Is it finally starting to sink in?
Separating European and Canadian wheat from American chaff will be painful, but it's necessary to our common survival. Europe knows that now. Do Canadians?
Unfinished business
Following on last Monday’s magazine-style edition of the Real Story, I put in a couple of double shifts for the National Post that picked up on the threads in that newsletter. This afternoon’s edition will be link-rich. Best to read through and come back to the clicks when you’re done.
I’m still working on that deep background piece I promised on the role that Trumpist lieutenant Elon Musk is playing as the apex predator of a new and agressive global media ecosystem. It isn’t easy keeping up with the complex and overpowering dezinformatziya the Lord of the Flies is mainlining into the liberal democracies’ public consciousness. It’s far worse than I thought, let me tell you.
I began that project last Monday under the heading The “MSM” is no longer the “MSM.” As the term is ordinarily understood and deployed, there is no such thing as the “mainstream media” anymore.
Canada appears to be a key arena in Musk’s zone-flooding exertions. It’s no coincidence that another of Musk’s major targets is the far-flung community of independent journalists and media organizations devoted to exposing corruption in the Moscow-aligned autocracies. You’ll see.
There will be some frank and candid talk about all this on the far side of the paywall. I’ll probably lose some paying customers. Oh well. I just need to be clear about where I’m coming from, and up front I’ll remind subscribers that I’m one of about 300 Canadians who have been formally sanctioned by Moscow and officially barred from returning to Russia.
So that’s the grain of salt you’re welcome to take in order to make certain uncomfortable facts easier for you to swallow. Final preambular note: Today is the anniversary of the murder of the great Russian patriot, opposition leader and anti-corruption activist Alexeii Navalny, who may have been Russia’s last hope. I write this newsletter in his blessed memory.
The state of play in the collapse of Pax Americana
In Wednesday’s National Post: Forget it, Trump. Canadians won't cave. The tariff war is going to be bitterly painful for a lot of us, no matter how this macabre drama plays out. But it looks like we’re up to it.
That might strike you as an overly optimistic prognosis of the state of Canadian pluck. But there’s a rich vein of data supporting it from a survey of opinion polls that reveal, among other things, a greater distance between the overwhelming majority of us, on the one hand - yes, even Albertans - and Canada’s political class on the other.
It’s a much deeper chasm than the you’ll find even in the relatively petty differences between our undead Liberal prime minister Justin Trudeau and Alberta’s premier and oilpatch avatar Danielle Smith.
I know. It’s gone almost entirely unreported, and it’s very weird.
My Weekend Post essay: Trump chooses dishonour in Europe. Following Ukraine betrayal, U.S. no longer deserves seat at G7, NATO. My takeaway on the Americans in Munich this week: Say what we must about Neville Chamberlain’s disastrous 1938 Munich Agreement with Adolf Hitler, at least he didn’t go over to the other side.
Think I’m being too hard line? I’m not alone, as you’ll see below.
The United States’ betrayal of NATO and Ukraine is developing very quickly. From my weekend Post piece: Trump has been clear that he expects European troops to police American “security guarantees” in Ukraine, which Zelenskyy is expected to earn by presenting the Americans with what Trump has called “the equivalent of, like, $500 billion worth of rare earths.”
It turns out Trump’s attempt at the extortion of the wounded and shellshocked free people of Ukraine isn’t going as smoothly as he’d hoped. On Sunday, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy blocked the minerals deal Trump had put on the table. It turns out that Ukrainians don’t want to surrender a fifth of their country to the terrorist regime that has been making war on them only to play the role of an American resource colony policed by a pressganged European gendarmerie. “Ukraine will never accept deals made behind our backs,” Zelenskyy said.
It’s no coincidence that Trump sees exactly the same role for Canada. We are to accept our place as a subservient American resource colony or be reduced to the 51st American state.
And no, I’m not being too hard on the Americans.
Here’s The Economist: “Fears of a Munich-like cave-in to Mr Putin were inflamed by the way that Mr Trump began his bid for peace in Ukraine. The president and his defence secretary offered a blizzard of unilateral concessions to Russia: reciprocal visits to Washington and Moscow, which have not taken place for nearly two decades; a suggestion that Russia should re-join the G7; and a public acknowledgment that Ukraine would not restore its pre-war borders, join NATO or enjoy the alliance’s protection for any European peacekeeping forces there.”
