President Donald Trump is at the NATO summit in Turkey where things grew contentious when he dropped a “diplomatic bombshell” on Canada.
According to a report from the Wall Street Journal, Justin Trudeau kept getting threatening phone calls from Trump before he was replaced by Mark Carney.
At one point in a call, Trump told Canada he would kill a 118-year-old agreement that set the border with the U.S. and its neighbor to the north on maps and on the ground.
The agreement came when Canada was still handled by the United Kingdom, and at the April 1908 Boundary Convention, it was the U.K. that signed the agreement, not Canada. But Trump didn’t care, telling Trudeau, “I tear that up, and your whole country unravels.”
Trump seemed confused that the law established the border, but the reality is that a slew of other agreements and treaties set the border, including the Treaty of 1818 and the Oregon Treaty of 1846.
According to the Journal, “Over dinner at Mar-a-Lago, Trudeau’s envoys tried to dissuade Trump from absorbing their country. When one Trump aide pointed out Canada’s 41 million people would lean Democrat, the president came up with a neat solution: just split the northern neighbor into two states, one red, the other blue.”
It’s unclear how Trump would make that work, given that he has an approval rating in Canada of around 22 percent, according to a Pew Research Center survey.
When Carney took over, he asked for a review of Canada’s dependency “on one particular country for its data storage, military hardware, payments processing and even food.”
The report called it the first move for a country shifting the U.S. from an ally to a threat. It was a stark contrast to what NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte did, which is to encourage members that they had to do whatever it would take to keep the alliance together.
“In effect, a push to make Canada America’s 51st state had lighted a fuse of unintended consequences that would play out far beyond North America, as overseas allies asked themselves whether the U.S.-led alliance could truly last,” the report said.
Carney’s first visit as prime minister was not to the U.S. but to France, where he and President Emmanuel Macron discussed ways to dial down its dependency on the U.S.
“Canada had the critical minerals needed by France, whose state-backed tech firms were taking early steps into the U.S.-dominated spheres of AI and quantum computing. French diplomats joked that since Canada and Denmark share a land border on an uninhabited Arctic island off Greenland, that could make the North American country a legitimate candidate to gain fast-track membership in the EU. Carney laughed,” the report said.
When Carney went to the U.K. next, they discussed how “they might band together if the U.S. left ‘Five Eyes,'” the U.S.-led intelligence-sharing alliance made up of the U.K., Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the U.S. While that idea never gained traction, it was discussed with MI6.
While in the U.K. his requested report about a world without America was finished and he was able to share it with Kir Starmer’s office.
Starmer wanted to be cautious, insisting that they had to find a way to salvage the relationship between the West and America.
“We don’t have a relationship to keep!” Carney replied, according to the report.
Informal advisor and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner was advising Canada to “produce a video that might persuade the president that they were serious about border security. Trudeau’s government hired a film crew to capture two Black Hawk helicopters and a sniffer dog on patrol. Instead of placating Trump, it seemed to fuel his interest in revisiting the placement of the border.”
Carney’s team, by contrast, began reading clinical and psychological studies on “impulsivity” to better learn how to deal with Trump. They believed that Trump’s 51st state idea was really about “price discovery,” when he throws out an absurd idea to see how the financial markets will react.
Other aides thought it was more about Trump trying to kick Trudeau while his poll numbers were down.
Either way, Carney has looked for new ideas to deal with the volatility of the American leader while slowly reducing reliance on the U.S.