Trump is copying Putin’s losing playbook with Canada

It sometimes feels as though the Trump administration gets its worldview and foreign policy ideas from a Kremlin School of International Relations course taught by Vladimir Putin – though at a CliffsNotes level that fails to consider how those strategies played out. Take the recent breakdown of US trade talks with Canada. 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 US 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 US has a natural right to correct what Trump and his supporters consider aberrations of geopolitical history.

So, Greenland should naturally belong to the US, 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 US-Canada talks collapsed, it’s because Washington made last-minute demands to dictate Canada’s domestic language policies and destroy its car-manufacturing industry.

All of this echoes policies that Putin has employed since the mid-to-late 2000s. In the Kremlin’s worldview, Belarus, modern-day Kazakhstan (in its current borders) and Ukraine aren’t real countries but historical aberrations, conjured up by the Bolsheviks. And as with Trump’s “Donroe Doctrine” for the Americas, all countries within Moscow’s so-called near abroad must bow to its will. They have no right to attach their economies, let alone security policies, to anyone other than Russia, because it is a great power, which they are not.

Russia’s stance on Ukraine is perhaps a far-fetched comparison with Trump’s view of Canada, because it suggests a future in which American tanks pour across the border and US pilots and missile crews blow up Canadian cities. But that’s just the worst-case destination for policies of coercion, which tend toward escalation when weaker countries are shocked into confronting their dependencies. Instead of forcing them into line, the coercion more often has the opposite effect, prompting them to diversify their security provision and trade.

The pressure on Kyiv to accept its vassal status was also primarily economic at first, involving disputes over natural gas prices in 2006 and 2008-2009, election interference and de facto trade embargoes. Russia also claimed a civilizational right to determine Ukraine’s language laws. And when bribery and intimidation didn’t work to keep friendly regimes in place, Moscow began to carve out territorial claims, starting with Crimea.

It took almost two decades to get to an open invasion, and in the interim, Ukraine’s exports to and imports from Russia fell to 5.1 per cent and 8.4 per cent respectively, in 2021, from 24 per cent and 42 per cent in 2000, when Putin came to power. It’s perhaps easier to see the US/Canada parallels in what’s happening now between Armenia and Russia, which has begun banning selected imports (on sanitary grounds) in response to Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s effort to end his country’s near-total reliance on Moscow.

He already froze Armenia’s participation in Russia’s equivalent of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, the Collective Security Treaty Organisation, in 2024. This week the parliament adopted a new government program for 2026-2031 that – for the first time – does not list Russia as a strategic partner. Pashinyan, who won re-election by a landslide in June, said last week that his government would apply for European Union membership “in the near future,” and that he would then hold a referendum to approve the decision.

He’s also working on normalizing relations with Azerbaijan and Turkey, building on the US-backed Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity, which could eventually form part of a corridor providing energy to Europe, bypassing Russia and Iran. The Kremlin isn’t happy. It’s demanding that Armenia hold the EU referendum by December, and so confront the painful consequences this would entail, including loss of access to Russian markets.

Moscow officials express outrage that Armenia (substitute Ukraine, Georgia or Moldova at will) should be trying to gain the benefits of integration with the EU at the same time as it enjoys membership in Russia’s equivalent, the Eurasian Economic Union. The suggestion is that countries must choose between trading partners not when they join the EU – something they may never do – but before. This need not be a matter for confrontation, but it very likely will become one.