Trump, Putin & Xi Vs. Liberal Democracy
The new world order's axis will prevail unless and until Conservatives lose the Trumpist millstones around their necks and Liberals decide to be liberal again.
Do we fight back or do we lay low and wait?
That’s probably too simplistic a characterization of the question before us all because if the point is to resist entombment in the new dystopia, both strategies are respectable choices.
But if you’ve succumbed to the hysteria our propaganda-enfeebled “mainstream media” has been inciting - and no, I don’t mean what the term “MSM” is ordinarily meant to mean - you will choose neither.
By “mainstream media” I mean what I described in this recent edition of The Real Story, under the subheads The “MSM” is no longer the “MSM” and The New Fourth Estate. It’s the newly dominant and rapidly expanding AI-enhanced media ecosystem patrolled by the X Panopticon, where U.S. president Donald Trump’s consigliere Elon Musk is the apex predator. It’s all Axis propaganda all the time with that guy.
Before we get into it:
Last Sunday (in Is It Finally Starting to Sink In?) I mentioned that I was pretty deep into a research project involving the dezinformatziya Musk has been mainlining into the public consciousness of the world’s liberal democracies, and I noted that it’s far worse than I thought. I can now say it’s even worse than the far worse I thought it was, and Canada has been hit with the full force of it. I’ll have a synopsis of what I’ve found, and some of the findings from other journalists, any day now.
On the subject of the recent avalanche of Trump-Musk lies about Ukraine, just so you know: Volodymyr Zelenskyy is not a dictator. Ukrainian law prohibits holding elections in wartime, and in any case Zelenskyy was elected by a 72 percent landslide in 2019 and he remains at a far higher approval rating (around 57 percent) than Trump enjoys (44 percent). And no, the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) that produced these poll results is not funded by USAID, and even if it was, so what?
Do I really need to provide links to show that Trump is talking malicious gibberish when he blames Ukraine for starting the war? Do you really need to have it spelled out for you that Russia invaded and seized nearly a fifth of Ukraine’s territory in 2014 and then three years ago launched a full-on war of conquest and subjugation?
Also, Europe provides at least as much direct aid to Ukraine as the United States does; Ukraine has not misused or “lost” half of the aid the United States has provided. Do you need to have it explained to you that Tucker (“demons tore at my flesh”) Carlson is lying through his teeth whe he says Ukraine is selling massive tranches of U.S.-supplied arms to Mexican crime cartels? Russia’s official Tass news agency just eats that stuff up. If anyone reading this newsletter does, I can’t help you.
Strengthen the things that remain
That subhead is from Chapter 3 v2 of the Apocalypse of Saint John, and I’m not trying to be melodramatic. It just happens to be the thinking behind my latest piece for the National Post: The U.S. wanted it this way, and now Trump is reneging on the deal. NATO was set up to nourish American power, not the other way around.
I reckoned it was important to set that out after thrashing through the thicket of storylines like these: Allies appear to duck and cover as Trump threatens Canada and Greenland; Canada lacks friends when it needs them most as Trump’s northern onslaught intensifies; Why aren't Canada's allies standing up to Trump's annexation threats?
In the Post, I answer those questions this way: Europeans should not be expected to stand up for Canada so long as Canada refuses to stand up for itself. The main reason we aren’t effectively standing up for ourselves is that our sort-of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau relinquished his Parliamentary mandate by convincing Governor General Mary Simon to lock the doors of the House of Commons on Jan. 6.
So what to do? Well, duck and cover all you want, and I get it. But Canada needs to strengthen our military, diplomatic and trade relationships with our real allies, and the United States is no longer among them. Donald Trump has explicitly abdicated from the NATO member states’ mutual-defence obligations, just for starters.
In the existential matter of Ukraine, Donald Trump has unambiguously joined the Russian side. And if you think he’s not courting Xi Jinping, Putin’s primary security guarantor and banker, you haven’t been paying attention. Here’s Trump five years ago: “We love each other.”
