For a few hours on Monday, Ontario Premier Doug Ford led the news in France.
Compatriots from Paris to Perpignan probably couldn’t locate Canada’s largest province on a map.
But they were sufficiently shocked that the country’s economic capital was set to clear American liquor from LCBO shelves, rip up contracts with Elon Musk’s Starlink and ban U.S. firms from bidding on government contracts in retaliation for President Donald Trump’s 25 per cent tariff threat.
And it is no exaggeration to say that the world’s capitals were furiously refreshing their social media feeds, waiting for word that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s talks with Trump had resulted in a 30-day reprieve.
That’s because Canada is a test case for how Trump’s altered America is willing to treat its allies.
The Brits will factor the North American trade-and-border clash into their recalibrated approach to the so-called “special relationship” between London and Washington.
Paris and Berlin must decide whether to roll out a red carpet along the transatlantic bridge linking Europe to Washington — or to guard against its sabotage and demolition.
Members of the NATO military alliance are weighing the potential costs of not radically increasing defence spending to five per cent of GDP, as Trump has repeatedly mused.
And Ukraine faces the prospect of paying a steep price for the defence of its besieged democracy.
What lessons can the world draw from Canada’s temporary stay of execution at the 11th hour?
First, that Trump aims to remake a name for himself as a leader for whom nothing is sacred and everything is negotiable, even more than during his first term.
Second, that he is a dog who — for the moment, at least — prefers barking to biting.
Colombian President Gustavo Petro, a former left-wing guerrilla, was among the first to cross swords with Trump when he, on principle, turned back two American military planes carrying Colombian deportees. The passengers had been bound with handcuffs, like the criminals Trump makes migrants out to be. An outraged Trump threatened retaliatory tariffs — and to double them if there was no capitulation within a week.
Petro was defiant in his reply: “I resisted torture, and I resist you.”
And a deal was reached, though the exact terms are unclear.
The White House declared victory, saying that Petro had “agreed to all of President Trump’s terms” including deportation flights aboard U.S. military aircraft. Colombia, too, could claim a win, in that it sent its own military aircraft to repatriate its citizens and proposed formalizing the procedure to ensure future deportees are treated in a “dignified” manner.
For Panama, Trump’s bark was enough.
The country fell into America’s crosshairs, in part, over a perceived rise in Chinese influence at the Panama Canal, a key crossing for ships travelling to and from the Pacific Ocean.
Trump threatened to seize control of the canal, deeming it a threat to U.S. national security.
That, and a visit by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, was all it apparently took for Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino to agree to abandon an infrastructure deal with China.
The morning after Trudeau and Trump hashed out an agreement to avert an all-out trade war, it’s not clear whether the concessions that the U.S. President has extracted are all that major or new.
Certainly, the concessions he’s gained from Canada and Mexico are nowhere near commensurate with the harm he was apparently prepared to inflict on the economies of all three countries.
The headline from Trump’s last-minute Mexico agreement was the deployment of 10,000 soldiers to the U.S. border to stop the flow of fentanyl and migrants into the U.S.
But Mexico did more than that in 2019 — and without the tariff threat — in response to an uptick in migrants crossing the border. At that time, the country sent 15,000 troops to its border with the U.S. and an additional 10,000 to the southern border with Guatemala.
It also struck a deal with former president Joe Biden in 2021 to maintain 10,000 troops on its southern border to prevent migrants from entering the country.
Canada, for its part, appears to have escaped the Trump tariff threat — at least for the next 30 days — on the strength of its $1.3-billion border security plan. Drafted in anticipation of Trump, it was announced last Dec. 17, more than a month before he swore the oath of office.
The only new elements that emerged from Monday’s talks were the position of a Canadian “Fentanyl Czar” — presumably with the mandate to co-ordinate federal efforts — and a promise to list drug cartels as terrorist organizations.
Those were enough to appease Trump’s tenuous allegation that the Canadian border is a major source of the fentanyl fuelling the U.S. toxic drug crisis. (In fact, less than 0.1 per cent of U.S. fentanyl seizures are intercepted at the Canadian border.)
Regardless, in just his third week in office, Trump watchers can spot a pattern: shrill proclamations and threats followed by more reasonable deals.
It’s a pattern that might allow Greenland and the Kingdom of Denmark to catch their breath.
After weeks of hyperventilating over Trump’s wish to buy the Arctic island — or seize it using military force — his track record so far would suggest that a middle-ground solution is not so far out of reach.
European allies are divided, but many will also be tempted to view Trump’s other demands through the same prism.
Take his desire for NATO allies to commit five per cent of their GDP to defence spending, which would take a gargantuan budgetary effort by most member states.
Or Monday’s out-of-the-blue revelation that he wants Ukraine to repay the U.S. military support they’ve been receiving by granting access to its rare-earth metals, which happen to sit mostly beneath the ground occupied by Russian forces.
“There’s nobody who doesn’t want to make deals,” Trump said Monday.
But there is a risk that grows with each over-the-top, Trumpian threat that is bargained down to a more modest tradeoff.
And that risk is heightened by the presence of America’s adversaries, particularly Russia and China, who are paying close attention to the president’s modus operandi, and the art of his deal-making.
Trump knows that they are watching. And he also knows that in order for his bulldog bark to be heard and to be feared, pretty soon he will have to bite.
