultural imagination. The American Frontier was closed over a century ago (c. 1890).

These half-dozen distinctions alone, each of which bear their own ideological/cultural imprint, should suffice to demonstrate the radical differences between our two peoples.

The radical, lift-yourself-by-your-own-bootstraps atomism of the American mindset finds little resonance in Canada except within a geographical stretch from the BC interior to the Alberta-Saskatchewan border. Few here consider the notion of the common good as equivalent to Communism, like almost half of American rubes do. (Nor were the American Founding Fathers and generation averse to the common good. Three of the thirteen original colonies had “commonwealth” in their nomenclatures. Oh! How the American mind and soul have fallen!)

No Canadian conservative, who values their reputation and livelihood, would boldly voice favor of the elimination of the minimum-wage laws (i.e. George Will) or the right of an employer to terminate an employee with impunity, without cause, even without compensation, as do many of the Red States. The radical economic disparities, which overflow into civic, political, and social inequalities and two-tier justice, which are historically known to contribute to social schism, civic conflagration, and the end of free civic polities (i.e. Democratic Athens, Republican Rome), are not yet as well developed in Canada as they are in the United States.

We have fought two skirmishes with the Americans. Our very Confederation is rooted as a response to the American Civil War. Why would any sane Canadian want to be a part of the American Woman, the American whore?

A Declaration of Independence

This country weaned itself off the teats of an imperious and duplicitous Britain after the First World War, officially in 1931. However, it seems that Canada merely replaced its mother, so to speak, with an American wet nurse. Canada has become an overgrown tweenager, still living in the attic, sniping about its effective lack of independence. If Canadians lack for an imperialist mindset, it is partly because we still think like provincial colonials.

As expected, a petulant toddler in his second childhood decreed a 100% tariff on all Canadian goods. It is doubtful whether this Narcissist-in-Chief sees in this seminal cri du coeur anything beyond an eloquent dig at his misrule.

But from the American standpoint, if Carney’s vision catches on in this country or, indeed, everywhere, despite the certainty of temporary decline in economic fortunes, courtesy of an imperious power losing its grip and geopolitical standing, the Carney Doctrine poses an insidious and enduring ideological threat.

For many overgrown tweenagers, the prospect of losing a life of economic ease and security overcomes the endemic desire to spread their wings and take responsibility. And already, among the business and conservative crowd, they grumble that they want to go back to Egypt.

Hence, in the absence of any viable, let alone cogent, alternative vision, this moment becomes a test of manly maturity so to speak. As for me and my household, being a vision not very different from my own, this seems preferable, even if perilous, then continuing to be hitched to the geopolitical Titanic.

Blood and Iron

It is not by speeches and majority resolutions that the great questions of the time are decided – that was the big mistake of 1848 and 1849 – but by iron and blood.

– Otto von Bismarck (1862)

History may not repeat. History may not rhyme. Yet there are undoubtedly parallels between epochs. While identifying the proper parallels is possible, the exercise is fraught with errors by those dabbling in historical analogies. Many errors are the result of partisan disingenuity, who posit analogies not motivated by pursuit of truth, but in pursuit of advantage. Yet even for the minority, who honestly seek some framework, however inchoate and porous, by which to understand the times, existential complexities make the task exceedingly difficult.

We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.

Stephen Miller, White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, is doing his level best to mimic Bismarck. But neither Miller nor his master have anywhere near the same level of Bismarck’s genius. Indeed, neither Miller nor Trump are even at the level of that buffoon, Kaiser Wilhelm II (1888–1918) who dismissed Bismarck in 1890.

Bismarck, at least, recognized the limits of Prussian power and navigated and enhanced Germany’s position within Europe in light of those limits. The Trump administration vastly overestimates America’s relative power.

Authors of Their Own Misfortune

Many apologists for Israel and its government claim that the recent sea change in Western attitudes towards Israel is largely due to Hamas propaganda. Such are much too generous in this accreditation (as well as implicitly condescending of Western peoples). The Palestinian motto “from the river to the sea,” unreasonable and pragmatically impossible in light of the facts on the ground, only appeals to an extremist minority and repels the rest.

It is rather that the Israeli government and Jews, both Israeli and Diaspora, have become their own worst enemies. In their hubris, the Netanyahu government thinks that they can do in Gaza what the Americans could not do in Afghanistan, namely, to extinguish the organization that massacred innocent civilians. Even if the IDF could exterminate Hamas, they could not extinguish the animus. Other violent partisans would just replace them.