The Munk Debates Podcast - Friday Focus: Why America's new national security strategy has Ottawa on edge

Episode Date: December 12, 2025

The full length edition of this week's' Friday Focus podcast is being made available to all paying and non-paying subscribers. America's new national security strategy doctrine is getting a lot of attention and for good reason. Two main points stick out for Rudyard and Janice: the assumption that Europe is a civilization in decline, and that the western hemisphere belongs to the United States. Up until this point many of us accepted that in the last decade the world has shifted considerably with the rise of China. The post-Cold war unipolar period led by America as the superpower is over and we are witnessing a return to the great power competition between countries that defined the late 19th and early 20th centuries. What should concern Canadians in the strategy announced last week is the notion of spheres of influence, which suggests that North America belongs to the U.S. who will dominate and discipline neighbouring countries. Putin praised the doctrine which also implies that the other great powers - specifically China and Russia - are allowed their own spheres of influence. How should Canadians interpret this strategy? And how should it inform our foreign policy and defense strategy in the years ahead?Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Friday Focus podcast for the 12th of December 2025. I'm Rudyard Griffiths, Chair of the Monk Debates, joined by Janice Gross Stein, the founding director of the Monk School of Global Affairs. Hey, Janice, how's it going? I am going to apologize in advance. This is my new voice, which I hope only lasts another day or two. Yes, well, we'll maybe run some like AI audio processing. and have you sounding like Scarlett Johansson

by the time we released this episode. Wouldn't that be good? It would be great. It would be great. It is not your audio. It is me. Yes. We'll see what Ricky Gerwitz, our producer,

can do in post-production, but you sound great. Let's jump in Janus on right off the top of the show on this big new national security. strategy that was released a week ago. It caused a lot of waves over the course of the last seven days. Maybe just for our listeners who are cluing into it for the first time or read about it in passing, what was this strategy and why is it getting so much attention? It deserves all the attention is getting rugged. Every four years, the present, and issues a strategy.

This one's one for the books. Europe is in civilizational decline. All right? Let's start there. Who are the good guys in Europe? The nationalist populist parties who get it, like the AFD or Franch or Marine Le Penz party in France. They get it.

that Europe will disappear if it continues to admit immigration. That's a starter. The second one for us in Canada, the Western Hemisphere, belongs to the United States. And if you don't believe that, Redyard, just go back and read the Monroe Doctrine, 200-year-old document updated for you in real time with the Trump corollary.

It is astounding. It is an astounding document. Yeah, and I think maybe the thing for listeners to take away from the coverage, I think one thing I feel has been missing is an analysis of a step change. And I see it, let me play it out for you and get your reaction to it. My sense is that up until this point, many of us would have accepted the notion that in the last, let's say decade, the world has changed. China had emerged as a economic, certainly rival to the United States, increasingly a military rival and a technological rival.

And in other words, we were leaving this post-Cold War period of American superpower status into, I don't know, a return of history, a step back into something that looked more like the great power competition of the early, 20th century and, you know, elements of the 19th century and before. I think what's different in this strategy, and I think what maybe should be particularly concerning to Canadians, is, yes, there's a lot about rivalry and the extent to which America now has to, and this doctor, in this strategy, prepare, you know, to confront this geopolitical competitor in the form of China. But what's layered on top of it, which seems new, is this notion of spheres of influence. So that America is

saying very clearly in this, you know, Monroe Doctrine 2.0, North America is, is ours. The hemisphere is ours. We're returning to the early 19th century. And we are basically going to dominate. and if need be, discipline everything from, you know, Venezuela and the Panama Canal through to, I don't know, Greenland and the Northwest Passage. And you, China, Russia, others, you're on notice, don't come into our sphere. If that wasn't bad enough, what is implicit in that? And I think that's why we saw the Kremlin come forward and law at this. new strategy document is that it implies that the other great powers, China most notably, but Russia too, are allowed their spheres of influence. In other words, Janice, are we right to read into this

a quid quo pro between the great powers? In other words, this isn't maybe a moment of great power competition, it in fact could be a moment of great power. I don't know. It's not, maybe it's compromise. I don't know if that's the right word. Maybe it's, it's coordination. Yeah. Yeah. More, more, more worrying. Yeah. Like, what is your thoughts on this? Are we reading too much into it? Or is there something here that's going beyond America first into something that looks like a world that is being divided up between these powers with America sitting there with the, you know, the birthday cake and the biggest knife doling at the slices.

