By Fen Hampson

February 10, 2026

Donald Trump’s threat to prevent the opening of the new Gordie Howe International Bridge unless Canada compensates the United States is but the latest chapter in a series of irrational threats and unjustified punitive measures he has inflicted on our country.

Never mind that Canadian taxpayers paid $6 billion for the bridge, which is why there will be a toll on the Canadian side to recoup some of those costs. The truth of the matter is irrelevant to this president, for whom facts are an unnecessary distraction as he continues to systematically alienate America’s closest allies and neighbours.

The late George Shultz, who served as Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state, often remarked that foreign policy is like gardening and that it is in America’s interest to ensure its relations with its friends and close neighbours are well tended. “Foreign policy starts in your neighbourhood,” Shultz said.

In a speech (which I attended) to the North American Forum, which Schultz co-chaired, he argued that America’s best defence against China was to build a strong North America by working much more closely with Canada and Mexico in order to capitalize on the great strengths of all three countries.

Sadly, Shultz’s vision never materialized. Under successive presidents, America became increasingly protectionist and unwilling to look for the real dividends that would come from closer cooperation with its neighbours.

Under Donald Trump, however, America’s former attitude of general indifference has hardened into outright hostility, marked by escalating efforts to weaponize economic interdependence and intimidate America’s neighbours into submission.

Although Canadians often cast Trump as the problem and pin their hopes on the end of his term—or, more immediately, on Democrats capturing the House of Representatives and restraining his worst instincts—the history of great-power decline offers little reassurance about what may lie ahead for our country.

Since 1945, Canada has relied on a U.S. that generally tied its power to multilateral rules rather than raw economic coercion. Donald Trump’s openly transactional use of tariffs and market access signals a reversion to coercive, imperial‑style rent‑seeking behaviour of a bygone era.

Historically, great powers experiencing decline have gone from being the “benevolent” provider of public goods to their alliance partners in the form of security guarantees and trade on preferential terms to a much more extractive and punitive set of relationships.

It is fashionable these days (notably by Graham Allison in Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?) to invoke the cautionary tale of Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian wars, including by our own prime minister in a now much-acclaimed speech at the Davos World Economic Forum.

As Germany and the United States challenged British imperial rule in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Britain responded by intensifying the extractive relationship with its empire to keep itself afloat.

But we should also remember that, as Sparta challenged Athenian dominance and Athens turned the Delian League into its own empire, Athens turned on its closest and most prosperous neighbours, the islands of Naxos and Thasos, to extract maximum tribute in what ultimately proved a failed bid to save its empire. Poorer and more distant islands were able to retain some autonomy and escape the brunt of Athens’ harsh rule.

As the Spanish empire began to falter in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, its vast silver revenues were increasingly swallowed by debt and the costs of almost continuous warfare, a classic case of imperial overstretch.

Rather than moderating its rule in the Netherlands, Madrid doubled down with religious repression, new taxes, and heavy-handed efforts to centralize control. The Dutch Revolt that followed — the Eighty Years’ War — ended with the Peace of Münster in 1648, when Spain formally recognized Dutch independence, a settlement that was one of the foundational pillars of the modern Westphalian state system.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, at the very height of European imperial expansion but on the eve of its eventual decline, the British, French, and Portuguese empires relied on highly extractive and punitive policies toward their colonies.

Nowhere was this clearer than in the French empire, where Algeria and Vietnam were subjected to heavy head taxes, state monopolies over key commodities, and widespread corvée labour.

Punitive direct taxes on African subjects, especially native head and hut taxes introduced to fund the colonial administration and force Africans into the cash economy, together with pervasive systems of coerced and forced labour, were defining features of Portuguese rule in its African colonies in the final decades before decolonization.

As Germany and the United States challenged British imperial rule in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Britain responded by intensifying the extractive relationship with its empire to keep itself afloat.

India—Britain’s so‑called “jewel in the crown”—was made to finance much of the cost of its own subjugation through the notorious “home charges”, while tariff and currency policies increasingly diverted Indian trade and savings to the benefit of British manufacturers and creditors, in ways that ultimately fuelled India’s independence movement.

By contrast, Britain’s white self‑governing dominions such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand were treated far more favourably, enjoying preferential access to the British market under the Imperial Preference system of the 1930s, even as those arrangements encouraged them to buy higher‑priced British goods over cheaper imports from the rest of the world.

Although we should not overstate parallels with the past, Donald Trump’s extractive and punitive policies toward America’s closest trading partners, which are being implemented just as US power is being tested by a rising China (and, in time, perhaps India), carry more than a faint echo of earlier empires facing decline.

While an unprovoked propaganda attack on a crucial new bilateral trade artery may seem like just the latest Trumpian stunt, it harkens back to a previous era of imperial entitlement that lasted much longer than will Donald Trump’s strutting and fretting across the global stage.

Policy Contributing Writer Fen Osler Hampson, FRSC, is the Chancellor’s Professor and Professor of International Affairs at Carleton University, and president of the World Refugee & Migration Council. He is co-chair of the Expert Group on Canada-US Relations.