The United States’ weekend invasion of Venezuela and kidnapping of its president, Nicolás Maduro, forces a harsh reckoning upon Canada and the world. Until now (by which I mean this past weekend now), the unofficial policy of US “allies” – a word that in its current context has no meaning – has been to hope that Trump was an aberration, and that sanity would return to the US and the world upon his death or removal from office.

This fragile hope, tended to like a delicate flower, has underpinned all Canadian and others’ strategies, which can politely be described as a mixture of flattery, appeasement, and a leisurely distancing from the US. Canada and others countries, for the most part, have been acting as if the United States is a potential future threat, not an immediate danger to the international order itself.

That this delusion persisted even after Trump’s November 2024 re-election should be considered an historic mark against all those who indulged in this denial of reality at the cost of preparing on the scale needed to survive as democracies in a world in which the United States is, at best, unreliable and, at worst, a military and economic adversary.

Trump’s brazen violation of sovereignty and international law has shattered the liberal international order. Sovereignty – the idea that states should have supreme control over their territory (I’m simplifying a lot here) – and international law – the idea that states should follow agreed-upon rules (again, huge simplification) – aren’t just norms; they’re foundational, constitutional norms. If you change them, you change the entire game you’re playing. Take hockey sticks of hockey and replace the puck with a round ball and you’re still playing a sport, but it’s no longer hockey. That’s where we are now in global politics.

(As I’m writing this, Janice Gross Stein is telling Matt Galloway on CBC’s The Current, “The liberal international order is dead.” So you don’t just have to take my word for it.)

The US act of war against Venezuela is categorically different from the many, many other times it’s violated both international law and other countries’ sovereignty. This time around,Trump and co didn’t even bother to try to pretend they were following international law.

Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue. The political scientist Stephen Krasner calls sovereignty an “organized hypocrisy”: it’s violated a lot, but it remained the fundamental organizing principle of the international system. As grating as hypocrisy is, its presence is the difference between undermining a norm that remains active, and one that’s been put in the ground. The US invasion was many things, but it wasn’t hypocritical. They’re doing exactly what they said they’d do, following a justification they set out in their just-released National Security Strategy: whatever they want, because they want to.

That’s how you kill a norm: by acting as if it doesn’t exist.

No going back

Trump’s re-election and his subsequent actions have set in motion events that will make it almost impossible to return to the liberal international status quo ante. The United States’ economic and military superpower status give it an outsized role in shaping global politics. Since World War II, it’s promoted sovereignty, multilateralism and the rule of law as constitutional principles. If the US no longe abides by these principles, the rest of us have to deal with it.

In the absence of a liberal international order, another politics will prevail. In this case, we’re likely heading toward spheres of influence – something that’s been in the cards since Trump I (see, e.g., Chrystia Freeland’s concept of “friendshoring”) – and might makes right.

Most importantly, if and when Trumpism (let alone Trump) is defeated in the US, any new administration will have to act in the world as it exists, not as it was in 2015. A weakened US, relative to rivals like China (which would be totally OK with a spheres of influence world), in a world of great power politics will almost be forced to act like a great power to satisfy its own economic, social, and security needs and appetites.

That’s what it means to lose the liberal international order. And Canada as a whole has yet to come to terms with the full implications of this loss.

Canada’s two-dimensional debate: All roads lead to integration

The Venezuelan invasion, as well as Trump’s follow-on threats to invade Greenland and Mexico, have reminded everyone that, Oh shit, Trump is an immediate and direct threat to the world.

Our leaders’ reactions to the invasion have been immensely, if dismayingly, clarifying, in a way that months of “elbows up” and nationalist rhetoric hasn’t been.

Let’s start with Mark Carney. In his statement, he called “on all parties to respect international law.” As many people have pointed out, he blatantly ignores (unlike Mexico) that the violation has already occurred. As many others have also pointed out, this kid gloves treatment is of a part with his actions in power, where he has gone out of his way to avoid offending or criticizing Trump or the United States on pretty much anything.

As John Ibbitson summarized it in the January 5 Globe and Mail:

The Liberal government is anxious to do or say nothing that will offend the Trump administration, as Ottawa prepares to defend the vital Canada-United States-Mexico trade agreement. Rightly or wrongly, in responding to the American strike on Venezuela, Mr. Carney spoke softly and carried no stick.