Boy, do I agree with you, Richard. I think that's exactly it. You know, in Canada, we still have a lot of discussion of the rules-based international order. Look, I think that died. Probably began to die a decade ago and has now gone. But here are the new rules, Richard. And because, you know, every order has rules. What matters is are they liberal rules or are they authoritative?

authoritarian rules that says, you're absolutely right, there are now what I would call rules of the road. You stay in my backyard. No foreign intervention. Nobody owns assets in this part of the world that we, the United States, don't like. So that's a very encompassing view of a sphere of influence, much broader than the Monroe Doctrine. And okay, you can do that. You can do this. the same thing, Russia in Eastern Europe and Eurasia and China. You've got concerns about South Asia and the South Asian Sea. Maybe they may even go beyond Taiwan. I get that. I respect that. So here are the rules of the road where we won't bump into each other. This is how we play. We avoid war. We avoid big power war that way. Let's not forget that. But the little ones

along the way they don't really matter. I completely agree. I found it stunning the strategy document. Yeah, and I hope, you know, Tom Freeman had a good piece in the New York Times today that's starting to get at the spheres of influence argument, because this really does warrant some serious debate. And listeners who are maybe, again, doubtful of this, I would just even point to the last week where Trump has now released the up to most recent Navidia chips,

not the very latest, but the chips, basically, that had been subject to a ban, an export ban to China. He's now released those to China. He has remained silent. The administration has largely remained silent on this pretty vocal spat between China and Japan around who's, you know, who's putting missiles where and who's saying what in terms of the new Japanese prime minister about Taiwan. And then just look at the at the schmazel that is the the negotiation, the endless seeming negotiation that the Trump administration has initiated on the future of Ukraine with Russia, which has presupposed, you know, Russia will keep and possibly add Ukrainian territory that it doesn't even occupy at this point to its butcher's bill. And that, you know,

NATO will not be extending membership to Ukraine to provide some kind of lasting security guarantee. I could go on and on with examples of how this strategy is already being enacted. That it's not just, again, and this is a key thing, it's not great power competition, which was kind of how a lot of the American security establishment, you know, the foreign policy elites in America, had been thinking, you know, over the last decade with the rise of China, this is something very different. This is a, as you put it, a division of the world and a, a unwritten or not, there's now rumors that there's a longer version of this document that has been seen by a few reporters that goes even further down this row, creating something called the C5 to replace

the G7 effectively. And trust me, Canada, even though it's called the C5, it ain't in the C5, ladies and gentlemen. Janice, I, you know, I always want to be careful about presentism and kind of putting too much emphasis on this moment where we are right now. But I feel like this doctrine is getting a lot of its tension precisely because it does seem to be both consequential in the letter, but also in the fact and what we're seeing playing out in the ground in Asia and Eastern Europe, you know, in the last seven days. Look, Richard, I agree. Let's add one or two more examples of Vladimir Putin cheered the document when it was issued.

When do you last remember, you know, the leader of Russia coming out and praising a national security document. It's never happened, frankly. Secondly, one of the interesting things is Jiji Ping called Donald Trump two weeks ago partly to ask him to rein in the Japanese prime minister. Now, we don't have the evidence that he has tried to do that, but he certainly has not stepped up in any way in support of her, and her statement was about Taiwan and is very, very tense now between Japan and China. You see no statement coming out of the White House in support of the United States' biggest,

most consequential ally in the Pacific. So why do I attach as much importance to this document? You say, well, you know, they have to do it. They do it every four years. It's just a document. I think it actually reflects the thinking of this administration. You compare this to J.D. Vance's famous Munich speech about civilizational decline in Europe. It's all there, red-yard.

