CANADA LAST: AFTER THE REPUBLICAN FRONT-RUNNER DONALD TRUMP UNVEILS HIS ‘AMERICA FIRST’ FOREIGN POLICY, MICHAEL DEN TANDT REVIEWS HOW UNPREPARED WE ARE TO DEAL WITH TRUMPISM.
The day Donald J. Trump is sworn in as president of the United States, the received wisdom holds, pigs will fly and snowballs freeze in hell. But consider this: The received wisdom about The Donald has been wrong, dead wrong, at every previous turn. It may be wrong now.
What if Hillary Clinton, assuming she’s the Democratic nominee, runs a miserable campaign and implodes? What if Trump, assuming he tops the Republican ticket, deploys his blend of swagger, braying insults and demagogy to steamroll his better-qualified but, let’s face it, duller opponent? It can happen. Therefore Canada and Canadians need to begin to prepare for the possibility, at the very least, of a Trump White House.
There are two conclusions we can draw, off the top, from Trump’s foreign policy speech at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday. The first is that he very clearly is positioning himself to claim in a fall presidential campaign that every outrageous, offensive remark he ever made was merely an opening negotiating position. The second is that Canada, and the Liberal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, are unprepared to deal with Trumpism as it would likely emerge in U.S. foreign and trade policy.
To the first point, curiously (or perhaps not), the Great Wall of Mexico failed to make it into the speech. This inanity has been at the heart of Trump’s battle cry for months. It was airbrushed out of the speech, likely because the candidate finally found time to sit down with some data and discovered there is no path to the presidency without a significant number of Latino American votes. Nor was there any mention of banning Muslims from entering America; only that “we must stop importing extremism through senseless immigration policies” and “a pause for reassessment will help us to prevent the next San Bernardino or worse.”
In a similar vein, frantically buffing the ragged edges of his extremism into something more closely approximating the Republican tradition, Trump took a step back from previous bellicose rhetoric toward strategic foes and allies alike. Rather than sounding like Al Capone with loaded pistol in hand, demanding cash in exchange for the Pax Americana, Trump sought to reassure. “To all our friends and allies,” reads the prepared text of the speech, “I say America is going to be strong again. America is going to be a reliable friend and ally again. We’re going to finally have a coherent foreign policy based upon American interests, and the shared interests of our allies.”
Never mind that this last clause, viewed through the prism of the real estate billionaire’s oft-stated views about economics and foreign policy, is itself contradictory and thus, incoherent. It was an effort, carefully worded, to signal to Japan, South Korea, Australia and other U.S. allies that the U.S. navy won’t be steaming home to Hawaii on Day One of the Trump era.
The message to China and Russia, meantime, was peace through strength. In both cases, the actual intended audience was the internationalist Republican establishment, which Trump expects will soon be desperate for a reason, any reason at all, to line up behind him.
But here come the bits to which Canadians should pay particular attention. Trump did not — again with careful wording from his speech writer — promise to rip up the North American Free Trade Agreement. He said rather that “NAFTA, as an example, has been a total disaster for the U.S and has emptied our states of our manufacturing and our jobs. Never again.” The implication is that pending trade deals, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, would somehow be negotiated to yield better terms for American workers, while existing deals might be left alone. The NAFTA risk can now be safely relegated to the category of the usual protectionist twaddle that emerges in U.S. election cycles.
This should not be set aside: In this speech, as in the past, the clear quid pro quo in Trump’s geopolitical thinking is security for prosperity. Though he has softened his tone, he remains adamant that America’s allies must pay for a bigger share of the real cost of their own security. “In NATO, for instance, only four of 28 other members countries besides America, are spending the minimum required two per cent of GDP (gross domestic product) on defence,” reads the speech.
And there, of course, is Canada, chronic laggard, now spending slightly less than one per cent of GDP on its military, with $3.7 billion in hardware purchases newly put off to some indefinite future date when delaying the Navy’s Arctic offshore patrol ships, or the Royal Canadian Air Force’s fighter replacement, is no longer politically possible.
It may be that Trump implodes, and none of this matters at all. But if he doesn’t, it’s a safe bet he’ll view border access as a bargaining chip, and a significantly more robust, well-funded and capable Canadian military as currency in trade.