In contrast to Carney’s timidity, Ibbitson remarked, “Conservatives cheered Mr. Trump on.” Pierre Poilievre offered “Congratulations to President Trump for the arrest of the narco-terrorist and socialist dictator Nicolas Maduro, who should spend the rest of his days in prison.”

While their topic was ostensibly Venezuela, their two statements also reflect their views of how Canada should approach its relationship with the United States. Both statements actually map cleanly onto the taxonomy that Mitchell Sharp laid out over 50 years ago when discussing Canada’s options for dealing with the United States.

• Option one: Reactive, adjust as needed to respond to US actions.
• Option two: Deeper integration.
• Option three: Transformative and strategic reduction of Canadian dependence on the United States.

Of the two, Poilievre’s views are clearest. His rhetoric clearly reflects a preference for Sharp’s Second Option: deeper integration with the United States, larded with a comfort with the fascist MAGA wing of US politics.

Mark Carney, at first glance, is a bit more difficult to place. His early rhetoric and claims of nation building via infrastructure, defence spending, trade agreements and, uh, slashing government spending, convinced a lot of people that he was a Third Option guy. But his ongoing refusal to call out the United States, or to risk upsetting the US on any sensitive file from telecoms and digital policy to border security and military cooperation, tells another story.

In reality, Carney’s policies are the very embodiment of Sharp’s First Option: a reactive approach that leaves the underlying status quo unchanged.

As Sharp noted, a reactive, status quo-focused First Option approach is fully compatible with pursuing policies like new trade agreements, if they don’t upset the underlying dynamics of the Canada-US relationship, which Carney is being very careful not to do. For example, caving on the Digital Services Tax (in return for nothing), entertaining the notion of joining the proposed US “Golden Dome” missile defence system (the literal opposite of distancing oneself from the US), refusing to change the US travel advisory to reflect the real danger to Canadians of crossing the border (even as US government agents have escalated to murdering civilians in broad daylight), and, most recently, a refusal to directly and forcefully condemn a blatant violation of sovereignty and international law that directly threatens Canada.

Even Carney’s military build-up is about buying more stuff, not challenging underlying Canada-US military integration. Neither Carney nor the Canadian military has gone so far as to identify the US as a potential threat or (more importantly) to take steps to reduce Canadian integration with US forces that have just shown us exactly how much they care about international law.

Or consider Carney’s mealy-mouthed statement on worries that the US might invade Greenland: “We stand with Denmark, we stand with Greenland, our closest partnership is with the United States, and we’ll work with everybody to make sure we move forward together.” As The Beaverton writer Clare Blackwood caustically noted on Bluesky:

i just don’t think you get to say ‘America wants our land, our resources, our water, our country. But these are not idle threats. President Trump is trying to break us so that America can own us. That will never, that will never ever happen’ in your election speech and then say stuff like this

The First Option, it turns out, is not that different from the Second. The big difference is that while Poilievre would openly embrace the United States in its current form, policy inertia would carry Carney, and Canada, to the same outcome: deeper US integration. From this perspective, the biggest difference between Carney and Poilievre is over the terms of integration, not the final destination.

In fairness to Carney, it’s significant that he has not yet signed any agreement with the United States/Trump. The most generous interpretation of his actions is that he recognizes that signing an agreement with an untrustworthy partner is pointless (though that didn’t stop him from axing the DST), and so he’s stringing Trump along until Trump dies or is removed from power, and sanity returns to the US.

Again, though, this approach suggests a bias toward a status quo that, as I’ve suggested, ain’t coming back.

Carney’s economic Maginot Line

The fundamental point remains: Carney’s extreme reluctance to challenge the United States on issues of core, conflicting interest to Canada and the US demonstrates a reluctance to challenge the United States in a way that’s necessary to actually protect Canadian autonomy, which Carney claims is his main goal. His are First Option, status quo policies dressed up as a Third Option transformation.

The distinction matters because it’s preventing a serious, informed debate about the future of Canada-US relations. By presenting his economic development policy suite as standing up to the United States rather than an attempt to maintain the status quo with a belligerent adversary, Carney is selling Canadians an economic Maginot Line. Carney’s policies, designed to promote productivity, attract investment, and stimulate growth are based on the assumption that the US threat is primarily economic and can be addressed through standard conservative economic policies.