It's all of the piece. This, I think, is the best short document, the published document, 33 pages, to get a sense of how this administration thinks about the world. Yeah, we'll put a link in the show notes to the document. If people want to read it, again, it takes 15, 20 minutes to read. I think everyone should scan it for sure. So let's bring this document back then to Canada. Because if you're sitting there in Ottawa and you know a lot of these players

and you're reading this document, what do you do? Because right now our strategy seems to be, and look, I'm not critical of this, but we saw Mark Carney at the Fief phoony Peace Prize ceremony for Donald J. Trump, a lot of grinning and gripping and smiling, and I presume, laughing at the president's jokes and everyone's trying to kind of humor him along. But the document is the document. And the strategy is the strategy. And we could say, you might want to say, well, this is playing out in Asia.

This is playing out in the Donbass in Eastern Europe. this, you know, what about North America? Well, I would say look at what's happened in Venezuela in the last, you know, 24 hours with the seizure, the illegal seizure of this Venezuelan tanker, which could be, again, part of Venezuela's shadow fleet, illegally exporting oil, but two wrongs don't make a right. This doctrine now is being expressed in the most real terms with Venezuela. It had been previously articulated, not on paper, but in action regarding rhetoric about Greenland, outrageous assumptions about the future sovereignty of Greenland, the Panama Canal. And I guess my question, Janice, is when does this doctrine express itself in relation to Canada?

And what might that look like? because the rest of our hemisphere certainly seems to be subject to this way of thinking. This, again, not great power competition. I think that's yesterday's story. Spheres of influence and dominance of each great power respectively within their sphere of influence. That's right. So look, I think it is already laying itself out. are very, I would say, tense run-up to the renegotiation of the USMCA,

whatever you want to call it, doesn't really matter. You know, the special trade representative held a press conference, and he said, well, the president could just walk away from the deal, give six months notice and walk away. That's true. He can't. We are in it already. Our ambassador to Washington, very capable of women, resigned because she knows we are in the run-up to this.

And, you know, the estimate is it will take at least two years to get this done if it gets done. That agreement is what is sheltering us from U.S. tariffs, frankly. And he can, he's functionally saying, I can behave any way I want because you're a small, power, you're in my sphere of influence. We heard this first on the 51st state. That's a discretion. That fits beautifully. You know, you've written about the Northwest Passage in the Arctic.

So I think we're already living in this world. I think our leaders know it. So what are they doing? Well, they are reopening relationships with China. They are improving relationships. relationships with India. They are doing what they can in the Gulf. There's a lot of attention to Europe. They are doing whatever they can to create options. But Roger, I think you and I both know, doesn't change our geography. No. But even if we're creating options, part of this doctrine when you

read it, the strategy, is that it's not just about foreign rivals coming into the North American Hemisphere dominated by the United States militarily. It is explicit that the United States will not brook economic. What they see is as economic impositions by foreign rivals in North America. So, I mean, great that we're talking to the Chinese doesn't, if you believe that this doctrine is actually as we are seeing being followed out by action and actual policy, I mean, good luck translating that into a, you know, a substantial strategy of diversification. Same with Europe. There's an implication in this document that if you're going to buy the Griffin fighter planes, that that doesn't line up with what America sees.

It mentions in the document sole source contracts to American firms and using American economic dominance and technological, because I know this is something that really concerns you, American technological preeminence in terms of artificial intelligence, cloud services, all these things that millions of Canadian businesses, including the Canadian government, rely on every day, simply to effectively turn the lights on, that they are going to use all those combined assets, technological, economic, and military to create, you know, they're not using the word integrated market, but it certainly sounds like in the document that they are not going to allow Chinese EVs to appear on the streets of Canadian cities or European fighter jets to appear on Canadian military bases.

You know, I don't know, Janice. I start to wonder if this whole strategy of diversification that we've obviously been very keen on because it seems like the most obvious path to kind of blunt, you know, American supremacy over Canada, in fact, isn't itself going to culminate in some kind of crisis with the Americans, where they begin to make it explicit,

and maybe the F-35 is where it will be made explicit, that those options are not on the table for us in terms of the sphere of influence that we now live in. You know, I think it is going to come to a head very quickly, Roger, over the F-35 and the Gripon fighter. Gripon fighters made by sob. there have been very good conversations between Canada and that's partly to diversify

and to get benefits that we would not have under the F-35 that we don't get. They're not military benefits right here. They're economic benefits, right? That's what's on the table. And so, you know, the makers of the F-35 just said, oh, don't worry too much about that. will service the planes in Quebec.

