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Analysis
Last Thursday, Justin Trudeau’s last full day as prime minister, Donald Trump was emphatic in his desire to force Canada to join the United States during a press event in the Oval Office.
“Canada only works as a state,” he said, referring to the border as “an artificial line” and suggesting that Canschluss — a play on the term Anschluss, denoting Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria in 1938 — is just a matter of time.
“There will be a little disruption, but it won’t be very long. But they need us. We really don’t need them. And we have to do this. I’m sorry.”
On Friday, former central banker Mark Carney was sworn in as Canada’s prime minister. In his first news conference, he called Trump’s comments “crazy. That’s all you can say.”
For a few days, Trump didn't repeat his threats, which opened up the possibility that he merely enjoyed dunking onTrudeau, whom he seems to despise, and would now move on. But it was likely that the US president was just busy — carrying out airstrikes in Yemen, deporting migrants to El Salvador, and trying to negotiate a ceasefire in Ukraine.
On Tuesday night, in an interview with Fox News, Trump angrily denounced Canada again, said he doesn’t care if his comments cost the Conservatives the election, and said Canada is “meant to be our 51st state.”
Trump is so toxic in Canada that Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievreseized on the comment as evidence that he, not Carney, is the champion the country needs.
Trump’s continued trash talk may show that his fixation is too deep to be deterred by the disinclination of Canadians to be annexed, which is setting him up for a showdown with the new prime minister.
People who know Carney think he may be better equipped to respond than Trudeau was.
Anthony Scaramucci, who became friends with Carney at Goldman Sachs many years ago, and who briefly worked for Trump in 2017, said on MSNBC that the president likely doesn’t want a fight with Carney, who he described as a “very, very tough guy.”
“I don’t think the administration really wants to fight with him,” said the Mooch. “He has energy on his side. He has electricity on his side.”
Trudeau looked weak
Trump and Carney have not yet had the traditional congratulatory call but, on the other hand, he is not yet calling Carney governor — which would be ironic, since he previously served as governor of both the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England.
It may be that Trump had a special desire to bully Trudeau, who was an unpopular lame duck when Trump was elected.
“Trump, as everybody knows, has an unerring instinct for the weakness of a counterparty, and he seeks to exploit that and control them for it,” says Graeme Thompson, a senior analyst with Eurasia Group.
The White House will have noticed that Canadians now have their backs up, says Jamie Tronnes, executive director of the Center for North American Prosperity and Security, and are unified around the idea of “sticking it” to the Americans.
“It really has changed the way in which they will be able to negotiate with the United States in an upcoming [trade] renegotiation. It doesn’t matter who the leader of the Canadian government is. That person is going to have to represent the national mood, and the national mood is not conducive to cutting a deal with the United States.”
And Trump appreciates muscle. After blustery Ontario Premier Doug Ford threatened to impose a 25% tariff on electricity exports to the United States, Trump threatened him into backing down, and then praised him as “a very strong man.”
Thompson notes that Trump has been respectful to Ford, who just won a majority, and Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, who enjoys overwhelming support among Mexicans.
“I think that whoever ends up on the other side of the Canadian election, if they get a majority, that would be the most powerful thing in Carney or Poilievre’s pocket, in terms of relations with the Trump administration.”
An election on tackling Trump
For Carney, everything depends on managing Trump, since he has the power to badly damage Canada’s economy with tariffs.
Carney is trying to show strength. After being sworn in, he flew to Europe to meet with French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer to “strengthen ties with reliable allies,” which seemingly no longer includes the United States.
After flying back to the Canadian Arctic, Carney announced that Canada would buy a CA$6 billion radar system from Australia, getting it before the Americans. He also has asked for a review of the planned CA$19 billion purchase of 88 F-35 fighter jets from the United States, “given the geopolitical environment,” although the Americans might be able to use technology-sharing agreements to block Canada from purchasing alternatives.
Last week, Portugal announced it would buy European jets rather than F-35s because of America’s new hostility toward traditional allies, so the Canadian announcement would seem like bad news for politically powerful American supplier Lockheed Martin. This would normally be the kind of thing to get a president’s attention.
Carney, who has met Trump at international conferences and been involved in business deals with Jared Kushner and Elon Musk, will highlight his economic and crisis-management experience in the upcoming Canadian election, which could start as soon as Sunday.
