The White House approached the meetings less as a negotiation between two partners than as an effort to force tribute from a vassal. Trump portrayed his decision to change the previously agreed terms of trade between the two countries as a righting of past wrongs. But in reality, it’s part of something much more profound: a U.S. effort to ensure its economic interests and physical security in the Western Hemisphere by coercion, rather than through alliances and soft power.

This is further underpinned by an ideology that assumes the U.S. has a natural right to correct what Trump and his supporters consider aberrations of geopolitical history. So, Greenland should naturally belong to the U.S., and would already if not for some absurd American decisions at the end of World War II. Canada isn’t a real country, but rightly the 51st US state. The Gulf of Mexico was really the Gulf of America all along — and now, Lake Ontario is Lake America, too. If we’re to believe Prime Minister Mark Carney about why the U.S.-Canada talks collapsed, it’s because Washington made last-minute demands to dictate Canada’s domestic language policies and destroy its car-manufacturing industry.

Bloomberg: Trump Is Copying Putin’s Losing Playbook With Canada

Bloomberg article is also archived.