Now, frankly, let's get real. The economic benefits of servicing planes, you don't want to take that home for Christmas. That's all I'll tell you. So just put yourself in the shoes now of any Canadian Prime Minister of Minister of Defense, do you make a decision, which may give you better economic benefits, IP, tech transfer, intellectual property, tech transfer, investment in Canadian companies,

but you risk antagonizing the U.S. President at provoking retaliation because we've just diversified away from a major American company. That's what life is like in Ottawa now every day. Recently, the Monk debates hosted a fascinating debate about the two-state solution, but 90 minutes on this contentious topic can also barely scratch the surface. After all, Israel is a hotbed of conflicting ideologies, identities, interests, and historical narratives. Even for experts, that's a lot to keep up with. And it's not just Israel. The Middle East is changing fast.

Alliances are shifting. New power centers are emerging. And longstanding assumptions are being rewritten in real time. If you want to understand what's really going on, I'd like to invite you to join me on the Call Me Back podcast. I'm Dan Cienor, host of Call Me Back. Our mission is to give you the facts, context, and insights you need to make sense of Israel and the region. Our contributors include some of the best source journalists in Israel like Nadavail and Amit Segal and top thought leaders in the U.S. like Sam Harris and Scott Galloway.

So if you're ready to go deeper, find me on Call Me Back, wherever you get your podcasts. See you there. Just as we had towards the conclusion of the show, we're going to make this show available to our entire audience because we just think it's a really important question in conversation that, you know, deserves to be outside our members-only paywall,

which we normally put the back half of the show inside. And we thank all of our donors and members, and especially, let me just take this moment. Just to quickly thank three new curators this week, Sarah M. Alexander S. And Brian S, thank you so much for becoming a curator, making a significant contribution to our efforts to encourage civil and substantive debate,

including at our most recent debate on a two-state solution. If you are listening to this and you are a donor-to-the-munk debates at any level, you can watch that debate right now on our website. So go do that. But here's my final point to ask for you to weigh in. And again, I hope our listeners take it in the context of me just trying to stir up a little debate here. If we were really to be realistic about this,

and the asymmetries between Canada, the United States, are not just military, and they're not just economic, they're increasingly technological. And again, the vast majority of Canadian businesses are on something called AWS, Amazon Cloud Services. 60%. Government is using all kinds of, of America's technology stack, all the big AI build at a scale that we can never replicate

in terms of the quantity and velocity of spend that's going on underway in the United States to create these massive data centers that are powering these different AI models. So we acknowledge the relationship is massively asymmetrical. And if we acknowledge now that there is a genuine sphere of influence doctrine that is in place, Janice, and again, I don't like to go to this place. It's not a happy place, but is it time to acknowledge that potentially spending tens or maybe hundreds of billions of dollars on some kind of Canada first strategy to supposedly blunt the effects of American technological, economic, and military pressure to reduce our sovereignty and independence

is really a mugs game at the end of the day. That we might, we might, again, this is not something I would relish for a moment, but we might instead want to acknowledge that deeper integration now is a fait of complete, that other options that might have existed for us to remain more independent, more sovereign, distinct, economically, technologically,

militarily, that those doors actually closed a long time. time ago and that after the free trade agreement in the 80s we allowed and we went deep on integration and we in a sense cast our bet our we tied our future of this country after the free trade agreement to the United States and now we've woken up you know in this North American continent with with a madman sharing sharing the first floor of our you know of our our split level house. So Janice, I know that's that's that's that's a cold kind of realist view, but I am a bit concerned that we could be thinking to ourselves that there is some plan B, that there is some get out of jail card. And we could devote years and hundreds of billions of dollars and

massive governmental and social effort to those ends when in fact those ends are just, they're no longer achievable. They weren't even achievable before Trump came along for his second administration. And they're definitely not achievable now that we have this explicit doctrine of spheres of influence in effect. Look, I'm glad you put that on the table right here. I think it's an important argument to consider. And there is a great deal of truth that we made our bet in the 1980s when we signed the first free trade degree. and double down and double down and double down.

