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By Jeremy Kinsman

May 26, 2024

Donald Trump’s America First nationalism has forcefully yanked the world backward from its postwar consensus of interdependence and international cooperation.

The G7 group of leading market economy countries will hold its  annual summit June 15-17 in Kananaskis, Alberta, under Canadian chairmanship, and under Trump’s tariff assault on all partners including G7 partners. The Summit, coming 50 years after Canada’s addition to the G6 made it the G7 in Puerto Rico in 1975, may or may not sustain the principle of mutual interest permitting the G7 to carry on. G7 members are mentally focused on the challenge the Trump administration poses to their own economic outlooks.

But a preparatory meeting this week of G7 finance ministers in Banff avoided substantive discussion of the divisive and toxic US tariff assault on the global economy. Their description of the meeting as “productive” was an evasion of reality to keep the US at least partially in the consensus tent at the ministerial level before its autocratic head of government arrives for the main event on June 15th.

The effect is to show the G7 as a club of rich countries trying to pretend that things remain as they were, while everybody knows that in reality everything has changed. One change is that the fortunes and fates of the world’s poorest are now not visibly high among current preoccupations of the G7.

Canadian public opinion and politics have rightly been focusing on the threat Trump has posed to Canada’s sovereignty and security. But Trump’s autocratic and anti-globalist worldview also undermines Canada’s international belief system. A retreat by major countries into isolated and competitive “fortresses,” each vying for strategic advantage in a global game of great power rivalry, would desert the principles of multilateralism and international cooperation that emerged from the wreckage of World War Two. Those principles have guided Canadian foreign policy for generations.

Canadians grew to rely on a stable international order that shaped our domestic context. Though we lived under the shadow of the Cold War, it was a manageable danger, with violent confrontations largely confined to proxy wars in politically contested states. While NATO was central to our security, Canada also reached across ideological divides forging deep relationships among the post-colonial, newly independent states of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, where living standards were vastly lower than ours and the scars from dictatorships were still raw.

Canadian humanist impulses championed these nations’ development, particularly among Commonwealth and Francophone countries we considered to be “family.” Tens of thousands of individual Canadians engaged in international field development work through the Canadian International Development Association (CIDA) and a plethora of NGOs.

In 1969, the World Bank published “Partners in Development,” known informally as “The Pearson Report,” named after Canada’s globally celebrated, Nobel Prize-winning peacemaker and former prime minister, Lester Pearson, who chaired the international commission that compiled it. His successor, Pierre Trudeau, was of course closely allied with NATO and G7 peers, but he connected with special empathy to those who similarly envisioned a neighbourly and compassionate world — leaders like Sweden’s Olaf Palme, and US President Jimmy Carter.

He especially cultivated significant relationships with leaders from the Global South: Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, Indira Ghandhi of India, Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore, and, controversially, Fidel Castro of Cuba. Trudeau laid out his world view in the only full-length foreign policy speech he ever gave in the House of Commons, on June 15, 1981, titled “Who is my Neighbour?”:

“Who is my neighbour? Is she the woman rummaging for food in the back streets of an Asian shanty town? Is he the man in prison in South America for leading a trade union? The people dying in Africa for lack of medical care, or clean water, are they my neighbours? What about those who are dying in the spirit in the villages of India for lack of a job, or an education, or hope? Are my neighbours the children running from the sound of gunfire in the streets of Beirut? If we, the peoples of the North say yes, then we will act; we will act together to keep hope alive. If we say no, then they are doomed and so are we.”

Only days after this speech, Trudeau hosted the first G7 meeting in Canada, at the Chateau Montebello. His intended theme — “power-sharing” between North and South was met with disinterest by the recently-elected Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

Canadian public opinion and politics have rightly been focusing on the threat Trump has posed to Canada’s sovereignty and security. But Trump’s autocratic and anti-globalist worldview also undermines Canada’s international belief system.

Trudeau pressed on, co-chairing major North-South dialogues in Mexico, and collaborating with like-minded partners such as the Scandinavians and the Netherlands, whose overseas development assistance far exceeded Canada’s.

His question, “who is my neighbour?” continued to shape foreign policy under other Canadian leaders Brian Mulroney, Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin (as it had with Joe Clark).

But of course, successful relations with our literal neighbour, the United States, was always our principal foreign policy priority.

