SOURCE :- THE AGE NEWS
Washington: Early in his second term, US President Donald Trump wanted Canada so entwined with the United States that he even set out to make it the 51st state. Instead, he has driven Canada into the arms of the European Union after antagonising the Canadians for months, taunting the country’s prime minister and waging a relentless trade war.
The invitation by the European Union for Canada to become an “associate member” is a sign of the knock-on effects of Trump’s brand of diplomacy, which often involves threatening countries that once were considered America’s closest friends.
And even if the gesture by the EU ends up being more symbolic than substantive, it shows how Trump is upending global relationships in ways that will be difficult to undo.
“We should see this action from Canada and the EU as a direct consequence of Trump’s actions and rhetoric,” said James Batchik, a deputy director at the Atlantic Council’s Europe Centre. The rhetoric around making Canada the 51st state, he added, “and the threats against Greenland, which are still highly, highly controversial and remembered in Brussels, are really reminders for both sides that the United States is not necessarily that trusted ally that it once was”.
At every turn, Trump’s bullying approach to Canada has appeared to backfire. His trade war stirred up trouble for embattled Republicans in swing states, endangering GOP control of the Senate. And his hostility towards Canadian leaders helped surge the country’s struggling liberal party, no friend of Trump’s, to electoral victory.
A White House spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
Trump’s battle with Canada is part of his striking focus on a western hemisphere that recent presidents, typically consumed with the Middle East and Asia, have often neglected.
Trump, emboldened after a US operation that toppled the leader of Venezuela, has set his sights this year on other countries in the western hemisphere. He has applied massive economic pressure against Cuba and proposed a “friendly takeover”. He has threatened to seize the Panama Canal and to wrest the North American island of Greenland from Denmark.
In an update of the Monroe Doctrine, the 1823 foundational statement of US claims over the western hemisphere, with what he called the “Trump Corollary”, Trump formally declared that “the American people – not foreign nations nor globalist institutions – will always control their own destiny in our hemisphere”.
(Trump often refers to the concept as the “Donroe Doctrine”, named after himself.)
In the cases of Cuba and Venezuela, Trump’s policies are led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a Cuban American whose interest in Latin America is driven by his strong anti-socialist ideology. Rubio has shown far less public enthusiasm for Trump’s territorial claims than he does for democratising the region.
But Trump’s fixation with Canada is mainly rooted in trade and economics, not territory or politics.
The president started his second term threatening Canada’s previous leader, Justin Trudeau, whom Trump publicly derided, with unilaterally scrapping agreements that have governed the relationship between the neighbouring countries for more than a century.
He has imposed tariffs on Canada, which, with Mexico, is one of America’s two top trading partners, that are crippling some of Canada’s key economic sectors, such as autos, steel, aluminium and lumber.
In part because of Trump’s attacks, Canadians rallied around Trudeau’s successor, Prime Minister Mark Carney, who positioned himself as a fighter against the American president. This year, Carney delivered a speech in Davos, Switzerland, in which he called for a new world order, no longer led by America, prompting global political and corporate leaders in the audience to rise from their seats for a rare standing ovation.
“The middle powers must act together because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu,” Carney said.
Liana Fix, a senior fellow for Europe at the Council on Foreign Relations, said it wasn’t clear what Canada becoming an “associate member” of the EU would mean, beyond trade and defence agreements already in place. But Canada and the EU will meet for a summit at the end of October, when they are expected to lay out more concrete ideas.
EU president Ursula von der Leyen has said Canada and Europe could work more closely together on the Arctic, their defence industrial bases and critical minerals.
“The EU wants to make a statement that the middle powers have a say and will not be bullied by the Trump administration,” Fix said.
The reaction of Canadian and European leaders is perhaps unsurprising, given Trump’s penchant for attacking allies and playing nice with historic rivals, Batchik said.
“Donald Trump has been pulling his punches toward some of our adversaries, top of mind Russia and China, and doubling down and taking a rather gleeful approach to needling our previous would-be allies,” Batchik said.
“You’re starting to see many across Europe taking that to heart and saying, ‘OK, if that’s truly the case, if that’s how the United States is going to treat its allies, they’re just going to look elsewhere’.”
It could end up being “a generational turn away from the United States”, he said, “or at least will take a significant amount of energy and time to repair these relations”.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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