But I think it's too early yet to call the debate. Let me put it to you that way. The bet we made, Rudyard, was to integrate our economies, but it wasn't to strip this country of all events manufacturing. It wasn't to have cars made only in the United States. Right? We never signed on. that we would be the heurers of waters

so that we would become only a resource extracting the economy, ship it all to the United States at a discounted price and take what we got and be quiet about it because that's the term, those are the terms Donald Trump is offering now. They are not the terms that we signed on to.

So I think we need to test the boundaries. We need to see how much room we have. For example, will Donald Trump actually retaliate if we announce we're going to buy another fighter? There's cost to him to doing it. There's economic pain in the United States. Every time he does one of these things, you're looking at his numbers.

The polls are back for him right now, Richard. There is a Democrat. mayor in Miami. Just think about that one. Who would have thought that? So there is, and you know, he gave one of his typical Donald Trump's speech where he mocks the word affordability.

I don't know if you caught a clip of that in which he mimicked the Democrats, but that is the issue right now in the American public. I think it's too early yet. This may be the doctrine but is he willing to pay the price to enforce that we have to test that yeah i would agree and i think look but i think in the next 24 so months yeah i think we'll know because we'll have the midterm elections hopefully and it won't simply be whether americans have soured on don't trump it will be are those

elections legitimate are the results right knowledge is there some bigger crisis that that's yet to happen in the United States. And I take your point that that's still to come and we probably shouldn't act until we know. I guess what, and let's end on this, but what I think is a known unknown is that, is what is expressed in this strategy? Is this specific to Trump and specific to this administration?

Or are there broader currents of thinking in here which could not only survive Donald Trump in terms of J.D. Vance, certainly as a future president, would think absolutely this way. But even elements within the Democratic Party who would, they wouldn't dress it up in the same language. It wouldn't be as aggressive or nativist. But there would still be, I guess, to go back to the theme of this whole conversation, there would still be this sense that we're not only in an era of great power rivalry. We are in an era of spheres of influence. The world has been divided. We have divided North America from the rest of the world. And America for the first time since Monroe in the early 19th century is asserting a military technological and economic fiat from the Darien Gap to Greenland

in a way that Canada hasn't experienced since the war of 1812. Let's leave that one. I mean, that's what the next two years will show. You know, Richard, I take a little comfort from the last week of politics inside the United States. Republicans are beginning to push back. We haven't seen that. He had an iron grip on that point. party. They pushed back in Indiana. He was unable. The courts did not give him the right

twice now to proceed with charges against a former governor, federal governor of the bank of the Fed. There's stirrings there. I think this is all in play. And that's why these next two years are so consequential. Yeah. It's darkest before the dawn. It's what I love going into this weekend. Yeah. Good fulsome conversation.

If our listeners are enjoying this and if you're a free listener normally and you've come through now to the back half of the show, you get a sense of what we offer our donors in terms of like a detailed, meaty, hopefully. in reaching conversation that helps you think in bigger, broader ways about international events and global affairs. So urge you to head over to our website, www.munkMUNK, DebateswithanS.com. Join at any one of a series of different donation levels. We'd really appreciate your support. We do not accept government funding.

We're entirely privately funded as an organization, from our podcast to our debates, from STEM to Stern, We rely on your support to do this and to power the monk debates each and every day. So thank you in advance for your contribution. And Janice, we'll do this all again next Friday. We will. Have a good week, Frederick. You too. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Friday Focus podcast.

I'm Roger Griffiths, the chair of the Monk Debates. I'm joined on this program each week by Janice Gross Stein, the founding director of the Monk School of Global Affairs. Janice and I would love to hear. your reactions on what you've just heard on today's program and also your thoughts and suggestions about future topics and ideas that we should be covering on Friday Focus. Please send us your suggestions now to podcast at monkdebates.com. That's MUNK Debateswithan S.com.

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