“We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition,” Canadian prime minister Mark Carney told the world’s self-designated elite in a January 21 speech. “[G]reat powers have begun using economic integration as weapons. Tariffs as leverage. Financial infrastructure as coercion. Supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited. You cannot ‘live within the lie’ of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination.”
Carney delivered his musings to the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, days after visiting China and striking a major trade deal with its regime. That deal represents both a “rupture” with Canada’s former first-line trade partner, the United States, and a “transition” to something else.
Why the rupture? Why the transition?
Under US president Donald Trump (and, to some degree, Joe Biden), we’ve seen all the things Carney complained about in his speech.
When your main buyer (or, rather, the lord and master of your main buyers) becomes reluctant to buy from you — even if it means he (or, rather, his serfs) have trouble selling to you — you eventually start looking for other buyers and sellers. That’s the transition.
And, eventually, you find those new buyers and sellers and, to at least some degree, swear off coddling the old ones. That’s the rupture.
Writ large, Canada’s move away from the US and toward China is just the latter part of Mike’s answer, in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises — “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly” — to the question of how he went bankrupt.
Which, in turn, is just a waypoint in another transition. In Mike’s case, it was all downhill from the bankruptcy. In America’s case, who knows?
It’s easy to just blame Trump for all this craziness, but it’s also a little bit lazy.
Yes, Trump’s trade and economic policies seem purpose-built for the task of dismantling American prosperity at home and power (“soft” and “hard”) abroad.
In reality, though, the American empire and the supposed global “rules-based order” have been in continual decline pretty much since that happy accident 80 years ago, when World War 2 ended with most of the world’s industry wrecked, but America’s untouched.
It’s all been downhill from there … gradually.
We may have finally reached the “suddenly” point.
We were always going to.
It may be that with Trump, as William Lowndes Yancey said of Jefferson Davis upon his arrival in Montgomery, Alabama in 1861, “the man and the hour have met.” You may remember how that turned out. In both cases, the man’s identity was unimportant. There was going to be a man, there was going to be an hour, there was going to be a rupture, and there was going to be a transition.
I consider myself lucky, in many ways, to have lived the bulk of my likely lifespan during the “gradually” phase. Americans, including myself, have had it fat and happy for a very long time. That time is nearing its end.
I just hope America can find its way to a better transition than Mike managed.
Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.
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