Reality TV star cum Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy misunderstood. After Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney rejected tariff negotiations that would lead to a trade war, he thought he meant a real war with guns and bombs, and so he opined that Canada would certainly lose because it doesn’t have a military.
Sean Duffy on Canada: “It’s a country that doesn’t have a military … they have record high euthanasia rates. And so to think that they’re gonna go to war with Donald Trump and actually win that war with the US, I think it’s foolish on their part.” pic.twitter.com/YfMwn6KovY
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 23, 2026
Carney made clear at the World Economic Forum in Davos that the old world order was no longer viable.
It was a unique statement for any leader in Canada to make. The country has long defined itself through its participation in global systems, seeing itself as a node in the larger orders of the world, the postwar trans-Atlantic order and, before that, the British Empire. Mr. Carney is taking Canada in another direction, emphasizing national sovereignty on every front — economic, political, military and technological.
Canada would not be the 51st state. Trump could not be trusted, and by extension, Canada could no longer rely on the United States. But Canada was and would remain a sovereign nation, not a vassal of the United States or Trump. Trump didn’t get it.
These deep-running values, rarely openly expressed, are the undercurrent of Canada’s rejection of America last week. The offered deal, or at least the details that have emerged, veered significantly from purely economic matters. Apparently, one of the final sticking points was an American demand that Quebec undo its French language laws and French language cultural protections. French, in Canada, is not a business matter. Its place in our nation transcends absolutely any market-based consideration. It is not something that gets “put on the table.”
What does speaking French in Quebec have to do with trade? Was there even an arguable connection between French cultural protections and Trump’s delusion that Canada was somehow cheating the United States? Yet, there was the demand made on the cusp of Trump’s deadline, a demand that no rational person could possibly believe would be acceptable, and no rational nation would have made if it expected to negotiate a deal both nations could live with.
The tariff scheme involved is no more lawful than Trump’s others. While Trump persists in claiming that tariff is the word he finds most “beautiful,” it doesn’t change the law.
Section 338 was a part of the notorious Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, which gravely exacerbated the Great Depression. In a previous post, I summarized the reasons why Section 338 tariffs are an illegal usurpation of congressional authority by the president.
As Philip Zelikow of the conservative Hoover Institution explained in a guest post here at the VC blog, last year, Section 338 was superseded by new legislation enacted in 1962 and 1974, and is therefore defunct. For that reason, it has not been used to impose tariffs since at least the 1940s.
In a more recent guest post, Georgetown University trade law specialist Peter Harrell explained why the then-planned Canada tariffs are illegal even if Section 338 is not defunct. Trump’s tariffs don’t meet various requirements for invoking the law. I expect there will be legal challenges to these tariffs, and those challenges will deserve to prevail.
Eventually, the tariffs will be enjoined, but it will be too late to undo the damage done to our relationship with Canada, or with our other allies, from NATO to South Korea. The sheer, unadulterated idiocy of imposing 50% tariffs on a whim by a person wholly lacking in authority and without benefit of actual forethought that will inevitably be stricken at the price of our national integrity has made two things abundantly, and irrefutably, clear: No nation can put its faith and trust into the United States being there when it’s needed, and President Trump still has no grasp of the limits of his authority.
It’s one thing to disclaim the duty to help a democracy like Ukraine withstand the invasion by a communist imperialist dictator like Putin. Trump had a talking point that there is an ocean between us, so it wasn’t our problem. It’s a foolish point, accepted only by people too ignorant to grasp why the United States should defend democracy and how this stand would safeguard Europe from invasion.
If and when that happens, NATO Article 5 will be invoked, putting the hard question to Trump of whether he will honor the United States’ treaty commitment or refuse. At this point, our one-time allies in Europe have no faith that Trump will come to their aid. And even when Trump is out of office, they will remember that the United States is only one presidential term away from another president who does not believe in honoring commitments.
There is no ocean between the United States and Canada. We have enjoyed a symbiotic relationship, each being the other’s largest trading partner. Canada sent its sons and daughters to die when we asked it to be part of the coalition of the willing. But no more. Canada is lost to the United States. For nothing.
Update: Trump has his say.