Polls show, in a dramatic reversal, that Canadians now favor Carney over his Conservative rival, who is promising to stand up to Trump but whom Carney has linked to the MAGA movement.
Carney is campaigning on taking a hard line. In London, he said he didn’t intend to negotiate with Trump until he stopped threatening to make Canada the 51st state.
“We’ve called out those comments,” he said. “They’re disrespectful, they’re not helpful, and they need to stop. They will have to stop before we sit down and have a conversation about our broader partnership with the United States.”
But Trump shows no sign of stopping, and if he doesn’t, it’s unclear what Carney — or Poilievre — can do. Both leaders talk about diversifying trade, but it would take years to build the transport infrastructure to make a major shift workable. In the short term, a showdown with a hostile neighbor looks inevitable.
Last week, the US and Ukrainian governments agreed to pursue a 30-day ceasefire with no preconditions. Putin said yesterday on that call that he agrees – as long as the halt to fighting applies only to strikes on energy infrastructure, a major military target for both sides in recent months. That’s far short of the pause on fighting by land, sea, and air that Trump wanted, though Putin did say he was also ready to talk about a pause on attacks on Black Sea shipping. (Clearly, the Russian president is tired of daily briefings on the successes of Ukrainian air and sea drones.)
In the meantime, Russian forces will continue to push for more territorial gains on the ground, and Russia remains free to launch air attacks on civilian populations. We saw more of that last night. Since spring is here and power losses will no longer leave Ukrainians in the freezing cold, the promise to hold off on attacking energy infrastructure costs Russia little.
Putin offered Trump enough to encourage the US president to continue talks on a broader US-Russia rapprochement, one that includes benefits for both economies. Trump also has no reason to begin insisting that Ukrainians and Europeans participate in future negotiations, another prize for Putin.
Any halt or slowdown in the intensity of attacks will keep more civilians alive, at least for now. That's good news, and there's likely to be further movement toward a broader ceasefire at some point later in the year, maybe by the end of April.
But a durable peace agreement is another question. Putin made clear to Trump that he has some bright red lines that must be respected. For example, the Russian president insisted there could be no ongoing military and intelligence support for Ukraine from either the US or Europe. (The US readout of the call doesn’t mention that, but the Kremlin version does.) Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky will turn quickly to the Europeans for help, and he’ll get it. Neither Ukraine nor Europe has any reason to accept an end to support for Kyiv. That will be a large problem for Trump in getting the big-splash peace deal he wants.
Still, Trump might soon argue that Ukraine and its Euro allies are the obstacle that prevents a temporary ceasefire from blossoming into permanent peace. If so, Putin will miss out on a peace deal he doesn’t want in exchange for a big new opening with the president of the United States.
That’s where Trump and Putin have left it. From his visit yesterday to Finland, Zelensky offered a positive preliminary appraisal of the energy infrastructure ceasefire, but with some big caveats. He said that he’ll have a “conversation with President Trump” where he’ll try to read the fine print on Trump’s exchange with Putin. That call happened earlier today. He called on Russia to free all Ukrainian prisoners of war as a gesture of good faith, and he vowed to keep Ukrainian troops inside Russia’s Kursk region “for as long as we need.”
But the energy ceasefire is essentially a scaled-back version of the proposal for a long-range airstrike halt and naval truce that Zelensky offered before the US-Ukrainian meeting last week in Saudi Arabia. If Ukraine’s president does fully endorse the idea, Europe will quickly get to yes too. Ukraine and the Europeans will then try to work toward winning a broader ceasefire that puts the Kremlin back on the spot. For now, that prospect looks doubtful.
Sadly, today’s news on Ukraine sounds a lot like what we’ve seen in Gaza where, as hard and time-consuming as it was to get that first ceasefire, a move to phase two will yield a lot fewer points the two sides can agree on. And as with Gaza, when that first ceasefire comes to an end, expect a new burst of deadly violence.
That’s why it’s hard to be optimistic that yesterday’s bargaining has moved us any closer to a true and lasting peace, the outcome all sides say they want.
The Trump White House has received thousands of recommendations for its upcoming AI Action Plan, a roadmap that will define how the US government will approach artificial intelligence for the remainder of the administration.
