Dispatch from the Front Lines: Sour grapes from south of the border

It's pretty much time to give up on America for a generation or two, right? Right?!

Hey, folks. We didn’t think we’d do a dispatch before heading off on holiday, but we can’t be helped, we guess. Just to be clear: we’ll be throttling down for a week or two, while we rest and attend to urgent family matters, but we’ll continue podcasting throughout, and will return in writing if news developments warrant.

Speaking of podcasts, check out last Friday’s episode of The Line Podcast.

Also, don’t miss last Tuesday’s episode of On The Line, where Jen Gerson spoke to Professor Andrew Leach about all the fascinating little pipeline politics stories that have been bubbling up of late.

And now, on with the dispatch.

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The Line is not, and shouldn’t be, your one-stop shop for American news and analysis. At least not yet! (We aspire above our station, perhaps.) But as we prepared to shut down here before a vacation, we chose to sneak in one more dispatch simply because the sheer volume of stories relating to our southern neighbours was too tempting for us to ignore. There’s a lot goin’ on, is the thing, and we hope our readers will indulge us a U.S.A.-centric final word before we head off for a break.

First, we note the sudden passing of South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham at the age of 71. Graham had just returned from a trip to Ukraine when he reportedly experienced a sudden medical emergency and died. We won’t speculate any more than that, except to note that in these turbulent geopolitical, the sudden death of a U.S. official after a trip abroad must be investigated, and we hope it will be.

As for Graham himself, we have no eulogy to offer. We only ever observed him from afar. He was a fascinating character, to put it mildly, but we’ll limit our comment to this: he was perhaps the single most perfect embodiment of the wrenching change that swept over U.S. politics over the last decade. Graham was a proponent of a strong, aggressive but generally principled U.S. foreign policy — one that understood the role and necessity of U.S. power, but also believed it was enhanced by cooperation with allies and must be rooted in traditional U.S. principles of liberal democracy and Western strength. The kind of foreign policy he believed in was one that was very close to our view of America’s role in the world. He was somehow able to mostly remain a champion of this version of U.S. foreign policy while also transitioning from one of Donald Trump’s earliest and harshest critics a decade ago to one of his most sycophantic supporters.

No man should be reduced to a mere symbol, but to the extent Graham will be remembered for anything, we suspect it might be that — he was a walking, talking embodiment of the torturous and still-ongoing transformation of the Republican Party. The senator leaves behind only a sister, and our best wishes go to her.

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One of the most especially obnoxious aspects of America’s increasingly obnoxious targeting of Canada is the refusal by Americans to accept that Canadians have agency in all of this. The comparison with Russia’s ongoing assault on Ukraine has been made many times, and for good reason. Just as Putin assumed he could take over Ukraine in three days, on account of Ukraine not being a real country made up of real people with real views on how their country should be run and by whom, it is pretty clear that Trump and his cronies figured all they had to do was shout “51st state!” a bunch of times, slap on some tariffs, and we would just give them the keys to the place.

And again, just as Putin has spent every night of the last four years massacring Ukrainian civilians as they sleep while any comparable retaliation by Ukraine is met with screeches of outrage in Moscow, Americans seem incapable of accepting that Canadians have an absolute right to respond in kind to American hostility and aggression.

To be clear, the comparison has limits — Ukrainians are facing death and suffering at a massive scale, and that’s far beyond what Canadians have had to endure. But the key similarly that holds is the blinding arrogance of the larger power in an asymmetrical relationship — the more powerful country simply cannot understand how and why the smaller one would resist in the first place, whether it’s bombs or tariffs and nasty rhetoric. Here in North America, this failing is common in the high reaches of the American administration, in particular Jamieson Greer, Howard Lutnick, and the gaslighter-designate Pete Hoekstra, who continues to insist that “there’s fault to go around” in the bad blood between Canada and the United States, and that “some of the language your premiers have used” has been unhelpful.

Greer, the U.S. Trade Representative, has spent months telling anyone with a microphone that Canada’s counter-tariffs are “a problem” for negotiations, having previously blamed the provincial booze bans, the digital services tax, and Ottawa’s flirtation with Chinese EVs for the stalled talks. His favourite line is that only two countries on Earth have retaliated economically against the United States: the People’s Republic of China, and Canada. “That’s the company they’re running in.” Note the logic here: the aggression is normal, and it is the response that is deviant. Lutnick, the commerce secretary, dispensed with logic altogether at a Semafor conference in April, where he summarized Canada’s negotiating position with the words “they suck.” The Commerce Department later clarified that the secretary had been misquoted, and merely meant that Canada “sucks off of our $30T economy.” O RLY.

