The Decibel - How Trump’s imperialism is reshaping global alliances

Episode Date: March 7, 2025

After a little more than two days, U.S. President Donald Trump paused the 25 per cent tariffs on Canada and Mexico until April 2. It’s not just the tariff whiplash that’s causing anxiety – since Trump took office, he’s alienated allies, moved closer to traditional rivals, and hinted at a new age of U.S. imperialism.Doug Saunders is the international affairs columnist for the Globe. He joins the Decibel to talk about how the world as we know it has changed since Trump took office in January, and how countries are adapting to the constantly shifting global order.Questions? Comments? Ideas? E-mail us at [e-mail]

The tariffs have been paused. On Thursday, U.S. President Donald Trump granted an exemption until April 2nd for goods from both Canada and Mexico that fall under the Free Trade Agreement. The U.S. tariffs were in place for a little over two days, but they caused anxiety and economic chaos. It's the kind of whiplash we've seen over and over again since Trump took office. And it's not only free trade norms that Trump has turned upside down. He's also alienated allies, moved closer to traditional rivals, and hinted at a new

age of US imperialism. This week, European leaders negotiated landmark defence spending in the wake of the US suspending aid to Ukraine. This is meant to compensate for decreased funding from a newly isolationist United States. It's the start of a new era of international politics as countries figure out how to adapt to this new global order. So today we're joined by Doug Saunders, the Globe's international affairs columnist. Things are moving so quickly that when we spoke to Doug around 11 a.m. on Thursday, the tariffs on Canada were still in place.

But a few hours later, they'd been paused. Doug will talk about how the world as we know it has changed since Trump took office in January and how Canada and other countries can fight back. I'm Menaka Raman-Wilms and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Doug, thanks so much for being here again. A real pleasure, thank you. So Doug, it's been a very busy news week, following many weeks actually of busy news weeks.

I know you've been covering international politics for a long time. What do you make of this moment? I don't think it's any exaggeration to say that this is a fulcrum point in world history and international relations to an extent that really I don't think we've seen since the Second World War. Such a sudden and dramatic realignment of the major nations

of the world and how they relate to each other and how war and peace works, how economies work. And there have been back and forths with the United States in relations with Canada and other democracies over the decades. But this one, it's going to be hard to put the cork back in the bottle. It looks like however we come out of this Trump period, the world order is going to be significantly different on a permanent basis afterwards. I mean, that's a pretty big thing to say that, you know, the world order is going to be significantly different after after Trump here. How would you characterize these last six weeks? Like how has the world changed since Trump has taken office again?

In terms of economies and trade relations, in terms of military and defense relations, in terms of a lot of international things like environmental policy and health policy and so on. Everything turned upside down pretty much on inauguration day in January and has done so even more dramatically now. I mean, on Thursday, we had all the leaders of Europe meeting to plan how to organize their economies and their defense system without the United States and without potentially NATO. And that would have been unthinkable a year ago. Now, I should say this was discussed. This was known to European leaders in particular. They had been skeptical four years ago

in the beginning of 2021 that Joe Biden was a return to the new normal in the United States. There was a strong feeling in many world capitals that that was the interregnum and that there would be a return to Trumpism. I don't think anybody anticipated how dramatically that would happen

or how totally he would happen or how totally he would withdraw the United States from its previous place in the world from its previous alliances and realign his country with the enemies of the democratic world. Well let's talk about what we've heard from Trump specifically here. Of course he addressed Congress earlier this week for the first time since re-entering office. Doug, what stood out to you from his speech, like when it comes to how the U.S. is going to deal with the rest of the world? Well, that speech to Congress, to international listeners and Canadians and Europeans and

people in Latin America, it sounded like a return to imperialism of a sort that we've not seen from the United States since the late 19th and early very early 20th centuries. I mean he said we want to make the United States the most dominant civilization ever to exist on the face of the earth and he said that after having declared that he wants to take over Greenland and Panama and making noises about Canada that seemed to reinforce his repeated almost daily expressions of interest in taking over Canada. He said, we pay subsidies to Canada and to Mexico of hundreds of billions of dollars and the United States will not be doing that any longer.