The plan was first mandated by President Donald Trump in his January executive order that scrapped the AI rules of his predecessor, Joe Biden. While Silicon Valley tech giants have put forth their plans for industry-friendly regulation and deregulation, many civil society groups have taken the opportunity to warn of the dangers of AI. Ahead of the March 15 deadline set by the White House to answer a request for information, Google and OpenAI were some of the biggest names to propose measures they’d like to see in place at the federal level.
What Silicon Valley wants
OpenAI urged the federal government to allow AI companies to train their models’ copyrighted material without restriction, shield them from state-level regulations, and implement additional export controls against Chinese competitors.
“While America maintains a lead on AI today, DeepSeek shows that our lead is not wide and is narrowing. The AI Action Plan should ensure that American-led AI prevails over CCP-led AI, securing both American leadership on AI and a brighter future for all Americans,” OpenAI’s head of global policy, Christopher Lehane, wrote in a memo. Google meanwhile called for weakened copyright restrictions on training AI and “balanced” export controls that would protect national security without strangling American companies.
Xiaomeng Lu, the director of geo-technology at the Eurasia Group, said invoking Chinese AI models was a “competitive play” from OpenAI.
“OpenAI is threatened by DeepSeek and other open-source models that put pressure on the company to lower prices and innovate better,” she said. “Sam [Altman] likely wants the US government’s aid in wider access to data, export restrictions, and government procurement to boost its own market position.”
Laura Caroli, a senior fellow of the Wadhwani AI Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, agreed. “Despite DeepSeek’s problems in safety and privacy, the real point is … OpenAI feels threatened by DeepSeek’s ability to build powerful open-source models at lower costs,” she said. “They use the national security narrative to advance their commercial goals.”
Civil liberties and national security concerns
Civil liberties groups painted a more dire picture of what could happen if Trump pursues an AI strategy that does not attempt to place guardrails on the development of this technology.
“Automating important decisions about people is reckless and dangerous,” said Corynne McSherry, legal director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The group submitted its own response to the government on March 13. McSherry told GZERO it criticized tech companies for ignoring “serious and well-documented risks of using AI tools for consequential decisions about housing, employment, immigration, access to benefits” and more.
There are also important national security measures that might be ignored by the Trump administration if it removes all regulations governing AI.
“I agree that maintaining US leadership in AI is a national security imperative,” said Cole McFaul, research analyst at Georgetown University's Center for Security and Emerging Technology, which also submitted a response that focused on securing American leadership in AI while mitigating risks and better competing with China. “OpenAI’s RFI response includes a call to ban the use of PRC-trained models. I agree with a lot of what they proposed, but I worry that some of Washington’s most influential AI policy advocates are also those with the most to gain.”
But even with corporate influence in Washington, it’s a confusing time to try to navigate the AI landscape with so many nascent regulations in Europe, plus changing signals from the White House.
Mia Rendar, an attorney at the law firm Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman, noted that while the government is figuring out how to regulate this emerging technology, businesses are caught in the middle. “We’re at a similar inflection point that we were when GDPR was being put in place,” Rendar said, referring to the European privacy law. “If you’re a multinational company, AI laws are going to follow a similar model – you’ll need to set and maintain standards that meet the most stringent set of obligations.”
How influential is Silicon Valley?
With close allies like Tesla CEO Elon Musk and investor David Sacks in Trump’s orbit, the tech sector’s influence has been hard to ignore. Thus, the final AI Action Plan, expected in July, will show whether Silicon Valley really has pull with the Trump administration — and, specifically, which firms have what kind of sway.
While the administration has already signaled that it will be hands-off in regulating AI, it’s unclear what path Trump will take in helping American-made AI companies, sticking it to China, and signaling to the rest of the world that the United States is, in fact, the global leader on AI.
Bottles of Champagne are seen on display for sale in a wine shop in Paris, France, on March 13, 2025.
The party ended abruptly last week, and the last bottle of European champagne may have popped.
