By Maria Popova

January 27, 2026

While the most obvious feature of Donald Trump’s assault on global power arrangements is the fomenting of chaos to produce narrative dominance, there are always strategies discernible beneath the tactical circus.

Most recently, NATO leaders had barely exhaled after Trump promised in Davos not to use force to take Greenland and he has returned to attacking Canadian sovereignty by calling our prime minister “Governor Carney,” suggesting Canada cannot survive without the US, and threatening economic devastation through tariffs.

The less worrisome interpretation of this latest tactical barrage is that Trump is sulking after the worldwide-viral positive response to Mark Carney’s speech in Davos. The more serious, but unfortunately also plausible interpretation, is that his rhetoric reflects a strategy to, at best, turn Canada from an ally into a vassal, and, at worst, to end our independence.

As Carney underlined in Davos, we need to be honest and realistic about the end of the rules-based order and the return of gamesmanship between rapacious great powers.

Make no mistake, this gamesmanship in part entails emulation of each other’s strategies of domination and expansion. Throughout the post-Cold War era, Russia has treated the former Soviet republics, now independent neighbours, as vassals, using economic coercion, domestic politics interference, and intermittent military aggression. Russia has tried to bully its former satellites in Eastern Europe through Europe’s energy interdependence.

After decades of close security cooperation in an alliance of sovereign nations within NATO, the US now seems interested in taking a page out of Russia’s playbook and trying to turn Europe and Canada into obedient vassals.

The similarities in the pathways should be deeply disconcerting, and Europe and Canada need to draw lessons from Ukraine’s experience about how to push back and deter before we become victims of military aggression.

Long before the 2014 invasion of Crimea, Russian political elites questioned the viability of Ukraine as an independent state and Putin famously told George W. Bush that Ukraine is “not even a country”.

Russia applied economic pressure and bullied most of Eastern Europe through economic interconnectedness based on the region’s dependence on Russian energy imports. It repeatedly used trade and gas wars to scuttle Ukraine’s European integration prospects.

In 2013, Putin threatened Ukraine that signing an association agreement with the EU would be catastrophic and Ukraine would face “financial ruin and collapse”. Russia fostered corruption and political decay all over Eastern Europe through oligarchic networks, and repeatedly interfered in the countries’ elections.

When it saw no push back from the rest of Europe in the form of energy independence policies or rearming, Russia launched military aggression against Ukraine in 2014. When Ukraine didn’t collapse after the annexation of Crimea but chose to resist, Russia jumpstarted a separatist insurgency in Donbas to destabilize the central government in Kyiv and pave the way for vassalization through the installation of a Russian puppet government.

When the eight-year insurgency stagnated and Ukrainians, as committed as ever to independence, elected successive governments that furthered democratic reforms and Euroatlantic integration, Russia launched its full-scale invasion to end Ukrainian statehood altogether.

Today, we see Trump in the early stages of using economic aggression against Western Europe and Canada through tariffs and tariff threats with a similar goal—to show America’s long-standing allies that the US can dominate them.

In addition to the intensifying demands to Denmark to turn over Greenland, Trump has used eerily analogous phrasing to Putin’s in claiming that Canada “isn’t viable as a country” and the border between the US and Canada is artificial.

Albertans tempted to support the separatist movement to send a message to Ottawa would do well to consider what happened in Eastern Ukraine.

The US administration has started interfering in European elections by openly supporting and even campaigning for Trump-aligned populist actors. Vis-à-vis Canada, Trump ally Steve Bannon and Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent have both talked about the need to support Alberta separatism, echoing arguments made by Igor Girkin, the FSB officer who in 2014 jump started Russian-backed Donbas separatism.

Albertans tempted to support the separatist movement to send a message to Ottawa would do well to consider what happened in Eastern Ukraine.

In Donbas in 2014, many joined anti-government protests hoping to send a clear message to the new Kyiv government, which they disliked, that it would have to make concessions to their region. Instead, within a couple of months, they found themselves occupied by Russia and governed by a puppet regime.

Of course, because Russia escalated from economic coercion to military aggression is not evidence that the US will necessarily tread the same path. Majorities of Americans are against the annexation of Greenland or Canada, unlike Russians’ enthusiasm for Crimea’s annexation.

Indeed, most Americans oppose territorial expansionism anywhere. Despite Trump’s authoritarian tendencies, the US still has more checks and balances than Putin’s regime ever did.

But we shouldn’t rely exclusively on American domestic forces constraining Trump’s expansionist ambitions. As Mark Carney stressed, the middle powers that are potential victims of bullying and expansionism need to be honest and need to band together to be stronger.

In 2014, no one was honest about Russian aggression in Ukraine. Everyone pretended that Donbas separatism was organic and arose from Kyiv’s Euromaidan revolution, rather than that it was initiated, fed, and armed by Russia. Everyone pretended that Crimeans wanted to be in Russia even though it was clear that the referendum was held at gunpoint.

Europe and the US thought that appeasing Russia and continuing economic interdependence through energy would work to constrain Putin’s expansionism and would benefit everyone in Europe.

Canada should not make the same mistake. Let’s not lend credence to far-fetched and disingenuous Trump administration rhetoric that the US needs to take Greenland or make Canada the 51st state in order to protect their populations from other threats.

If Albertan or Quebec separatist movements get a boost from American sources, overtly or covertly, Canada will have to devise a strategy to neutralize or resist the interference.

And in the meantime, Canada and Europe need to invest in building up defence capabilities and in helping Ukraine defeat Russia. While the immediate threat to Eastern Europeans is Russia and the immediate threat to Canada/Greenland is the US, shoring up the alliance and its defence capabilities will help address both sources of aggression.

The EU should take Zelenskyy’s advice, now offered two years in a row at Davos, and put the formation of a European army immediately on the agenda. The EU needs to be a unified geopolitical actor, not a collection of middle powers.

It can then work with Canada and with other likeminded middle powers such as Australia and Japan to maintain its sovereignty and contain aggression from multiple directions.

If the world’s democracies can’t fight the disintegration of the world order they led, then further integration is the only option.

Policy Columnist Maria Popova is Associate Professor of Political Science at McGill University and Co-Director of the Jean Monnet Centre Montreal. With Oxana Shevel, she recently published a book titled Russia and Ukraine: Entangled Histories, Diverging States.