Now, the United States doesn't subsidize Canada. What that means is Americans buy Canadian products. And in his mind, that's a subsidy, and it can be solved, as he said repeatedly, by annexing Canada. And you know, it doesn't really matter if he seriously means it or not. The fact that the head of state of the largest economy in the world is saying on a daily basis these things about annexation means that there is a mindset governing the country

that makes it impossible for us to ally with them in any way. There is no functioning democracy right now that wants to ally itself with the United States even if they disagreed on specific policies. Okay so what you're you seem to be saying here Doug is a big part of this does come down to who the US is allying themselves with at this moment or the changing things that are happening here. So let's talk about some specific relationships. Specifically, Trump has become more sympathetic to Russian President Vladimir Putin and at the same time he's pulled support away from Ukraine. Right this week we saw the US paused aid to

Ukraine and indefinitely stopped sharing intelligence as well and we saw that really charged meeting a few days before that with Ukrainian President Zelensky in the Oval Office. If you didn't have our military equipment, if you didn't have our military equipment, this war would have been over in two weeks. In three days. I heard it from Putin. In three days. What do we know, Doug, about the relationship between Trump and Putin? Well, it's taken a long existing set of relationships and turned them into official world policy. Donald Trump has always been an admirer of and a friend of Vladimir Putin. And then, of course, U.S. Congress proved in its investigation that Mr. Putin had interfered in the 2016

U.S. election to an extent that it may have caused the Trump victory. That angered Donald Trump to a considerable degree to the fact that he's now removed a lot of those investigative powers from the FBI and so on. Yes, and just thinking back to that meeting with Zelensky, Trump said something about how him and Putin went through a lot together. Let me tell you, Putin went through a hell of a lot with me. He went through a phony witch hunt. I mean, there just seems to be a real personal alignment that Trump seems to feel towards Putin.

He has had nothing good to say about Zelensky or Ukraine, or in fact, about any leader of a functioning democratic country. He has had positive things to say about Vladimir Putin and has given concessions to Vladimir Putin. It's the conclusion of leaders in Europe, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said this week that Donald Trump is supporting Vladimir Putin, that he's allied with Vladimir Putin. It's created a situation where we've all realized that the United States is now not just rhetorically,

but formally allied with the dictatorship that's attacking the democracies of Europe. I mean, the withdrawal of Ukraine's support is a huge move. It doesn't mean that Ukraine is going to lose the war, that Russia's invasion is going to overtake Kiev and the rest of the country, because more than half of the military support going to Ukraine is coming from European countries. And along with Canada's help and a number of other countries, they can make up that difference. And that's what the meetings in recent days among European leaders have been about.

Many dramatic things have been provoked. The newly elected, presumable Chancellor of Germany, Friedrich Merz, completely upturned his own country's history by teaming up with the opposition party, the social democrats of Schultz. And we should say Merz is of course, he's the leader of the center-right mainstream party, the CDU, so a mainstream party but but right-leaning. Yeah, Friedrich Merz is the leader of the Christian Democratic Union and he's quite a conservative guy. I mean, he's very right-wing rhetorically on things like immigration and LGBT rights.

And also he's a huge Americanist. He worships Ronald Reagan. He wanted nothing more than to bring Germany closer to the United States. Yet, day after the election, day of the election actually, he came out condemning basically US imperialism and saying that his first task would be to engineer a break of Europe and Germany from the United States.

His first sort of decisive act in forming a government was to team up his Christian Democrats with the left-wing currently governing party, the social democrats, and they together agreed to change the German constitution to remove a clause that Chancellor Angela Merkel, another Christian Democrat, had put in place in the 2000s that outlawed big levels of government debt. And that constitutional debt break, as it's known, had prevented Germany from providing arms to Ukraine on a very large scale. Their entire purpose in altering the country's constitution was to go deep into debt in order to arm up Ukraine to replace the lost support from the United States.