After President Donald Trump imposed 25% tariffs on all steel and aluminum imports, US allies quickly announced countermeasures. This included a European Union plan to introduce 50% tariffs on US whiskey. Further accelerating any impending trade war, Trump responded by threatening a 200% tariff on all EU wines, champagnes, and alcoholic products. In the words of former President Thomas Jefferson as interpreted by Lin-Manuel Miranda in “Hamilton,” “Look, when Britain taxed our tea, we got frisky. Imagine what gon’ happen when you try to tax our whiskey.”
European leaders caught between the rock of needing Trump to help bring an end to the war in Ukraine (while they aim to beef up collective defense) and the hard place of fearing economic contraction from US tariffs are quickly realizing that nobody is having fun anymore.
Lessons of a tariff man
As Europe and others look to rebound from the latest round of the Trump administration’s trade offensive, a few misguided lessons are being drawn. The first is about Trump’s attachment to tariffs and protectionist trade policy. Many headlines in recent weeks have propelled a narrative of the Trump “whipsaw” or the view that the administration quickly U-turns on trade policy. Examples like the retreat on Colombia or the initial deferral for Canada and Mexico are frequently cited as evidence of the tendency toward reversals. What these perspectives underappreciate, however, is both how longstanding Trump’s regard for tariffs has been, and how fundamental the administration sees it to its broader policy objectives. The concession-reprieve cycle is the noise, while economic security as national security is the signal.
Trump’s zest for tariffs dates back to the 1980s and was widely written about during his first administration. Now, this four-decade history seems to have been overtaken by disorientation and incredulity. In an interview given in 1989, Trump reportedly said “America is being ripped off … We’re a debtor nation, and we have to tax, we have to tariff, we have to protect this country.” Taking to social media last week, Trump echoed these sentiments, posting, “The US doesn’t have Free Trade. We have ‘Stupid Trade.’ The Entire World is RIPPING US OFF!!.” In short, there is no new Donald Trump.
But it is not just that Trump may be ideological about tariffs; it is also that he and his team have placed these beliefs at the center of their second-term ambitions. In a Day 1 presidential action, the administration announced that “Americans benefit from and deserve an America First trade policy.” For the Trump administration, “America First trade” means promoting investment and productivity, enhancing US industrial and technological advantages, and defending economic and national security to benefit American workers. Each of these objectives will be backed up by efforts to address unfair and unbalanced trade – tariffs and other measures – and wider economic security considerations, including reviews and investigations, with special attention given to economic and trade relations with the People’s Republic of China. The administration has laid it all out by executive action. When Trump orders the creation of an External Revenue Service to collect tariffs, duties, and other foreign trade-related revenues, he plans to collect the money.
Missed connections
The other lesson that should be gleaned from what has unfolded in recent weeks between the US and its allies, particularly in Europe, is about a mismatch in intentions. Trump and his trade team believe that protectionist policies will restructure the global trade system in favor of US industrial and manufacturing strength. Imposing tariffs across the board on steel and aluminum is aimed at reigniting the US metals industry, whether this comes to fruition will take years to assess.
When Europe responds to industrial tariffs by targeting goods with only limited substitutability like US whiskey, the goal is to find a pain point and apply leverage. The downside of such an approach, however, is exactly what analysts, the financial market, and those targeted by US tariffs have lobbed at Trump: It will be domestic consumers that are most hurt. Will Europeans turn to the United Kingdom to replace American whiskey with Scotch? Perhaps. But the UK is no longer in the EU anyway. France, Germany, and others seem unlikely to invest in their own domestic distilling for near-term gain. Instead, Europeans will be left to pay a heftier price for whiskey or go without. Likewise, Trump’s proposed countermeasures on European champagne put US consumers in an analogous position. The US domestic wine market may be robust, but champagne can only be made in Champagne, France.
As the potential domestic impact ratchets up, US allies will likely discover that retaliation leaves a bitter aftertaste, especially for the Transatlantic relationship. This is the forcing function of tariffs that the Trump administration is hoping to see.
US presidents who came before Trump like William McKinley and Herbert Hoover found that the best tariff intentions do not always turn out as planned, instead bringing domestic price increases and economic downturns. In the current interconnected world where supply chains are truly global, the historical experience may not directly apply. Still, there is a real risk that it might. The question is, when the music stops, who is left with a seat and a glass of bubbly?
Lindsay Newman is a geopolitical risk expert and columnist for GZERO.
