Breaking up is hard to do, eh?

OTTAWA »The story of the dramatic change in Canada’s global profile and in the decline of American influence around the globe might be glimpsed in three telling moments.

Back in 1916, when Canada sent troops to assist Great Britain in World War I but the United States remained on the sidelines, one of the leading songs here carried the jaunty reprise line, “We’re the boys from Canada/Glad to serve Britannia.”

Some 22 years later, in August 1938, Franklin Delano Roosevelt traveled to Kingston, Ontario, to meet Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King and extend a military security pledge to Canada that has persisted for more than three-quarters of a century.

And then, this August, Canada stood aghast as the United States withdrew its troops from Afghanistan in an episode of mass chaos that raised fresh questions about American resolve, dependability and power on the world stage.

In this capital, as in London, Paris, Berlin, Moscow and Beijing, foreign policy experts sensed a power vacuum, for the scene at the Kabul airport seemed to symbolize a fundamental shift in the world order. In abandoning Afghanistan, the United States appeared to be abandoning its role as a global leader.

Those other world capitals have historical experience with charting their own ways in the world that Canada, dominated diplomatically and militarily first by Great Britain and then by the United States, lacks. None of them shares with another country a 5,525-mile border, 120 land crossings and an economic relationship accounting for $1.7 billion in trade each day. And yet nowhere was the midsummer alteration in the power balance felt as strongly as it was here.

As Afghanis who worked with Western nations, including Canada, besieged the Kabul airport, five top Canadian diplomats and scholars wrote that the “disastrous retreat from Afghanistan is yet one more development that shows the U.S. has lost the primacy it once enjoyed in international affairs.”

“Without effective U.S. leadership, the onus to address burning international issues falls more heavily on the rest of us in the democratic world,” argued the group, a veritable Canadian diplomatic dream team that included former foreign minister Lloyd Axworthy and former Quebec premier Jean Charest.

This view, ignored in Washington and barely noted beyond Canada, nonetheless was the functional equivalent of a diplomatic declaration of independence.

It does not mean that the United States will cease to exercise influence over Canada, withdraw from security arrangements with Canada, stop affecting cultural life in Canada, and end enormously important economic ties with Canada, which account for 16.4% of all American international trade. It does, however, mean that Canada may be more willing than ever to go its own way.

This is not a sudden break. Relations between Prime Minister John Diefenbaker and John F. Kennedy were frosty, and American presidents Lyndon B.

Johnson and Richard M. Nixon had contempt for Pierre Elliott Trudeau.

But no prime minister and president had as poor rapport as Justin Trudeau and Donald J. Trump.

Trudeau has sought to repair relations with the United States by reaching out to President Biden — whom many Canadians credit with helping to free two Canadians who were detained in China for more than 1,000 days — even as he looks across both the Atlantic and the Pacific.

Though there always has been a strain of anti-Americanism across the 49th parallel, Canadians generally have thought warmly of the United States. But in the wake of the Trump years, the high rates of COVID-19 in the United States and the siege of the Capitol, many Canadians now are looking across the border not with admiration but with horror.

The decoupling that these episodes prompted has served to amplify a movement that has been underway for two decades.

“There are reasons for the two countries to be close, but broader forces suggest Canada will go its own way,” said Christopher Kirkey, director of the SUNY Plattsburgh Center for the Study of Canada. “After the death of the Soviet Union, Americans felt less of a need for Canada and there was less of a need for Canada to feel tied to the U.S.”

There now is a sense that American troubles are a Canadian opportunity. Put another way: Sometimes in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands that have connected them with another.