By Stephen R. Nagy
Sunday, April 12, 2026
There is a comfortable orthodoxy settling over editorial
boards, university seminars, and policy conferences from Ottawa to Brussels. It
goes something like this: Donald Trump broke the international order, the
United States is an unreliable partner, and the remedy is diversification —
toward China, toward the BRICS bloc of emerging economies (including players
like Brazil, Russia, and India), toward anyone who is not Washington. This
narrative is not merely incomplete, it is dangerously wrong, and the countries indulging
in it are squandering what little time they have to prepare for a world that is
about to change in ways that have nothing to do with who occupies the Oval
Office.
Let’s begin with the diversification fantasy. Canada in
particular has spent considerable political energy signaling that it can
meaningfully reduce its economic dependence on the United States. The
arithmetic tells a different story. Roughly 75 percent of Canadian exports flow
south. The infrastructure — pipelines, rail corridors, and supply chains — is
integrated on a north-south axis that took the better part of a century to
build. As Michael Hart has argued, the Canadian-American economic
relationship is not a policy choice; it is a geographic and structural reality.
Talking about diversification may win applause at Davos panels, but it does not build liquified natural gas
(LNG) terminals, nor conjure new consumer markets out of thin air.
The second delusion is that China represents a viable
alternative anchor for liberal democracies. But Beijing’s long-term strategy is
now well-documented. The Belt and Road Initiative, the Global Development
Initiative, the Global Security Initiative, the Global Civilization Initiative,
and the expanding architecture of BRICS are not charitable enterprises. They
are institutional instruments designed to construct a parallel international
order — one in which sovereignty is defined as regime security, human rights
are culturally relative, and the rule of law is subordinate to the rule of
party. Elizabeth Economy has argued persuasively that Xi Jinping’s
China is not joining the existing order; it’s seeking to revise it from within
and, where necessary, replace it from without. Canada, the European Union, and
the broader constellation of democracies benefit enormously from the
institutional architecture that emerged after 1945 — open trade adjudication,
treaty-based security, and freedom of navigation. To flirt with Beijing as a
counterweight to Washington is to saw off the branch on which one is sitting.
Third, and perhaps most corrosive, is the notion that
Trump and the United States are the root cause of dysfunction in the
international system and at home. China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea have
been working to revamp and replace the international system since the end of
the Cold War. Rather than being an instigator of the dysfunction, the U.S. has
defended the international order.
Blaming the U.S. for socio-economic problems at home is
an exercise in scapegoating dressed up as analysis. Canada’s productivity
crisis did not begin in 2017. The European Union’s demographic stagnation,
regulatory sclerosis, and energy vulnerability were not created in Mar-a-Lago.
Britain’s post-Brexit turbulence was a sovereign British decision. The
high-quality data — from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development, the IMF, the Bank for International Settlements — consistently
points to domestic governance failures as the primary drivers of sluggish
growth, housing unaffordability, and declining competitiveness across the
Western world. As Fareed Zakaria notes in Foreign Affairs, the
crisis of liberal democracy is largely self-inflicted, a product of decades of
deferred structural reform and political systems that reward short-term
consumption over long-term investment. Blaming America is easy. Reforming
pension systems, rationalizing health-care spending, and liberalizing planning
regimes are all hard. Democracies are choosing the easy path, and it leads
nowhere useful.
There is also an uncomfortable illiberal undercurrent in
fashionable anti-Americanism that deserves scrutiny. The United States, for all
its polarization and dysfunction, remains the society in which citizens can
write, speak, protest, and publish virtually without restraint. Can the same be
said of the alternatives on offer? Can it be said of Beijing, where a single
social media post can result in detention? Of Moscow, where independent
journalism is functionally extinct? The reflex to equate American imperfection
with villainy betrays a moral confusion that would be laughable if its
consequences were not so serious.
Now consider what is actually coming. Over the next five
to ten years, the world will be entering a period of simultaneous leadership
transitions in the four most consequential states outside Europe, and almost no
one in the policy establishment is adequately preparing for it.
The United States will eventually move beyond Trump. But
what will replace MAGA? The movement has restructured the Republican Party’s
coalition around economic nationalism, skepticism of alliance commitments, and
a transactional view of trade. That ideological infrastructure will not vanish
with one man. As Walter Russell Mead has written, Jacksonian nationalism is not an aberration in American
political culture, but a deep current. Allies who are simply waiting for Trump
to leave are waiting for a restoration that is unlikely to arrive in the form
they imagine.
China faces an even more consequential transition. Xi
Jinping has systematically eliminated rivals, abolished term limits, and
concentrated power to a degree unseen since Mao. History suggests — and scholars like Jude Blanchette have detailed — that when
a paramount leader of Xi’s type exits the scene, China turns inward. Succession
struggles consume political oxygen. Factional competition paralyzes
decision-making. The interregnum enduring bipolarity could last years. How the
world manages a distracted, unstable, nuclear-armed China with the world’s
second-largest economy is a question of the first order. It is receiving
attention of the third order.
Russia after Putin is unlikely to be a moderated Russia.
The institutional bench behind Putin is populated not by liberals, but by
security-state hardliners and ultranationalists who view the current regime as
insufficiently aggressive. As Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Erica Frantz have argued,
personalist autocracies rarely transition to moderation; they transition to
chaos or to something harder. A post-Putin Russia armed with 6,000 nuclear
warheads and led by someone to Putin’s right is a scenario that demands
preparation now.
India, too, is in flux. Narendra Modi’s vision of a
Hindu-majoritarian state that asserts civilizational confidence on the global
stage has transformed Indian domestic politics. When Modi eventually leaves
office, the question is not whether Hindu nationalism endures, but what form it
takes and how a more assertive India interacts with an Indo-Pacific already
strained by Sino-American competition. This is a first-tier strategic question
for every democracy with interests east of Suez.
Layered on top of all this are structural disruptions
that respect no political calendar: the coming tsunami of artificial
intelligence displacing white-collar labor at a scale and speed for which no
government has a credible plan; birth rates across the developed world falling
below replacement and, increasingly, across the developing world; aging
populations consuming ever-larger shares of national budgets; and the uneven
but accelerating impacts of climate change on agriculture, migration, and state
stability.
These are the issues that will define the next 25 years.
Not Trump’s tariffs. Not the latest inflammatory social media post from
Washington. Not the satisfying but ultimately sterile exercise of anti-American
virtue signaling.
When you engage exclusively with a certain demographic of
media commentator, academic, or policy analyst — the kind who populate panels
and podcasts with a reliably rewarded anti-Trump lens — you receive answers
that reinforce your priors. Confirmation bias is not a strategy. It’s a
sedative. And countries that are sedated while the world transforms around them
do not get second chances.
Canada and its allies need to do something deeply unfashionable: Stop staring at Washington and start staring in the mirror. The big picture is not about Donald Trump. It never was.
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