GIESBRECHT: It was a no-win situation for Carney and sure enough, he lost

Well, they had their much ballyhooed meeting — and Trump survived!Considering the fate of other American presidents who met with Canadian prime ministers — and didn’t survive — Trump can consider himself lucky.Take the case of President Warren Harding, who visited Canada in 1923, apparently got food poisoning here from a crab dinner, and died shortly after. Or Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who might have contracted the polio that crippled him while in New Brunswick.More recently, John F. Kennedy’s 1961 trip to Canada, might have contributed to his death. On a state visit to Canada Kennedy was cajoled by Diefenbaker into digging a hole for the symbolic planting of a tree. Kennedy knew he shouldn’t be doing such a thing, because he had a back injury from his football days. But Diefenbaker nagged him into doing it, and as a result he badly aggravated his back injury, and thereafter had to wear a cumbersome back brace. It was that back brace that might have prevented him from ducking when he heard the bullets fired from Lee Harvey Oswald’s gun. It was one of those bullets that killed him.So Donald Trump should thank his lucky stars that he emerged from his meeting with Carney unscathed.Okay, I’ll get serious. How did Carney do?.He escaped with his life for sure, but not much else.In fact, he had trouble getting in a word edgewise, as the much bigger — and much louder — Trump dominated the smaller, mild-mannered Carney. Those of us of a certain vintage will remember Prime Minister Lester Pearson being dominated in this way by Lyndon Johnson. Like Carney, Pearson was a small, mild mannered man, while Johnson — like Trump — was big, loud and brash.At one meeting in 1965, angered by Pearson’s criticism of his handling of the war in Vietnam, Johnson reportedly lifted Pearson up by his lapels, and shouted into his face: “Don’t you come into my house and piss on my rug.”That might well have been the worst meeting in history between an American president and a Canadian prime minister. (Although some meetings between Kennedy and Diefenbaker were pretty ugly.).This picture — like the lead picture of Trump and Carney — tells the story..In any event, the meeting with Trump actually followed a rather predictable pattern. Trump tends to be gracious to leaders, except to those he thinks have double-crossed him (such as Justin Trudeau and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy.) He heaps praise on them, but then proceeds to completely dominate them in the question and answer part of the meeting. For Trump, it is that part of the meeting that is important.For example, when asked by a reporter, “Is there anything Prime Minister Carney can do to get you to lift tariffs on Canada?” Trump immediately said “No.” When pressed by the reporter with, “Why not?” Trump shrugged and said “That’s just the way it is.”Considering the fact that Carney’s main reason for coming cap in hand to Washington was to try and change the president’s mind about tariffs on Canada, this was a remarkable reply. Trump was basically telling Carney that the meeting was just for show, and if Carney wanted to save Canada he had to do it himself. Trump wasn’t going to do it for him.Trump was making a fool of Carney — who just sat there looking rather uncomfortable.Essentially, the meeting was a failure for Carney, and a win for Trump. Carney capitulated to Trump. And that’s exactly the way the American conservative media portrayed the meeting..When Trump repeated his now infamous troll that Canada should become the 51st state Carney did manage to squeak out a rehearsed reply. But even then Trump got in the last word, with his “Never say never.”CBC and other Liberal-friendly media tried to paint the meeting in the best light possible for Carney, and groups that had hoped for a more positive outcome for Canadians, such as the National Citizens Coalition, were dismayed. Here is what they said:“We will not stand idly by while Carney exploits sovereignty concerns and election interference for political points. It's time to reclaim the Canadian Dream from low-cunning leaders who say one thing and do another."So, the big meeting is over, with nothing accomplished on the main purpose of the meeting — tariffs.What Trump is doing with tariffs seems unfair to many, and irrational to others. Why would he be such a “bully” and upset about arrangements that had been in place for years, or even decades? And why would he pick on Canada?.At least that’s basically the way Trump’s tariff policy was portrayed in Canadian government-subsidized media during the recent Canadian election campaign. Trump was at various times called a “fool,” “imbecile” or “Mad King Donald. According to these writers, there was no rhyme or reason to what he was doing. It was all chaos. In fact, Carney and his Liberals somehow managed to convince a Trump-hating electorate that all of this was a good reason for putting the same Liberals — the same Liberals who had put Canada in this incredibly weak position — back in power.But it is simply not true that the Trump administration is proceeding with no plan — and that all of this is just the whim of one erratic and foolish man. The truth is that this is all part of a very bold plan. Some of the best minds in the world are behind it. The goal is to do a complete reset of the Pax Americana and Bretton Woods system that was built after 1945, as well as to reset the relationship with Communist China