Once again, Canada has been drawn into the vortex of Donald Trump’s global disruption.
Justin Trudeau was asked several times on Thursday whether Donald Trump bore some blame for the shooting down of the Ukrainian plane carrying 138 people destined for Canada this week.
It’s not going to be the last time that question is going to be raised in the days and weeks ahead. It may be one of the rare times, though, that an international aviation disaster has carried thorny implications for Canada-U.S. relations.
For now, the prime minister is trying his best to sidestep any Trump connection to the Tehran flight disaster. “It is too soon to be drawing conclusions or assigning blame or responsibility in whatever proportions,” Trudeau said at his news conference.
But Trudeau didn’t take that question entirely off the table, either. Nor will many Canadians, still reeling from the deaths of so many compatriots on that ill-fated flight from Tehran to Kyiv on Wednesday.
Trudeau was asked, for instance, about Trump’s remarks earlier Thursday — about the Tehran crash taking place in a “rough neighbourhood” in the Middle East and the possibility it was simply a “devastating” error.
“I’ll let Mr. Trump’s words stand for themselves,” the prime minister said.
By now, Trudeau should have this answer down pat. From the moment that Trump entered the White House in 2016, he has been knocking Trudeau — and Canada’s foreign policy — off track, often dangerously so. Free trade negotiations with the U.S. ate up much of Trudeau’s first mandate. The ongoing extradition drama over Meng Wanzhou — linked to Trump’s own battle with China and Huawei — has blown up Canada-China relations. Now Canada has been drawn into Trump’s new tinderbox of the Middle East, not to mention Ukraine, which has figured largely in the president’s impeachment drama.
Even before the plane crash, Trump’s foray into Iraq last weekend forced many Canadian troops to decamp from their NATO training mission in the country and seek safe haven in Kuwait. It remains an open question when Canada can resume this NATO role. Remember when 2020 was going to be all about Trudeau turning his focus to domestic concerns, even reassigning his prize minister, Chrystia Freeland, from international to Canadian matters as his deputy?
That seems like a long time ago and we’re less than 10 days into the new year.
Once again, Canada has been drawn into the vortex of Trump’s global disruption — this time, tragically and quite probably accidentally. For a president who doesn’t travel often out of his country, Trump has a remarkable ability to stir things up outside U.S. borders, and Canada apparently cannot remain insulated or unimplicated, even inadvertently.
Whether Trudeau likes it or not, Canadians will be looking for blame — not just cause — in this large-scale tragedy, and Trump may well be in many sights. If Trump had not launched his drone strike in Baghdad last weekend to take out a top Iranian commander, would Iran have been launching missiles at planes this week?
On Wednesday, Trudeau and Trump talked on the phone — a “constructive” call, according to sources in the PMO. This was, however, before the news erupted on Thursday about an Iranian missile as the cause of the crash. If the two leaders did talk of a connection between the plane crash and Trump’s new focus on Iran-Iraq, no one is saying, at least for now.
I also asked PMO people this week whether Trump had given any foreshadowing of his plans for Iran when he spoke to his counterparts at the NATO summit in December.
You’ll remember that NATO summit. It became more famous — or infamous — for the cocktail-party scene of Trudeau, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and French President Emmanuel Macron chatting about their travails with Trump.
No, Trump did not give any advance word of his Iran intentions there at NATO, I was told. This sounds about right. Trudeau, Johnson and Macron were actually talking of Trump’s unpredictability in that candid chat.
Trump’s penchant for surprising behaviour has been rippling across the planet since his inauguration. Trudeau — and Canada — has had to learn to manage it. If the prime minister ever does write a book about his experience in governing, he may need to put Trump in the title, or at least a subtitle about best-laid plans and the disruptor-in-chief.
A few years ago — well, even a few days ago — very few people would have predicted that a plane crash in Tehran would force us to look at Canada’s relations with the United States.
But this is life in Trump’s rough neighbourhood, where Canada keeps getting caught in the crossfire: this time, as the president would say, devastatingly.
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