Mark Carney is Leading the European Resistance Against America
Europe and Canada just put America in the threat model
Hey friends.
The Wall Street Journal just dropped some reporting that changed how I think about Canada, Europe, and the whole shape of NATO, and I think we need to talk about it.
For most of the alliance’s history, the nightmare scenario had one basic shape: Russia moves west, America comes east, Europe holds. That’s the entire postwar order, without the summits and acronyms.
Then came the Canada 51 thing, which most of us Americans wrote off as noise.
When Trump started floating Canada as America’s 51st state, plenty of people, myself included for a while, treated it as typical Trump theater. Puffery. Bluster. The kind of thing a buffoon says at a podium because his cult likes the sound of it.
We now know it went considerably further than that. In private calls with Justin Trudeau, Trump reportedly threatened to tear up the 1908 treaty that draws the border between our two countries, telling him, “I tear that up and your whole country unravels.”
That’s not a joke. That’s an American president describing, to an ally’s own prime minister, exactly how he’d go about dismantling his country if he felt like it.
Mark Carney, Trudeau’s successor, apparently took the threat exactly as seriously as it deserved, and went looking for European partners willing to help Canada quietly reduce its dependence on American security and technology.
What happened next is where this stops being a Canada-only story and becomes something much larger.
The dinner before the fire alarm
According to the Journal, Katie Miller, wife of Trump’s deputy chief of staff, was dining with the president in early January, hours before US special forces captured Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro. Trump was in a reflective mood. “I wish I had more time,” he told her. “If I had more time, I would do Greenland.”
She reassured him. “You do have time.” On January 3, with Maduro now in American custody, she posted a single word on X, an American flag draped over Greenland, and the word “SOON.”
That tweet landed across European capitals like a fire alarm going off in a library. A private aside over dinner had just become a public signal, and every government watching read it the same way. Whatever Trump had been contemplating about Greenland, he wasn’t done contemplating it.
By the way, Trump just threatened Greenland again yesterday at the NATO summit in Turkey.
Therapy night at the Space Egg
Sometime in late January, nearly thirty European heads of government gathered at the European Council headquarters in Brussels, a building some diplomats call the Space Egg, for a five-hour meeting with no cameras, no phones, and no aides.
Every leader had been told to come alone. The single topic on the table, by the Journal’s own framing, was how to manage a breakup with the United States. Some of the leaders in that room later called it therapy night.
Around the five-hour mark, discussing the Greenland threat directly, French President Emmanuel Macron said, “We are drawing a line here.” At that point French soldiers were already stationed in Greenland alongside Danish special forces, both reportedly prepared for the possibility of shooting at American soldiers if it came to that.
It would have been a suicide mission for the French and Danes.
But the goal was to make an American seizure of Greenland too messy, too costly, and too alliance-shattering to attempt cleanly.
That’s deterrence, in its oldest and plainest form. For the first time in living memory, Europe was pointing it back at Washington.
I already wrote the piece gaming out what an actual American seizure of Greenland would look like, the legal mess, the NATO mechanics, the escalation ladder, the sheer strategic stupidity of trading allied trust for a chunk of ice the US could already use for free.
This is a different question, and it’s the one that actually kept me up. Could the US ever earn back the trust of Canada and Europe after this?
Until this week, the optimistic half of me had an easy answer ready. Trump won’t govern forever, and eventually sane hands will be back on the wheel, and things will drift back to normal. Sure, it might take a generation, but eventually we can win back Canada’s trust…
I don’t believe that anymore.
Think about the Trudeau call and the Brussels meeting together and a harder truth comes into focus. Even if a normal president appeared in the Oval Office tomorrow, the damage done this year doesn’t magically disappear.
Once an ally has built the habit of writing contingency plans for your country, that habit doesn’t un-build itself just because you replaced the person at the top.
Europe got a wake-up call: it had grown far too dependent on American systems for its own comfort, and that a single election cycle in a foreign country could put its security and its infrastructure at the mercy of one unpredictable man.
Canada and Europe’s response was a plan, and the plan was patient: Keep Trump fat, happy, and distracted for as long as possible, while quietly building the independence that makes the next Trump, whenever and wherever he shows up, matter less.
It occurs to me that the sheer amount of financial and reputational damage one man has done to the United States may never be fully quantified. How many billions or trillions of dollars will be lost over the next thirty or forty years because Europe is no longer reliant on US weapon systems, technology, business infrastructure, space access, etc.?
We’ve pushed Canada to make deals with China for lower agricultural tariffs in exchange for 49,000 Chinese electric cars. Carney’s quote on this deal was, “We take the world as it is. Not as we wish it to be.” God, I wish we had Carney down here in the States.