Borderline frenemies meet in Quebec for the G7 as Canada begins thinking the unthinkable: how to defend against a US attack.
You know things are going badly when the first thing Secretary of State Marco Rubio has to do on his G7 visit to Canada is deny his intention to invade. “It is not a meeting about how we’re going to take over Canada,” he said, though no one believed him.
Why would they?
President Donald Trump’s mantra includes daily insults, threats, and acts of disrespect toward Canada as he launches his destructive trade war. But for a guy who’s all about high walls and protected borders, he has a very different view of it when it comes to his northern neighbo(u)r, dismissing it as an “artificial line” drawn “with a ruler.” “When you take away that,” he said this week in a moment of empire-building fantasy, “and you look at that beautiful formation of Canada and the United States, there’s no place anywhere in the world that looks like that.”
I have no clue what he means by that whole “beautiful formation” thing, but our hardcore GZERO trivia fans deserve a short backgrounder on the actual formation of the US-Canada border.
Since the Treaty of Ghent (oh yes, I’m going there!) ended the War of 1812, the boundary between Canada and the US has been relatively stable. Sure, some fellow history buffs will point out the border was tested in 1816 by the humiliating construction of a US military battery dubbed “Fort Blunder,” a battery mistakenly built on Canadian soil that had to be moved south, where it is now called Fort Montgomery. But we survived that tiff. Later, in 1842, the Webster-Ashburton Treaty (stay with me here) clarified the border with better surveys, and in 1909, the Boundary Waters Treaty determined how the Great Lakes would be divvied up. Since then, there have been updates and a few disputes, but prime ministers and presidents have happily memorized what might be called the Psalm of the 49th parallel, which starts with the famous line, “This is the longest undefended border in the world.”
So no, these are not artificial lines but ones mutually agreed upon in legally binding treaties. The nub is that President Trump has shown he doesn’t care about treaties, even ones he signed himself, like the USMCA back in 2020. He prefers the law of the jungle, where strong countries take what they want from weaker ones. And Trump wants Canada. He has repeatedly claimed that Canada would not be “viable as a country” without US trade, which is why his stated strategy is to annex Canada by “economic force.”
Trump’s administration regularly amplifies his imperialist sentiments. This week, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt made the case that Canada should become a state to avoid tariffs, while US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick went on TV after Ontario Premier Doug Ford threatened to slap a 25% tariff on electricity to three northern US states, saying the best way to get a good trade deal with the United States is to “consider the amazing advantages of being the 51st state.”
It’s no wonder that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who leaves office tomorrow, concluded this is about taking over Canada: “What he wants is to see a total collapse of the Canadian economy because that’ll make it easier to annex us.”
When Rubio arrived in Canada for the G7, his Canadian counterpart, Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly, was not in a joking mood. “If the US can do this to us, their closest friend, then nobody is safe,” she said. Her colleagues in the EU have already absorbed that message, which is why they are talking about a European-run nuclear shield and a massive buildup of their collective defense forces.
It was almost sad to see how the secretary of state tried to spin Trump’s agenda in a bid to lower the temperature. “He says if they became the 51st state, we wouldn’t have to worry about the border and fentanyl coming across because now we would be able to manage that,” Rubio said.
Oh, thanks a bunch.
Annexing Canada is necessary because less than 1% of the illegal fentanyl that enters the US goes across the northern border? By that logic, Canada should annex the US because of the inflow of illegal guns from the US. It is madness, of course, but it’s a madness that is now being measured.
Angus Reid recently conducted a poll on the idea of annexation, and about 60% of Americans oppose it (including 44% of Trump voters), and about 30% would be interested only if Canadians supported the idea. They don’t. In the same poll, 90% of Canadians reject the idea outright, with one interesting exception. “One-in-five would-be CPC voters say they would vote yes, compared to almost zero Liberal (2%), NDP (3%), and Bloc Québécois (1%) voters,” reports Angus Reid.
Still, all this thought about annexation has the defense department in Canada running through scenarios they never imagined possible just months ago: what to do if the US ever attacked.
Trump has questioned the border lines in the Great Lakes, so what if US Coast Guard vessels started to cross that line and test the boundary? What about around the coast or in the Arctic?