But now that the CUSMA deadline has come and gone with no obvious end to the trade war in sight, other American officials are starting to get annoyed, and, true to form, are looking to place the blame north of the border.

Exhibit A: Adam Schiff, Democratic senator from California, who took to X this week to complain that Canada’s boycott of California wine is causing “devastating harm” to winegrowers. Schiff wrote to Quebec Premier Christine Fréchette in June asking her to lift the SAQ’s ban on American booze, a few weeks after a bipartisan group of 14 California lawmakers, Nancy Pelosi among them, did the same, mourning a lost $434-million market.

Exhibit B: Claudia Tenney, a Republican congresswoman from New York, who introduced a bill this week called the Combating Attacks on our National Alcoholic Drinks by Allies Act (the CANADA Act, geddit?) that would trigger a Section 301 investigation into the provincial liquor bans as an unfair trade practice, potentially leading to still more American tariffs.

It is hard to know where to start with these people.

So maybe let’s start with what is being asked. Schiff is not demanding that his own government drop the tariffs that started all this; he is demanding that Canada drop its response to them. “California doesn’t agree with these tariff wars,” he pleads, as though that settles the matter. But that is not how any of this works. Canada is not in a trade war with red states. Foreign policy does not come with sub-national carve-outs: when Washington attacks the Canadian economy, “America” is what attacks it, blue bits included. We cannot punish Republicans without also punishing the Democrats who, the record will show, have done approximately nothing to stop them. As one Canadian put it in a widely shared Reddit reply to Schiff: you don’t blame the trees when the forest fire you started spreads to your house.

Then we can move on to the nature of the supposed offence. The provinces have not tariffed American wine. They have not seized anyone’s assets or blockaded a port. Their liquor monopolies have simply declined to buy a product, and Canadian consumers have declined to miss it. This is the mildest, most law-abiding response available to a country whose sovereignty is being openly threatened. Nobody has a right to a market. That U.S. wine exports to Canada collapsed by 78 per cent in a year is not an attack, it’s a response to Trump’s preferred line about how the U.S. needs nothing from Canada.

At the heart of all of this is a sense amongst Americans that Canadians who defend their country on routine nationalist grounds are, in some profound but inexplicable sense, being silly. And that sense is a thoroughly bipartisan temperament, as common amongst the most progressive Democrats as it is amongst diehard MAGA Republicans, the only difference being that the Democrats expect to be thanked for their sympathy while washing their hands of any responsibility for what is coming out of D.C.

That “all other countries are a joke” narcissism has always been a part of the American psyche, but it has now reached such a state of pathology that it is not clear any of them can see how the rest of the world sees America right now: a country that starts a fight and then sues you for hitting back; that threatens to annex you, and then sends a letter asking why you’re being so cold. Meanwhile, VQA sales at the LCBO are up 44 per cent on the year, and Canadians are discovering they quite like their own wine.

In the meantime, as Schiff himself as so ably demonstrated, anyone who thinks this ends with Trump is dreaming.

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Speaking of American power, we have to throw our hands up a little bit in consternation at the events of just the last couple of days. It’s truly bonkers how much stuff is happening. We had originally planned to write a few different blurbs about all of these stories, but when we sat down to actually do it, we realized it’s actually all the same blurb: U.S. foreign policy is an absolute train wreck.

We’re not even really sure how to structure the argument, so we’ll probably just try to get away with listing all of the things that were on our minds.

First, check out what happened last week at the NATO summit. The allies were able to get through it without any particular eruption from Trump, though he did end up petulantly resuming his talk about controlling Greenland. The response from the allies is exactly what we think it should have been — basically nothing. We truly do believe that the Europeans are figuring out that the best way to handle Trump is largely to ignore what he says on a day-to-day basis and stay focused instead on more obvious and tangible issues.

Of which there are many. The Americans are signalling that they plan to wind down some of their military commitments to European defence, and that’s where Europe should stay focused. We don’t even object to that. We think it is entirely appropriate for Europe, and Canada, to carry a much higher share of the allied defence burden. There was a way that Trump, or someone like Trump, could have achieved that while still largely preserving U.S. credibility.

But that isn’t Trump’s style. He likes the attention at least as much, and we suspect much more, than he likes any results he might achieve.

So we got the Greenland talk again. He knows it gets a rise out of people, and he can’t help himself. We suspect it’ll get worse the more he figures out that people aren’t listening much anymore.