that began in 2001 when China was allowed to join the World Trade Organization (WTO.) China then proceeded to subvert the world trade system..The first “reset” involves changing the Bretton Woods post-war monetary system that America created out of the dust of a world war that had thoroughly wrecked Europe and much of the world.WW2 had left the United States as the most powerful country in the world. Europe and Asia were on their knees. But nipping at America’s heels was a hugely emboldened Soviet Union that was gobbling up what was left of Eastern Europe, and threatening a ruined Western Europe, while trying to lure the developing world with its promises of communist utopia.When Winston Churchill gave his famous Iron Curtain speech in 1946, the world was a very scary place. War between the West and the Soviet Union was a very real possibility:“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent." were Churchill's ominous words..The United States responded to the Soviet threat in various ways, that included: the Bretton Woods system to create a new monetary plan, the Marshall Plan to rebuild a devastated Europe and NATO to protect the West from direct Soviet aggression.The United States created this post-war system out of self-interest, and not altruism. But it also did so in the firm belief that it had a duty to protect what has since been called “The Free World.” Harry Truman, and the presidents who succeeded him, understood that their country could only thrive in a world that was not dominated by Soviet communism. As a result, they were quite happy to basically subsidize trade, and pay the lion’s share of the defence commitment. They wanted as many nations as possible on their side.But that post-1945 world ended long ago. With the help of the Marshall Plan, Europe quickly rebounded and today bears no resemblance to the continent of wrecked nations it was in 1945. And, as Trump sees things, the U.S. is still subsidizing European and other economies by paying for the lion’s share of mutual defence, and logging up yearly trade imbalances because of those ungrateful nations’ tariffs, and non-trade barriers..So, Trump is now telling the world that America is no longer prepared to continue to subsidize their defence, nor will it accept unfair trading practices. In other words, Trump is simply responding to a world that has fundamentally changed since 1945. At that time, the Soviet Union was a very real threat, both economically and geographically. Meanwhile, China was extremely poor and weak, and was not a threat at all.The situation is now completely reversed. We have seen with the Russian invasion of Ukraine how extremely weak Russia has become. Three years into the war, and a giant Russia hasn’t even been able to impose its will on a far smaller neighbour. In the process, Russia is becoming a virtual vassal of China.Meanwhile China has become a monster. Since it was allowed into the WTO in 2001 its economy has grown at a staggering pace..But while the intention was to integrate China peacefully into the world economy, and liberalize the country, the CCP had other plans. It is now seen as openly hostile to the west. It has used every trick in the book to game the system to give itself advantages. The U.S. trade imbalance annually with China is now in the hundreds of billions of dollars.And Trump intends to correct that. He is now basically waging a full scale trade war with China.No one explains all of this more succinctly than senior geopolitical expert, George Friedman. The world is at an important turning point, and Friedman puts this in context. How this will all work out we don’t know. We may be in for months or years of uncertainty, while a destabilizing and destructive trade war rages.On the other hand, this might all be resolved fairly soon. Even now, a comprehensive trade deal with the United Kingdom has been announced on May 8, 2025. The deal will apparently reduce most US tariffs on their exports to a baseline 10%, and eliminate tariffs completely on steel and other items..It is likely that other nations will soon follow. India, South Korea, Japan, and Vietnam might be next. The common element could be the retention of a basic 10% tariff but if so, that would substantially reduce the tariff percentage those countries currently face.So, Canada is small potatoes in all of this. Despite the fact that Carney and his Liberals have done their best to convince Canadians that Trump thinks of almost nothing else than how to do mean things to Canada, the truth is that Canada has made itself weak, and almost irrelevant on the world stage since 2015. We don’t matter much to anyone but ourselves at this low point in our history.But now that the election is over, and other nations are starting to make deals, Carney would be best advised to stop playing politics, and get down to business. A deal with Trump should be negotiated sooner rather than later. Trump would not be above punishing countries that insist on playing to their bases back home, instead of getting down to the brass tacks of a realistic deal.Carney and his clever Liberals have managed to win an election using fear and hatred of Trump.But it is now time for Carney to stop playing those games, and put the interests of Canada — not his Liberal Party — first.Brian Giesbrecht, a retired Manitoba judge, is a Senior Fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.

GIESBRECHT: It was a no-win situation for Carney and sure enough, he lost

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