Canada suddenly realizes — far too late – that the 2% GDP goal on defense spending is no longer aspirational but urgent. But what kind of military does it need? To find out, I spoke to retired Vice Admiral Mark Norman, the former vice chief of defense staff in Canada and currently a fellow at the Canadian Global Affairs Institute.
I’ve edited the conversation for this article.
GZERO: Some argue the US is still an ally, but others say we have to treat the US as a foe, one that could even potentially attack Canada. How would you describe the situation?
Norman: We’re outside the guardrails. To put it in nautical terms, we’re in completely uncharted territory here. What’s real and what’s not? How do you interpret what we’re hearing? How do we not overreact? There are many Canadians, both in the public domain and in the machinery of government, who I believe are banking on the faint hope clause, if I can put it that way, meaning they think that things will go back to the way they were. I think that is naive and irresponsible going forward. I don’t believe this is sort of a blip in the evolution of geostrategic affairs, specifically as it relates to the Canada-US relationship. I think we’re seeing a significant change — one could argue it’s almost a pivot.
Look at the Ukrainian situation and the public abandonment of European security. Then look at the ongoing threats of annexation as it relates to Canada.
Canadians have grown up far away from the kinds of threats to physical security and other types of security that many of our global neighbors have had to deal with. We have lived under the umbrella of the United States, and we have taken that for granted. There is some substance in the complaints that are being levied against us. The challenge is the nature of both the threats and the ongoing actions, and what that potentially means for us. I am concerned that the nature of Canada-US relations is changing fundamentally.
What could it look like?
There are two scenarios here, and there is risk in oversimplifying this ... One scenario is that this is simply transactional. This is Trump’s attempt to try and get us to do a bunch of things to up our game, our spending – to do more and contribute more. One could argue this transactional approach, this negotiating tactic, will lead to some magic tipping point at which everything falls into place, and we have some sort of agreement. That is scenario A.
Scenario B is the most threatening scenario. We’ll call it annexation. Not sure what that looks like, specifically, but we take this to mean that in some way or form, the United States is exercising a significant degree of control over what we would have traditionally seen as sovereign decisions made by Canada.
From a military perspective, much of what we would need to do is actually independent of those two scenarios. So we either have to step up and satisfy a whole series of unclear expectations on the part of the current administration, everything from border security to Arctic security to all these other things, or we’ve got to up our game, because if we don’t, then we risk the threat of some sort of loss of control.
I have difficulty imagining scenarios whereby Canada would be invaded or that Canada could respond to something like scenario B. I think there will be coercion. I think there are lots of tools left in Trump’s toolbox to coerce us and threaten us and basically put us off-balance and cause us to react. What’s interesting is we’re either on our own, at which point we need to do a hell of a lot more than we’re doing now, or we’re in the process of being shaken down, which also means we need to do a hell of a lot more. Those will be preconditions for what would be even the most benign and benevolent version of events.
So Canada has to rebuild its military one way or another?
Let’s start with national capacity, domestic capacity, and industrial capacity. One of the unintended consequences of the Ukrainian conflict has been the incredible growth in Ukrainian domestic capacity, notwithstanding the fact that they’re waging what many argued was an unwinnable war against a superpower with one of the largest armies in the world. A lot of that has to do with innovation, engineering, and agility, which has now made them a significant player in the European defense industry. It is particularly relevant to the Canadian situation, where a lot of our military capacity is tied to US technology. I think this is a huge vulnerability for us going forward, even if we were to find ourselves in scenario A. We cannot and should not rely on others for a lot of the stuff. Now, we cannot do everything, but there are enormous alternate sources of technology in our European and Asian partners. And we have to do a much better job of leveraging our own industrial capacity. What are we really good at? We’re really good at things related to AI, acoustic processing, and communications. We’re very good at things related to satellite technology. We have a number of emerging capabilities in unmanned systems, be they airborne or surface, and even underwater capabilities. We have enormous advantages in terms of understanding the technical challenges of the Arctic. It is our backyard. In military terms, we are good at combat management systems. So think of the computer architecture that allows you to do what you need to do from a command and control perspective.
Is the point that Canada will have to build a new type of military faster, cheaper, and less dependent on the US and use more innovation?
