This week, in a parliament chamber in Strasbourg, something happened that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.
The president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, stood up to give her annual address, and sitting there as her honored guest was the Prime Minister of Canada, Mark Carney. And she turned to him and said, “Dear Mark, Europe and Canada believe in democracy, that power does not belong to the strongest, richest and loudest, but to all of us.”
Then she invited Canada to become the first associate member in the history of the European Union.
The chamber rose to its feet. She and Carney exchanged kisses on the cheek. A new alliance, covering trade, defense, technology, and the Arctic, was born.
“Power does not belong to the strongest, richest, and loudest.” President von der Leyen was talking about us. About our country that, until recently, led the free world and was a friend, however imperfect, to our fellow democracies and foe to autocrats worldwide.
To be clear, associate membership is a new idea. The details haven’t been worked out, and Canada isn’t joining the EU as a full member. But do not let the technicalities obscure what happened.
Our closest neighbor, a country that shares the longest undefended border on earth with us, a country bound to us by a century of blood and trade and friendship, just decided the United States was no longer a reliable partner, and started building other alliances. And the oldest democracies of Europe, our allies throughout the Cold War and beyond, rolled out a red carpet for them.
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This Did Not Have to Happen
Canada didn’t want this. Europe didn’t want this. We pushed them away. More accurately, Donald Trump and his administration pushed them away.
For more than a year, this administration has treated Canada, one of our most loyal allies, like an adversary. Fifty percent tariffs. Blocked imports. And the President of the United States repeatedly, publicly musing that Canada should stop being a country at all and become our fifty-first state.
Imagine being Canadian and hearing the American president talk about annexing you, and then ask yourself what you would do. You would go looking for new friends too.
When von der Leyen made her offer, Trump’s response was to call it “laughable” and to suggest it might be a “hostile act.”
But Canada is only the clearest example of a much larger pattern. This is an administration that has spent its time in power systematically insulting the democracies that stood with us and flattering the dictators who never have.
It has held Ukraine at arm’s length while refusing, again and again, to condemn Vladimir Putin, the man bombing Ukrainian apartment blocks and stealing Ukrainian children. It has treated Viktor Orban, who has spent a decade strangling democracy in Hungary, as a model to admire. The President has spoken of his warm letters and his good relationship with Kim Jong Un, one of the most brutal jailers of his own people alive.
Over and over, presented with a choice between a democratic friend and an authoritarian strongman, this administration has chosen the strongman. Every single time.
And our longtime friends noticed. How could they not?
Nations, like people, will eventually believe you when you show them who you are for long enough. You cannot spend years telling your allies they are freeloaders and your adversaries they are geniuses and expect the alliances to survive it.
What we are watching is the methodical, entirely rational decision by the free world to stop depending on a United States it can no longer count on.
The Stakes Are Real
There are the obvious security costs. Alliances are what turned the United States from strong to indispensable. We got to help write the rules of the world not because we were the biggest, but because dozens of nations trusted us enough to follow our lead. Every ally we shed is a piece of that leverage gone, and that leverage does not come back cheaply, if it ever comes back at all.
But the economic threat is the one Americans should really understand.
For eighty years the American dollar has been the world’s reserve currency. That fact is the foundation of the American standard of living. It is why we can borrow so cheaply, why our debt hasn’t crushed us yet, why the things we buy cost what they cost.
There are people in this administration, including the Vice President, who have openly mused that the dollar’s role as the reserve currency is a burden we’d be better off without. They are wrong, dead wrong. The day the world decides it no longer needs the dollar is the day American living standards drop, our debts come due faster, and every single thing costs more.
If you think our politics are dysfunctional now, wait until you see what politics looks like in a country that has suddenly gotten much, much poorer.
Diminishing America will not make our country more stable. It will make it more desperate.
And that’s the bitter irony in all this. We were promised that Trump’s agenda would Make America Great Again. Instead, on this administration’s watch, our friends are building alliances that route around us. Our rivals are delighted. The MAGA project has made us less trusted, less influential, and less secure, and the bill for that will be paid not by the people who ran it up, but by our kids and our grandkids.
Put plainly, the next generation of Americans will inherit a country with fewer friends and less power to shape the world they live in and will be worse off for the actions of this administration.
The Future of Democracy
The world needs a strong democracy at its center; one willing to stand up to the autocrats who would happily conquer everything if no one stopped them. For eighty years that democracy was us, and for all our flaws and mistakes, the free world was safer for it.
My deepest hope, the thing I work towards every day, is that America returns to that role. That we remember what we are for. That we once again become the country von der Leyen was describing rather than the one she was warning about.
But until that day comes, I’ll say this: Canada and Europe are stepping up to defend democratic norms at the exact moment my own country is stepping back. They are keeping to the mission that America used to steward.
I wish with my whole heart that they didn’t have to. But since they are, they have my respect, my gratitude, and my best wishes. At least until the day the leaders of my country once again understand that America’s singular ability to lead the free world was never a burden.
It was the greatest gift we ever gave the world, and the greatest one we ever gave ourselves.
The world changed this week. I just refuse to believe America’s best days of leading it are behind us. We’ve come back from worse. We can come back from this too.
— Adam
Am SOOOO Thankful others in sane democratic lands have the courage to stand up to our self- serving power-crazed prez . . Because sadly our leaders in this nation do NOT!!
Thank you, Adam. This report makes me want to weep.