For what it’s worth, we don’t think the Europeans are moving fast enough to rearm and assume responsibility for their own defence. It will be years before they can even begin to backfill many crucial American military capabilities, and we’re not sure that Europe has the economic or political fortitude to truly stick with this. But right now they are at least moving in that direction. Our advice to all allied officials is simply this: ignore the day-to-day Trump eruptions as much as possible, stay on the best possible terms with key U.S. leaders in the meantime, and rapidly develop as much sovereign or allied military capability as you can afford.

You might need it one day.

And this brings us to Iran, which is back in its state of Schrödinger’s conflict with the United States. We don’t honestly know how many times the ceasefire was on and off over the last week. It was at least twice, and maybe three times? In any case, after Iran fired missiles at a cargo ship in the Strait of Hormuz a few days ago, the United States bombed a series of targets throughout the country, and Iran responded by attacking U.S. allies across the region with missiles and drones.

So we think, at least as of the time of writing, the war is back on again. But we honestly aren’t really sure. And whatever it is right now, it might not be in 12 hours. But whatever it is in 12 hours, it’ll probably be something else 12 hours later.

rubs temples

Not for nothing, this kind of reinforces what we were just saying above about Europe. And Canada. And, in the Iran context, Israel. All those countries, and a great many more, are well beyond the point where anyone can actually expect the Americans to honour any defence commitment. Even if they wanted to, and that is very much in doubt, we’re not even really sure that they could. The U.S. military is overstretched and desperately short many critical munitions — Patriot interceptor missiles and Tomahawk cruise missiles being critical examples. America also lacks any coherent plan and coordinated strategy, and that’s clearly been noticed by its adversaries, and effectively exploited.

Look again at the Persian Gulf. Given how thoroughly Iran has outplayed Trump at every turn over the last couple of months, what U.S. ally can take for granted that America would do any better if facing a much more militarily powerful opponent, such as Russia or China? The desperation among American officials to get to some kind of ceasefire with Iran — and good Lord, it was desperate — is a very clear signal to U.S. allies across the world that America’s pain tolerance has probably never been lower. And its willingness, bordering on eagerness, to override the strategic interests and wishes of its allies to get itself out of any military confrontation is something that every enemy of America, and we hope every ally of America, has noticed.

Iran is lighting up the Strait of Hormuz and hitting U.S. bases and allies throughout the region, and Trump is fuming about Greenland while his secretary of defense continues to be upset when he sees sailors with beards.

These are not serious people. But these are very serious times, and the sooner we all figure out that the absolute best-case scenario for any U.S. ally is that America would come to its defence symbolically and inconsistently, if it showed up at all, the better off those allies may be.

And you better believe that includes us.

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And finally, just to tie a bow around everything, we didn’t want to let this dispatch go out without at least a little bit of CanCon. Stick with the theme of U.S. foreign policy, there’s a hell of an example we didn’t bring up above: the Gordie Howe Bridge is set to open in a few days because we were able to hammer out a new deal with the Americans.

We confess we’re a little bit confused about the deal. We aren’t actually sure who got played by whom here. Under the new terms of the deal, Canada has agreed to funnel half the profits from its toll revenues into a regional development fund in the United States. This gave the White House enough of a win to permit the bridge to open — unless, of course, they find some other excuse to shut it down in the next few days. Which they might. See everything above.

But anyway, on the surface, at least, that looks like a massive Canadian concession to the Americans. And that would be embarrassing.

But we couldn’t help but notice that term: “profits.”

Profits are something that can be made to go away by a clever accountant. Canada was always intending to use crossing tolls to recoup the money it fronted for the construction of the new bridge. Are our profits going to be counted before or after we take those repayments?

If before? Okay, that is in fact a pretty huge concession, and it might explain why the Carney government didn’t really make a big deal of it, and why this was announced late on a Friday afternoon. But if we’re taking our repayment share before any profits are calculated, the actual amount of money left over for the American fund could be quite nominal.

So, yeah. We really don’t know what to say about the bridge. Hopefully, by the time we’re back in a couple of weeks, we’ll know more.

But what we can clearly conclude now, not that we were in much doubt, is that in the era of Trump, literally no deal is worth anything with America. We had figured that out long ago, so all we can do now is shrug. But all Canadians, and all other U.S. allies, should heed the lesson of this bridge.

The new America is pretty blatantly channeling Darth Vader from The Empire Strikes Back: “I am altering the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.”

And for what? A few million bucks? To keep a Trump donor less unhappy? A pure dominance flex that Trump can brag about? This is the price the U.S. government itself puts on U.S. credibility?

Well, gosh. Okay, then. We don’t like it, but we don’t mind the certainty.

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Alright, friends. That’s all from us for a while. Stay tuned for the podcasts, but barring any major news developments, we’ll talk to you in a few weeks.

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