That objective has been ravaged by Trump’s bizarre assertion that the US should annex Canada, making the defence of Canadian sovereignty a sudden paramount concern. Mark Carney bluntly reminded the President that during the recent Canadian campaign “the owners of Canada” made it unmistakably clear: Canada is not, and never will be for sale — re-emphasizing “never, never, never, never, never.”

Does Trump get it? It’s hard to know what he gets, what he doesn’t get and how much of his apparent ignorance is affected to rationalize his disruption. He seems determined to break every convention, every norm, in pursuit of his nationalist-MAGA agenda. But his notion of annexation of Canada is among the most ridiculed of his proposals, even within the US.

Trudeau’s “Who is my neighbour” speech, if delivered today by an American, would likely be denounced as naive, incomprehensible, or unpatriotic. Vice-President Vance’s recent attempt to redefine Catholic charity as extending no further than one’s gated community was sharply rebuked by Pope Leo XIV, who reaffirmed that Christian duty extends to all marginalized and suffering people everywhere.

Let us hope Trump will face up to the unreality of his annexation ambitions. But to make the point forcefully enough for even this White House to grasp, the reading of the Carney government’s Speech from the Throne by King Charles III will table for once and for all the inalienable sovereignty of Canada.

Meanwhile, reflection needs to be devoted to the gravity of the broad US withdrawal from global development and democracy-building that represents a deep retreat from the ideals of postwar internationalism, and a departure for the G7. As always, the nuances in position on this will be finessed for the final communiqué, which may or may not be disavowed by Trump before its release, after its release, or from Air Force One as it gains altitude over Montana.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 ignited hope that humanity could finally move forward together based on the triumph of not so much “the West” but of democracy as the dominant system, which made humanity, human development and human rights the focus of multilateralism. For the rest of the twentieth century, progress was uneven but real: expanding and more open markets, growing support for human rights, and a general orientation toward greater cooperation.

Momentum halted on 9/11, 2001. The attacks launched an open “clash of civilizations,” and identities — religious, ethnic, racial — hardened. Prolonged wars in Iraq and Afghanistan eroded faith in US leadership, while migration crises fed populist backlashes in Europe. Meanwhile, China, whose centralized undemocratic model persisted, achieved historic economic gains, now being echoed by India. In sub-Saharan Africa, average incomes remained stuck at the impoverished levels identified in 1969 in the Pearson Report.

The 2008 financial crash further undermined Western self-confidence and influence. Protectionism, illiberalism, and nationalism surged, recalling the darkest chapters of the 1930s. Covid-19 widened inequality with and between nations.

Social media, largely unregulated, intensified polarization and depleted trust in elected government, feeding an anti-globalist mood. Public commitment to shared global goals — like sustainable development — faded.

Russia’s unprovoked and murderous war on Ukraine shattered postwar norms of territorial integrity. With no end in sight, it has prompted among NATO countries a surge in military spending, diverting crucial resources from global development.

Former president Biden reportedly confided to columnist Tom Friedman his concern that NATO — which safeguarded postwar peace — may not survive in its current form. Biden understood the “world is the way the world has been since 1995 — which is to say, one of the most relatively peaceful and prosperous eras in history for more people on the planet than ever — because America was the way America was.”

Clearly, America is no longer the way America was. G7 partners may well try to put on a brave face of manageable continuity, but the world has become a harder place, where the strongest countries behave as they wish. The dismantling of USAID and other instruments of global assistance has created a vacuum and a crisis of unmet need and collapsed expectations.

The late Joe Nye, father of “soft power”, made clear that values have been part of America’s strategic interest. They remain so for Canada. The worldview of Pierre Trudeau and successive prime ministers has been that our sense of neighbourhood extends beyond our literal and sovereign borders to address the dire challenges of humanity elsewhere. It is a stance of engagement that Mark Carney is qualified to press upon others, even if it seems inconvenient for the G7’s agenda at the moment.

Pierre Trudeau foresaw doom if the Northern Hemisphere avoided these challenges. The situation calls for a new coalition of like-minded globalists from North and South to ensure that international institutions and efforts remain mobilized to support common goals of development and equity, despite the hiatus caused by America’s reconsideration of its own leadership role.

Policy Contributing Writer Jeremy Kinsman was Canada’s ambassador to Russia, high commissioner to the UK, ambassador to Italy and ambassador to the European Union. He also served as minister at the Canadian embassy in Washington. He is a Distinguished Fellow of the Canadian International Council.