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By Dan Perry
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There is something profoundly dispiriting about President Donald Trump’s treatment of Canada. His hostility toward America’s closest ally is costing both countries dearly while capturing the larger tragedy of the self-inflicted damage America is doing to its reputation on the world stage. A folly of this scale needs a symbol, and none is more fitting than the Gordie Howe International Bridge.
Connecting Detroit and Windsor, Ontario, the bridge is named for a man who embodied the bond between the two countries. Gordie Howe was a Canadian icon, one of the greatest hockey players ever, and also a Detroit legend.
His career with the Detroit Red Wings made him a hero on both sides of the border—and the very personification of "a bridge." The choice of his name celebrated the closest of geopolitical relationships.
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Along blunders Trump, with a ham-fisted transactionalism as self-defeating as it is cynical. Every tariff threat, every snarling tweet and every joke about annexing Canada raises the urgency of a question that resonates far beyond North America: Does the U.S. understand anything about the utility and value of alliances?
Canada represents the clearest example of how U.S. influence has worked: through friendship, integration, shared interests, and voluntary cooperation.
The hockey analogy is almost too perfect. Hockey is Canada's national sport and key to Canadian identity. Yet the "National" Hockey League is a North American institution. Most teams are in the United States because the American market is larger. A huge disproportion of the league's greatest players has been Canadian. U.S. franchises have dominated the Stanley Cup in recent decades. The result is a shared ecosystem in which two countries compete fiercely while thriving within the same structure.
Most Americans experience this personally: A friend I’ve known since birth is a leading doctor in Toronto, who as a kid visited me in Philadelphia. My best friend was married in Quebec City. A college roommate was Canadian. Another friend grew up in Montreal. I’ve visited the country many times. When I was a boy the Flyers won two Stanley Cups in a row. The heroes were Bobby Clarke, Rick MacLeish, Bernie Parent—Canadians all.
Trump’s Canada Tariffs Hurt America
A superficial interpretation might conclude that if Canada and the U.S. are so deeply intertwined, political union naturally follows. Their achievement is precisely the opposite. Two sovereign democracies have built one of the world's most successful cross-border partnerships while preserving their separate identities.
This has huge economic usefulness. The U.S. and Canada have spent generations building one of the world's most integrated economic relationships. Almost a trillion dollars in total trade in goods and services flows between the two countries each year—almost $3 billion every day—making it one of the largest bilateral trading relationships in the world.
Modern supply chains routinely cross the border several times before a finished product reaches consumers. Canada supplies more crude oil to the United States than any other country, providing roughly three-fifths of all American crude oil imports. American manufacturers depend upon Canadian aluminum, potash, lumber, uranium, and critical minerals, while Canadian companies rely upon American consumers, investment, and technology.
Sure, even within a close relationship disputes inevitably arise. Canada protects portions of its agricultural sector through supply management. But the broader context here makes tariff barriers in this case even more idiotic than they usually are—and this is worth examining in a week during which Trump has again threatened 50 percent tariffs on many Canadian products.
Far from protecting a vital national industry (at the cost of inefficiency and inflation), which is the one possible justification, it actually punishes one’s own businesses directly, disrupting production as much as commerce.
Trump may think that he is disadvantaging Canadian firms, but he is mostly reducing the competitiveness of American manufacturers that depend upon Canadian inputs, while raising prices for Americans.
The deterioration has become almost surreal. This week, Trump threatened yet more new tariffs because wildfire smoke from Canada drifted into the United States, blaming Ottawa—absolutely unfairly—for failing to manage its forests rather than treating the fires as a shared challenge requiring cross-border cooperation.
Reflecting the damage Trump is doing, Canada this week joined the British-Japanese-, and Italian-led Global Combat Air Programme as an observer, signaling interest in Europe's next-generation fighter jet even as it reviews its long-term commitment to the American F-35. The message is difficult to miss: even America's closest allies are beginning to hedge.
Allies Prepare for a Post-American World
It was Canadian PM Mark Carney who earlier this year made the case that Trump has undone forever the existing world order, and that its allies must prepare for a post-American landscape. I argued with that on these pages, saying he gives Trump too much credit and the catastrophe can be reversed. But from my experiences at geopolitical meetings in Europe in recent months, I know America’s allies increasingly agree with Carney.
And what of the Gordie Howe International Bridge? Trump threatened to block it, arguing that its financing favored Canada and tying the project to broader trade disputes. The opening was delayed, and Canada ultimately canceled the joint ribbon-cutting ceremony after the administration announced sweeping new tariffs. A bridge built to symbolize the closest partnership in North America became another casualty of its deterioration.
There is a word for this that Trump himself would recognize: SAD!
Dan Perry is the former London-based Europe-Africa Editor and Cairo-based Middle East Editor of The Associated Press, chairman of the Foreign Press Association in Jerusalem and the author of two books.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
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