S omeone of my generation remembers an imagined place called the free world. In our mental geographies, “we” Canadians, Americans, and Western Europeans grew up inside “the free world,” while Eastern Europeans, Russians, Chinese, and others were on the other side of the barbed wire. To say this world of ours was “imagined” is to say it air-brushed out members of the club, like the Shah’s Iran, Pinochet’s Chile, and Franco’s Spain, who were anything but free. We also drew a veil over the fact that the free world was led by a country that didn’t accord its own Black citizens the vote in the American south until 1965.
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The “free world” was a noble lie, but even noble lies can inspire. It helped leaders, from Kennedy to Reagan, to understand that the Berlin Wall was a moral abomination. It created bonds of solidarity that linked the best people of my generation to the cause of Polish Solidarity and Czech Charter 77. The people of Portugal, Spain, and Greece, who overthrew their own tyrannies in the 1970s and ’80s, and the Taiwanese, South Korean, and Philippine peoples, who overthrew theirs too, believed their national battles would enable their countries to rejoin this imagined world of freedom. The tears of joy on people’s faces in Berlin on the night the wall came down were tears of recognition. That night, at least, “the free world” didn’t feel like a dream. It had suddenly become real.
These days, we are like mourners at an excruciating funeral for that world. Even as late as a decade ago, automatic alignment on the side of fellow democracies against authoritarian and totalitarian regimes was supposed to be the guiding principle for the foreign policy of free peoples. Now there isn’t a tyrant or autocrat the American president doesn’t praise while shaking down his democratic allies. He plays up his friendship with North Korea’s odious tyrant while downgrading US military exercises with the country’s erstwhile democratic ally in Seoul. He tells the leader of a democratic state fighting for its life that it “doesn’t hold the cards” and denies it the missile defences that would protect its civilian population from nightly attack.
If such political vandalism were the work of just one man, we could imagine, sometime after 2028, a safe return to the ideals of the free world, but the reality is darker. The idea that America should stand up for free peoples is so degraded in American public opinion that Trump’s flagrant betrayals of free allies call forth no cry of outrage in Congress, no storm in US public opinion. The midterms will be decided by gas prices at the pump, not America’s betrayal of the ideals that were supposed to sustain its foreign policy since World War II.
Middle powers—Canada, the Europeans—still support freedom beyond their borders. They are staying true to their commitment to Ukraine while America walks away, but middle powers can’t recreate the free world. Their own survival in a world of predators is now their overriding priority. Where they once might have ventured a criticism of China’s human rights policies, or even support for its courageous dissidents, now every one of them is reaching out to China to counterbalance an America gone rogue.
When the values and principles of the free world are no longer shared in relations with America, who will prevail and who will submit becomes the only question. Canada turned out to be the first among former allies to discover this unwelcome truth. Last week, Canada’s leaders decided that its very economic sovereignty—its right to enter into economic relations with other states—was at stake, and so it walked away and triggered countervailing tariffs in reply. This can be called courageous, but it may just be recognizing reality.
In this new reality, we are all mercantilists now. Every state must protect its own core industries from external competition while investing massive state resources in the creation of the infrastructure necessary to remain competitive in a global struggle for economic survival. All forms of dependence can be weaponized, and so all supply chain and resource dependencies are vulnerabilities. We must grow our own, make our own, diversify our relationships, never put all our eggs in any single foreign basket.
We may all be mercantilists now, but if we are, we had better remind ourselves of Adam Smith’s scathing critique of mercantilism 250 years ago. When states close borders to trade, he argued, they don’t strengthen their national economies; they subsidize weakness and prevent economies from specializing and playing to their strengths. The president of the United States cannot bring manufacturing back to the United States. Manufacturing employment has been declining in America since the 1970s, shifting to China and East Asia, while employment in services, especially financial services, has mushroomed. Using tariffs to wreck the automobile supply ecosystem that used to seamlessly link Canada and the US across the border is classic mercantilist folly. It will destroy the auto industry in two countries, not just one, and deliver the automobile market in North America to the Chinese.
The conclusion to draw is that the US president is taking a wrecking ball to the foundations of the free world, all for the sake of an economic idée fixe discredited 250 years ago. Canada has no choice but to fight, but it knows it risks a damaging escalatory spiral and that it is forced to defend itself with mercantilist weapons—tariffs—that are a terrible idea. But sooner or later, every country watching this North American fight will realize that Canada isn’t just fighting for its own sovereignty but for everyone else’s too, especially those who once thought they lived in a place called “the free world.”
Originally published as “Tariff Wars and the End of the Free World” by Michael Ignatieff (Substack). Reprinted with permission of the author.
