Oh, Canada — Trump Pushes Two Former Allies Into Closer Collaboration

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The European Union and Canada this week pledged to work more closely together in what is one of the clearest signs yet of how Donald Trump’s foreign policy, which mainly consists of not understanding how trade works and trying to bully friends while embracing authoritarian regimes not named Iran, is destroying US relations with (former) allies and will harm American consumers.

Neither European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen nor Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney mentioned Trump by name in their addresses to the European Parliament on Wednesday and Thursday, respectively, in which they pledged closer collaboration.

They didn’t have to. Everybody knows who they were talking about.

“We see the world with the same eyes: from AI to climate change, from the Arctic to geopolitics. And we have stood together: on Ukraine, on defense, on raw materials and on supply chains,” said von der Layen in her State of the European Union speech on Wednesday with Carney in attendance.

All of these are digs at Trump, his trade wars, his refusal to regulate artificial intelligence, his threats to annex Greenland or to leave NATO.

And, just in case anybody didn’t catch her drift, von der Leyen spelled it out one more time.

“But above all, dear Mark, Europe and Canada believe in democracy,” she said. “We believe that power does not belong to the strongest, the richest or the loudest – but to all of us. That democracies have the freedom to choose with whom to work.”

For his part, Carney also left little doubt as to who is currently the main threat to western alliances.

“Today, our societies are being rocked by new storms: the upheavals caused by climate change, the erosion of democratic norms, and the use of trade as a weapon. The multilateral institutions we relied on have been weakened,” he said in his speech on Thursday. “Sovereignty and openness are difficult to reconcile today. Economic integration is now being used as a weapon, and tariffs as a means of exerting pressure.”

As to prove their point, Trump on Wednesday called Canada “a terrible trade partner” and threatened Europe with “very serious tariffs” or a stop in trade “on many things” if he perceives the closer cooperation between the (former) allies to be “a hostile act.”

Of course, a closer alliance between two (former) friends can only be seen as a threat if the US no longer shares the same values, which it admittedly does not.

While it is yet unclear what this new alliance will specifically look like — von der Leyen said Canada would become the EU’s first “associate member,” but that’s not a designation that yet exists — there is no doubt that Trump pushed them into taking this step, and that he is increasingly isolating the US in the process.

This is just the beginning. Instead of finding themselves at the whims of a madman drunk on power, America’s (former) allies will increasingly find ways to work together, and at least some of the bridges that Trump is recklessly burning right now will not be rebuilt for a very long time.