Canada will definitely need to explore alternative solutions, like drone capacity, to address the challenges of defending vast territories. But it will still need icebreakers, a navy, and tanks. It’s a new world. One other factor here. You need to be able to deploy and sustain your forces. A lot of people don’t think that’s sexy, but the reality is, this is all about logistics, and this is all about sustainment, which means you have to have an industrial base. You look at the kinds of distances that we’re dealing with in Canada — these are massive distances. These are not insignificant challenges, and we’ve never really dealt with them. You need to be able to control what’s going on. Do you just simply want to monitor what’s going on, or do you want to be able to influence what’s going on? This is where you get into the pointy ends, the more kinetic discussions around what are the hard capabilities that you need and don’t need, but you have to have all that other stuff sorted out first. The reason the Ukrainians are so effective in these asymmetric conflicts is because they figured out a lot of that back-end stuff. Canada needs to do that too.
Canada’s new PM is a technocratic banker who’s never been elected — and that might help him
Canadian Liberal Party leader Mark Carney faces Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre in this composite, with Donald Trump hovering in the background.
Mark Carney was sworn in Friday as the prime minister of Canada.
AsCarney takes the helm from Justin Trudeau, the country is witnessing a stunning rebound for the Liberals. In January, the governing Liberal Party trailed the opposition Conservatives by 25 points. Now, the gap has closed to roughly 6 points, and some recent polls even have the Liberals ahead. And Carney’s previous, purported liabilities — being a staid, low-key, globalist technocrat who’s never been elected — may now be seen as strengths as he prepares to call a snap election in the coming days.
What changed between January and today? In short: Donald Trump andTrudeau. Once Trudeau signaled his intention to go, the polls started moving in the Liberals’ favor. Then, Trump threatened Canada with annexation, calling for it to become the “cherished” 51st state and ushered in a trade war with heavy tariffs. Canadians rallied around the flag — and the governing party. Now it seems those same Canadians may be looking for an unflashy, steady hand on the tiller — a leader who can calmly explain matters and strike a stable, reliable posture.
Carney flips the script
Twice serving as a central banker — head of the Bank of Canada and, later, the Bank of England — Carney held earlier positions as deputy minister and an investment banker. His time at the central banks coincided with two major crises: the global financial crisis and Brexit. He’s been criticized by many on the right and left — including me — as a boring technocrat who couldn’t rise to meet today’s populist anger. The Conservatives and their leader, Pierre Poilievre, attacked him as a globalist — a banker with multiple passports, a Davos man through and through. A European, even.
Now, as Canada stares down threats from Trump and begins to look at trade and defense diversification, Carney’s CV and aesthetic may be valuable assets for enough voters to save the Liberals — or, at least, to bring them back from the brink of a previously expected wipeout.
These circumstances give Carney the chance to present himself as the change candidate with enough insiders onside to get the job done. He’s not Trudeau, and he’s never been elected — yet he has the steady hand of continuity as a Liberal surrounded by members of Parliament who’ve been around the block. He’s calm, experienced in negotiation and economic management, and he can explain the crisis at hand and what needs to be done. Even conservative Ontario Premier Doug Ford says Carney “understands finances like no other person.”
Still, Carney faces a big leadership test, and his party continues to trail in most polls. Graeme Thompson, a senior macro-geopolitics analyst at Eurasia Group, says Carney’s skills and temperament make him a kind of anti-Trump. But there may be a limit to how far that will take him in an election campaign, even if they serve him while governing.
What happens, asks Thompson, “when the technocratic economist skills and experience, and the kind of bland, boring, predictable, safe persona runs into the fact of a 40-day electoral sprint in front of the media, live crowds, and on debate stages with Pierre Poilievre?”
Carney versus Trump, Poilievre versus …Trudeau?
When Carney hits the debate stage, he’ll be running against Trump, and he’ll make the case that while he can’t manage the mercurial president — he says Trump can’t be controlled — he can effectively navigate the crises emanating from the White House.
In his victory speech in Ottawa last Sunday, Carney said as much, sending a message to Canadian voters — and Trump — and setting the tone and focus of his campaign for the federal election.
“Canada never, ever will be part of America in any way, shape, or form,” said Carney. “We didn’t ask for this fight, but Canadians are always ready when someone else drops the gloves.”