But like the historical Maginot Line, these policies are facing in the wrong direction, neglecting the actual, political, threat: domination by an authoritarian giant in a transformed international system. No number of trade agreements or oh-so-clever pipeline deals are suitable for confronting the challenge poised by a neighbouring superpower that has claimed the right to take what it wants, and nothing Carney has proposed fits the bill. The challenge from the United States cannot be solved by increasing Canadian productivity, nor can the government austerity its way toward greater Canadian independence.

Needed: An actual Third Option

That Poilievre and Carney’s integration-friendly ideas are defining the contours of the Canadian debate is discouraging. Carney’s continued use of Third Option rhetoric while pursuing First Option policies has injected serious confusion into the overall discussion. As a result, we’ve had a debate using Third Option language (e.g., the relationship is over) to sell Carney’s First Option-style policies, but without actually considering Third Option-type ideas.

That needs to change. We need to expand the discussion to consider seriously Sharp’s Third Option: Actually taking steps to reduce Canadian dependence on the United States. This policy stance is, I believe, what Canadians thought they were voting for when they voted for Carney.

Pursuing a Third Option, as Sharp recognized, involves more than simply adjusting the amount we export to the US. It would require changing the basis of the relationship with the United States and the world. It would require, at minimum, serious, transformative, moonshot-style amounts of money spent on infrastructure, not simply hurrying along projects already in the pipeline. It would require more, not less, spending on a higher-capacity federal government; and serious attention to governance issues, not simply depending on one man to make deals.

It would also require attention to questions regarding control over software and digital communications, including social media, as well as governance of the military and security services: not just buying more weapons, but ensuring that the military and security services aren’t simply an auxiliary of a US war machine that has already demonstrated a lack of commitment to international law and human rights.

A transformed world calls out for transformative policies, a Third Option-style attention to implementing policies that fit the world as it is, not as it was.

Thinking seriously about the challenges Canada faces with regard to an unstable, unreliable, imperialist United States would also involve an uncomfortable honesty about our situation that our leaders have been reluctant to provide, but which we must face:

• We are trapped on a continent with a superpower that (to be generous to a fault) can no longer be counted upon to respect sovereignty, international laws or treaties. That needs certain things (resources, water, physical security) that we have or, in the case of physical security, are expected to provide.
• Further: Unlike Ukraine, our strategic value to Europe is minimal, so we can’t count on anyone coming to save us.
• Further: Whose economy, by design as well as “natural” inclination, is deeply integrated with that of the United States.

Making things worse, as Carney has likely intuited, attempts to distance ourselves from the United States in any meaningful way will be met with a pushback that Sharp could barely imagine, writing as he was at a time when our two countries shared common values like respect for democracy, human rights, multilateralism and the rule of law.

Those are the stakes, and the risks. They’re really serious, and really worrisome. But pretending otherwise or misdisagnosing the problem are surefire ways to ensure that we don’t act as we must.

Historically, deeper integration has been the easier, more attractive option for Canada. But the US slide into authoritarianism has increased the cost of such integration to include compromising core Canadian values, including self-governance and the rule of law. It also makes the need to pursue a Third Option almost a categorical imperative, no matter the cost.

We need policies that can realistically deal with the actual, deep challenges we face. Addressing and overcoming these challenges will require much more than a few trade deals, AI and a wind farm. We need creative policies and new ways of doing domestic and international politics.

It will also come with costs. The implicit promise in Mark Carney’s economics-focused agenda is that we can minimize these costs: that while Canada currently does not have the ability to resist substantively the United States, his plan will allow us to do so sometime in the future.

This is a false hope. The reality is, Canada will never be able to get to this promised land. There will always be a cost to defying the United States on anything they deem important. Given the intimate nature of the countries’ relationship, we will always face such sticking points. And almost by definition, so long as we’re in a might-makes-right world, any meaningful steps we try take away from them will be treated as a threat.

That doesn’t mean that pursuing a Third Option is impossible or that appeasement is our best strategy. Rather, it means that we have to honestly acknowledge that preserving an independent, liberal, human rights-respecting democracy in the northern part of North America comes at a cost, and go from there.

Canadians need to ask and answer three questions: How much is our independence, our liberal democracy, worth? Are Mark Carney’s policies really up to the task of protecting Canadian independence? And what would actual Third Policy programs, capable of protecting Canadian sovereignty, look like?

Time is running out.