I’m pleased to see that Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre and long-shot Liberal leadership hopeful Chrystia Freeland are on the same page about Trump’s intention to recreate the G8 with Putin’s re-admission. Canadians who pay attention to these things might recall that it was former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper who led the charge to expel Putin in the first place. I’m really starting to miss that guy.
I have no idea whether we can get our act together fast enough. To my way of thinking, rather than re-invent the wheel, ideally the liberal democracies would rapidly reconfigure a new NATO, with Ukraine a founding member, without the United States, Turkey, or Viktor Orban’s hopelessly compromised Hungary.
I’m content for the moment to know that at least the penny is beginning to drop. The hour is much later than most people think, or was later than most people thought, anyway, until this past week.
And at least I’m not alone.
Here’s David J. Bercuson, the University of Calgary’s director emeritus of the Centre for Military, Security and Strategic Studies: Canada must prepare for a future without the United States. Here’s the National Post’s Adam Zivo, back from Ukraine: Trump’s peace plan would set Ukraine up for future Russian invasion.
Then there’s Mark Norman, formerly vice-chief of the Canadian defence staff and vice-admiral of the Canadian navy. In my Wednesday column I noticed that Norman’s assessment was consistent with my own, that Canada’s reaction to U.S. president Donald Trump’s unprecedented threats and provocations have been too “tactical, reactive and transactional,” in Norman’s words.
Norman proposed that Canada cut to the chase and invoke NATO’s Article 4, which would oblige the alliance to convene whenever “the territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the Parties is threatened.” Canada faces exactly that kind of threat, and it’s the United States that’s doing the threatening, which has got to be grounds for expulsion.
Here’s Norman laying out his case to its logical conclusion in the Weekend Post: Canada's relationship with the U.S. can't be saved. We are under attack and must act accordingly.
By all means yes, a dollar-for-dollar tariff retaliation against Trump’s assaults, and sure, an all-Canadian corridor for hydro transmission lines and oil and natural gas pipelines from the Pacific to the Atlantic, and good riddance to the encumbrance of interprovincial trade barriers. That suff should be no-brainers by now.
But a dramatic re-investment in Canada’s military capacity should be at the very top of any new federal government’s order of priorities, in tandem with a radical reconfiguration of Canada’s military, diplomatic and trade alliances.
About those “tactical, reactive and transactional” measures. . .
Simply pumping more oil into pipelines to the west coast will mostly benefit Beijing. Liberal leadership frontrunner Marc Carney wouldn’t mind, of course, because he’s Beijing’s guy. That Security and Intelligence Threats to Elections (SITE) Task Force finding has made this clear and plain.
More oil pumped to the Pacific coast would only hasten the substitution of a hostile American overlord with a voracious Chinese hegemon, and the multinational oil companies’ opportunism has sucked enough oxygen out of the room already. Their cause has been gallantly championed by Alberta’s Premier Smith, who is currently bogged down in a corruption scandal, but we need to face it.
We’ve become too dependent on foreign trade, too dependent on U.S. markets, obviously, and too dependent on oil exports. Whatever damage was done by crazy leftoid environmentalists or those Eastern bastards or an overburden of bothersome regulations, the oilsands aren’t coming back. The glory days are over. It’s the economics of it. The numbers just don’t add up.
What’s with all those Russian soldiers, marching westward?
In Munich, Zelenskyy argued that the time has finally come to put everybody’s shoulders behind an "armed forces of Europe." I doubt that Europe’s current generation of cheese-eating surrender monkeys will be able to build something like that fast enough from the wreckage. But time is wasting.
Ukrainian intelligence agencies are convinced that Putin is mobilizing between 100,000 and 150,000 troops to enter Belarus, the police state run by Aleksandr Lukashenko, Putin’s fat marionette in Minsk. Which NATO state are those troops intended to invade? Lithuania? Latvia? Estonia? Poland? Are these forces gathering for an final attack on Ukraine? Zelenskyy asked that question in Munich: “Perhaps they are for you, for Europe. Are your armies ready? How soon will your allies respond, if at all?"
Meanwhile, French president Emmanuel Macron has invited Europe’s major powers to Paris on Monday to sort out what their next steps might be. It would be an “informal” gathering, not enough to frighten the Euroweenies or provoke Putin or anger Trump.
The heads of government from Germany, Britain, Italy, Poland, Spain, the Netherlands and Denmark are expected to be there. So will the presidents of the European Council and the European Commission and Mark Rutte, the current secretary-general of NATO.
And now for some really nasty background to all this. With Canadian content.