So we need to strengthen the things that remain. The Group of 7 is one of the few multilateral institutions that has not been compromised by China, Russia, or the United States - despite Trump’s efforts to sabotage the G7, on Russia’s behalf, during his 2017-2021 presidency.
Canada holds the G7’s annually-rotating presidency this year, and at the June summit in Kananaskis, Trump cannot be permitted to get away with blowing it up as he did the last time the G7 convened in Canada, in Charlevoix, in 2018. Then, as now, Trump is insisting on the reinstatement of Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
It was owing mainly to the efforts of former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper that the G8 was pared down to the G7 with the expulsion of Russia over its bloody invasion of Eastern Ukraine and its annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula in 2014 (I’ll have more about Harper down below the paywall; for whatever his “world stage” faults in recent years, Harper has been downright heroic lately).
My point: We need to strengthen the G7. If for no other reasons than Trump’s crippling, irrational tariff wars waged against America’s trade partners, his threats to employ “economic force” to extort Canada’s surrender and annexation as the 51st American state, and his unilateral abrogation of the U.S.-Canada-Mexico Agreement, we should tell Trump that he will not be permitted to set foot in this country.
If we want to be taken seriously by our G7 counterparts in the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Germany and Japan, we cannot submit to the indignity and the humiliation of permitting Trump’s presence on Canadian soil. The American president has openly declared himself a foreign adversary, a threat to Canada’s national security and our sovereignty. He should be told to stay the hell away from us.
If we can’t muster the self-respect and the gumption to stand up to Trump on our own behalf, then at least we should take some stand on behalf of Ukraine, and as a gesture of solidarity with our European allies.
About Trump and China
I’ll have more later about the stupidity of certain Canadians, which I’ve touched on elsewhere, who think we can or should somehow offset the damage we’re likely to sustain from Trump’s tariff war by turning to China for help, tradewise.
For the moment, it should be enough to remind readers that ten years ago, the Liberal Party had been transformed into the political wing of the Canada-China Business Council, and the Prime Minister’s Office was the most fortuitously placed Chinese influence asset in the western world. Nowadays, Liberal frontrunner Marc Carney is China’s guy. He’s been to and from Beijing in his various capacities over the past decade more times than I can count.
So it’s not like Ottawa is in a position to notice anything unscrupulous about what Trump is up to now. This is yet another reason why quite a few of our European allies might not take Canada very seriously now that Trump is gearing up to strike a grand bargain with China along the same lines as his abandonment of NATO for a grand bargain with Russia.
Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump already have a lot more in common than is ordinarily acknowledged, and the three of them are already well on their way to ushering in a new imperial age. As you might imagine, while everyone in the NATO capitals was watching with disgust as Washington and Moscow exchanged vows last week, China was falling all over itself in enthusiastic approval. Trump has lately joined Xi and Putin in blaming “NATO expansion” for Ukraine’s agonies.
If Trump is so willing to adopt the Moscow-Beijing standpoint on Ukraine - that it is not a country entitled to its own territory, its own sovereignty, its own decisions about the democratic alliances it might want to join - it’s hard to imagine the White House objecting to Xi Jinping’s determination to assert Beijing’s “sacred” entitlement to Taiwan. As Gideon Rachman puts it: “Putin and Xi’s expansionist foreign policies go hand in hand with a cult of personality at home and political repression. Trump’s overseas ambitions are combined with an intense focus on crushing ‘the enemy within’.
“Elon Musk, who is doing much of the crushing, has said that he thinks about the fate of the Roman empire every day and suggested that America might need a ‘modern-day Sulla’ — a Roman dictator who murdered hundreds of his opponents, while reforming the state. You have been warned.”
Before returning to some Canadian content that will surely upset the delicate sensibilities of certain of my “conservative” Canadian subscribers - I will want a word with Albertan sovereignists, particularly - I’ll start with something that may well upset certain of my American subscribers. Sorry, but I need to get it off my chest.
It’s a synopsis of the National Post essay’s content that directly addresses some comforting myths about the trajectory of America’s dominance in NATO over the past 76 years. These myths have been in wide circulation on both sides of the border in recent weeks. I’ll rearticulate those points in the Post, except in the language of common speech.