'Revolutionary change in American foreign policy': Canada pivoting towards EU, India and China

François Picard is pleased to welcome Anne Applebaum, staff writer at The Atlantic and author of Autocracy, Inc. According to Applebaum, the upheaval in American diplomacy and foreign policy transcends any one administration. She describes a full-fledged transformation in the way the United States exerts power, pivoting away from leadership of a democratic alliance and toward a transactional, mafia-style politics that fuses ideology, private economic interests, personal relationships and geopolitical leverage.

In Applebaum’s analysis, the consequences are already extending well beyond Washington. Canada, for example, has begun taking a far more proactive approach to strengthening its economic and political ties with the EU, India and China, as Carney actively seeks to reduce the country’s dependence on its once-cozy, decades-long relationship with the United States.

Nor is this shift limited to the American continent. European governments are now being forced to confront a far less predictable and increasingly adversarial ally. At the same time, far-right movements abroad are finding new opportunities for political alignment as the United States embraces a harder-line, populist and increasingly autocratic style of politics at home and abroad. The resulting uncertainty is pushing countries around the world to quietly explore alternative economic and security relationships that leave them less dependent on an increasingly combative and impulsive American partner.

What makes Applebaum’s argument particularly striking is that she presents these developments as both a revolution and the beginnings of a counter-revolution. Trump’s political model has imitators, she argues, but it is also provoking fierce resistance. As confidence in American reliability declines, governments are beginning to hedge their bets for the long term, diversify their partnerships and imagine a world in which Washington is no longer automatically at the center of the geopolitical universe.

This may not be the “America First” that Donald Trump envisioned. In Applebaum’s telling, we are no longer navigating only the uncharted waters of what America itself might be becoming, both at home and on the world stage. We may also be witnessing the emergence of a new world order in which the United States occupies a diminished role, brought about, paradoxically, by a fiercely isolationist policy intended to reassert American dominance.

The irony is difficult to miss: in seeking to make the world bend once again to American power and self-described exceptionalism, the United States may instead be accelerating the world’s search for ways to live without it.