By Don Newman

December 9, 2025

Anyone who thought negotiating a productive new Canada-United States trade deal with the Trump administration was in the offing will have been thoroughly disabused of that idea after reading the National Security Strategy (NSS) released late last week in Washington.

The NSS — the production of which from the executive branch is mandated by federal law — is also, in this case, the Trump administration’s outline of how it wants the world to be. It is a dramatic change in how the United States has aimed to structure the world since the end of the Second World War and a blueprint of the changes that have been happening since Trump returned to office last January.

No longer, says the plan, can the United States act as the policeman of the world with a global reach that attempts to deal with problems and impose its views on how things should be run in countries that defy and deny human rights to their peoples. Instead, the United States should be concerned primarily with the Western Hemisphere and making itself even richer than it currently is.

One way it will make that happen is to loosen the ties the US has with Europe. The document is scathing in what it says about the waves of migrants that have invaded Europe, mostly from Africa, to escape war and climate change starvation, and whom the document describes, in the white supremacist code employed by the administration’s mouthpieces, as making Europe “less European”.

The deplored changing face of Europe is cited as the latest rationale to cast into doubt both the future of US-Europe relations and the future of NATO.

The Trump administration wants Europe to pay for its own defence and moreover, change its attitude towards Russia. Removing Americans from Europe and cozying up to Russia would seem to remove the two major reasons for the Alliance when it was formed in 1949.

As a briefing note from the Scowcroft Group published by Policy put it, “Donald Trump’s National Security Strategy is a political document, clearly written not by defense and security experts but by America First isolationists in the White House.”

Canada is not mentioned in the document. But the policy implications are far-reaching. The strategy says the United States will be pre-eminent in the Western Hemisphere and control military and economic activity there. It talks a lot about Latin America, but its policy prescriptions can be no less applicable to Canada.

Trump’s NSS contains a lot of ominous sabre-rattling for a lot of countries. Unless we act fearlessly and expeditiously, Canada could be its first casualty.

Trump has mused about Canada becoming the 51st state. Since that is not going to happen, he will envision this country falling in line with the prescriptions of his new policy and becoming what is known as a “vassal” state, supplying a more powerful country with everything it wants, providing critical minerals and other essential materials, and buying American exports to keep people working in the US and profits up for American industries.

That is what is happening with the tariffs Trump has imposed on many Canadian exports. So far, they have been seen mainly as economic measures that can somehow be bargained away in negotiations on CUSMA, the Canada, United States, Mexico free trade agreement scheduled for review next year.

The NSS published confirms that tariffs are really a foreign policy tool. Canadians will now have to look at what it has considered mainly an effort to change the economic relationship between Canada and the US into an effort to change the political relationship between the two countries. No longer can we count on being partners — albeit junior and underfunded partners — on a large variety of issues, policies and programs, now we will have to confront a new reality.

Nowhere will that be more important than in defence and foreign policy. The NSS effectively sees the world divided into three spheres of influence; American, Russian and Chinese.

Those spheres come together in the Arctic, our front door — with its warming waters, melting ice and the possibility of conflicts over mineral deposits, trade routes and rights of passage through a no-longer icebound ocean.

Canada has historic claims to land mass and sea routes throughout the Arctic. Unless we massively increase our defence spending to acquire the ships, planes, missiles, drones and even more advanced weaponry to combat any invaders, our chances of being brushed aside in our north by invasion, occupation or dealmaking to carve up territory we claim as our own, resistance will be futile.

As Maria Popova wrote in Policy recently, Ukraine isn’t Russia’s only neighbour — Canada is, too — and Trump’s NSS reinforces the fear of what being pincered between two expansionist autocracies could mean for this country.

Trump’s NSS contains a lot of ominous sabre-rattling for a lot of countries. Unless we act fearlessly and expeditiously, Canada could be its first casualty.

Policy Columnist Don Newman is an Officer of the Order of Canada, and a lifetime member and a past president of the Canadian Parliamentary Press Gallery.