So what does this tell you, Doug, that the next potential leader of Germany, right-leaning individual, would rather align himself with the left-leaning people in his country as opposed to other conservative leaders elsewhere in the world? What does that tell you? Well, it's caused a lot of politicians on the right, on the normal right, you could say,

to have to ask themselves whether they are really part of this thing that Donald Trump is part of, that Donald Trump and Viktor Orban in Hungary and Vladimir Putin in Russia are part of this populist, extremist, anti-democratic right, or whether they're part of an old tradition of conservatism that basically is on a spectrum of liberalism. By liberalism, I mean openness to democracy and trade relations and international relations and things like this. And a lot of the leaders of Europe have said, yeah, that's what we're doing. And it's because, I mean, I use the analogy of aliens invading the earth and all the parties putting aside their differences to fight them.

Ronald Reagan had alluded to that, that sci-fi narrative when he was US president. And now we're seeing it, except the aliens are in the White House. And we are seeing in a lot of countries, parties that were polar opposites before suddenly speaking with the same voice and speaking against the United States. It's pretty amazing. I mean, a lot of countries, especially Canada, there's been not so much a left-right spectrum

through their history as degrees of pro or anti-Americanism. And to see everybody united in a view about the United States that was a fringe view before is extraordinary. And it certainly doesn't have to do with any of these Europeans or Canadians or anything changing their politics. It has to do with the United States being governed by people who are unbearable to even quite right-wing people. I mean, calling it a new Cold War

is something we've been saying for a long time, but it's very unusual to have the United States be unambiguously on the other side of something like a Cold War from Canada and from the European democracies. We'll be back after this message. Doug, this moment really does feel unprecedented for a lot of us who haven't lived through this kind of situation before.

But I guess I wonder, is it actually unprecedented? Have we seen the US behave this way in the past? Well, not during the lifetime of anybody who's alive today. What this really brings us back to is the period at the end of the 19th century, in the very early years of the 20th century, when the United States was a territorial expansionist force, it did pursue imperialistic policies. It was during that period that the Spanish-American war took place. It was during that period that the United States took over Puerto Rico and Guam and the Philippines for a while, and Cuba. And it was an explicitly expansionist, imperialistic policy. And the president who

was most behind that policy was William McKinley. It's interesting that Donald Trump lauded McKinley in his inauguration speech, said he would rename Mount Denali in Alaska back to being Mount McKinley, against the wishes of Republicans in Alaska who actually preferred the Denali name. President McKinley made our country very rich through tariffs and through talent. He was a natural businessman. That's an unusual choice of president to choose for admiration. That's generally not seen as a great time in US history. It didn't work well. And during that time, the United States made noises about wanting to seize Canada. It engaged in large-scale tariff warfare against allied countries.

Something maybe similar then to what we're kind of seeing echoes of now then. Well what we hear is that Donald Trump became convinced during his four years out of office that the period to emulate was the 1890s, that period before income tax was invented. Remember income tax came around in the First World War and became the main way to finance government. Before that, government was much tinier and more limited, and it was financed through tariffs and duties and things like that. And if you wanted larger government, you had larger tariffs because your economy wasn't

so well developed, so your citizens depended on imports for a lot of things. Any economist will tell you that that doesn't work now because tariffs tend to be a prohibitive tax. They simply have the effect of preventing your consumers from buying those products rather than paying 25% more on those products. Donald Trump really seems to have the idea that he can get rid of income tax and other taxes and use tariffs this way. And that's very clearly why he keeps changing his reasons for putting punitive tariffs on Canada.

It's certainly not about fentanyl. It's not about migration. There's hardly any illegal migration from Canada into the United States. And at this point, it seems to be exceeded by illegal migration from Canada into the United States. And at this point, it seems to be exceeded by illegal migration from the United States into Canada. So if it's not about these things, Doug, then I guess what is it about? Look, you can chase your tail a lot trying to ascribe particular logics or motives to Donald Trump's tariffs. And I think it's better to describe them as almost a word cloud,

as a cluster of emotions. He has an idea about returning to the 1890s and using tariffs to finance the U S government so that he can get rid of most or all taxes. He has an idea about using punitive tariffs to subjugate countries who are allies, but who he sees as competitors or countries that have hurt him personally. And he simply has an idea of using and then withdrawing punitive tariffs as a way to get other countries to act on his behalf. The back and forth game is very interesting.

Some economists have observed that his practice of saying, okay, we're going to have 25% tariffs across the board. No, we're going to exempt auto industries, but only for one month. No, we're going to exempt NAFTA-related industries, but only for a certain period of time. It keeps people on their toes. It's a way of extracting tribute from these countries. It's a way to soften your opponent up for whatever concessions you want. And again, I would steer away from saying he's doing this with a deliberate plan. This is step A, then there's going to be step B, step C. There's never been any indication with Donald Trump that he has a specific board game with specific squares on it.

But his logic in doing these things is as a negotiating move. Let's look at the big picture here, Doug, and the overall changes that are happening here. I just wonder, if we look at the world as a whole now, do liberal democracies like Canada still stand a chance? And I guess what I'm trying to ask you is, like if all of the liberal democracies band together, could they push back?

Would we have enough might to protect each other against the potential power of the US and Russia aligned together? Well, we have to assume that we can. It's not inevitable. This has been a bad few years, really a bad 10 years or so, during which democracies, and I don't just mean countries that hold elections, but countries that have independent judiciaries and rights for minorities and free press and things like that. Those countries have been on the decline.

The number of them has been dwindling. And a lot of countries have had elected autocrats, people who've won elections and used that power to shut down checks and balances and courts and media and rights and things like that. Donald Trump is very explicitly doing that. I mean, he's very explicitly following a path that we saw Viktor Orban do in Hungary, that we saw Vladimir Putin 25 years ago begin to do in Russia. And that's not just hypothetical.

He's very explicitly stating he wants to do these things. He's explicitly firing the people who police corruption in the US government and who ensure democratic rights and things like that. And we have to assume that we can win, but we're going to have to work hard to do it. And it's going to hurt our standard of living for a little while.

It's going to be expensive. We can't let Vladimir Putin take over the democratic countries of Europe. That was very clear to the United States until a month and a half ago. And it has to be clear to the rest of us. We're going to have to spend money making up for the giant hole where the United States was,

not just in the defense of Ukraine and defense in general, but also in solving the climate crisis, in democratic rights and the rights of minorities, and of course, in economic relations, investment and trade. The last time there was this sort of downward spiral in rights and democracy in the world, you know, in the 1930s, you know, it didn't work out. The bad guys for a number of years won one, to the cost of a great many lives and the destruction of a great many countries.

I'm not saying we're headed into World War III or anything like that, but we need to be aware that it's not inevitable that we're in a historic moment that's gonna turn out well for us. We have to make it work out well for us, and we have to ally ourselves and work very closely with the rest of functioning democracies. And I should add,

with those forces and groups in the United States that are opposed to this and that are trying to move it in the right direction. But mostly we should be working with the other countries that are like us in Europe and Asia and in the Americas to create some new alliances that will replace the USA shaped hole in our world order. Sounds like a pretty dire situation Doug, but always appreciate hearing your insights on these things. Thank you so much for taking the time to be here. It's a pleasure being here. Thank you. That's it for today. I'm Maynika Ramon-Wilms.

Our producers are Madeleine White, Michal Stein, and Allie Graham. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer and Matt Frainer is our managing editor. You can subscribe to The Globe and Mail at globeandmail.com slash subscribe. Thanks so much for listening.