On Wednesday, Carney said he’ll only meet Trump if the president respects Canadian sovereignty, though he didn’t specify exactly what that would entail.
Poilievre and the Conservatives, meanwhile, have been left snakebitten by the quick turn of events. They say they’re not panicking at Carney’s rise, but they’re dropping in the polls, and they’ve lost the electoral focus — the carbon tax — they’ve worked on for over a year. Like the Conservatives, Carney says he will also scrap consumer carbon pricing. Poilievre has built his campaign around his character: combative, angry, unapologetically right-wing, and, above all, anti-Trudeau. He’s built his entire campaign around running against Trudeau.
Now, he’ll try to make the case that the new PM is Trudeau 2.0. Poilievre will question his opponent’s trustability, pointing to the fact that Carney has not disclosed his financial assets — even though he has now put those assets in a blind trust — and that Carney’s using Trump as a distraction.
Described as Trump-like or Trump-inspired in the past, Poilievre recently has been tougher on the president, attacking his tariffs, supporting counter-tariffs, and emphasizing that Canada will never become the 51st state. But it’s a fine line; he knows much of his base has been pro-Trump — and some still are. Poilievre can’t afford to alienate them, and the Liberals will be all too happy to try to tie the Canadian right to its US counterpart.
One way or another, the Canadian election will be about Trump, which could help the Liberals.
“If the election is about people wanting the opposite of whatever it is that Donald Trump is offering, then that works to the benefit of the Liberals,” Thompson says.
“In a way, you’re going to get a fight not between two relatively different policy visions, but two notions of what the ballot question is. A lot is going to be determined by the actual campaign, but the Liberals are definitely back in the game.”
Flags hung at the reconvening of the COP16 conference in Rome last month, with an inset image of Adrian Gahan, the ocean lead for Campaign for Nature.
Countries gathered in Rome in late February to finalize key decisions left unresolved after last year’s COP16 summit in Colombia. In Italy, negotiators agreed to the first global deal for finance conservation, which aims to achieve the landmark goal of protecting and restoring 30% of the world’s land and seas by 2030. Eurasia Group’s María José Valverde interviewed Adrian Gahan, the ocean lead for Campaign for Nature, a global campaign founded in 2018 to secure the 30x30 target, as we look ahead to the UN ocean conference and continue building on the nature agenda for 2025.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
María José Valverde: What are your expectations for the achievement of the 30x30 goal in the marine space, keeping all upcoming UN environmental processes (biodiversity, plastics, ocean, climate) in mind?
Adrian Gahan: This is an important year because we’re only five years away from the 2030 target. And the reality is that we're not making progress at the pace that we should. Something really important that can happen this year is the ratification of the High Seas Treaty. Whilst it’s been agreed, it needs to be ratified by at least 60 countries before it comes into legal effect, and at the moment, we’re at 17 countries. We should aim to get those remaining 43 countries in 2025, and we need to do it before Q4 for the treaty to come into legal effect this year. This would represent a significant step forward, and it'd be great if going into COP30 in Brazil we’re already counting down the ticker on the treaty taking legal effect.
Could you explain why this High Seas Treaty is so important?
Before this treaty was agreed in 2022, there was no legal instrument to manage biodiversity on the high seas, areas beyond national jurisdiction (ABNJ) 200 nautical miles off of a country’s coast. Instead, you had a patchwork of preexisting organizations — the International Whaling Commission, which is species-specific, and the International Seabed Authority, which covers the seabed but doesn't regulate the water column above the seabed. But they couldn’t establish marine protected areas covering the whole water column or all flora and fauna within it because they didn't have the legal capacity to do that. The Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction Treaty, or BBNJ, will allow countries to agree on setting parts of the international waters aside for nature in the context of all of these pre-existing organizations. And that is an innovation.
The high seas treaty could impact interests in critical minerals, deep sea mining, and those benefitting from marine genetic materials. The recently launched Cali Fund could also be a financial instrument for BBNJ areas. What are your thoughts on its potential implications?
This is one of the reasons why it’s taking countries a long time to ratify this treaty. They need to figure out what are the benefit-sharing mechanisms, what are the legal and financial instruments involved, etc. A lot of it has to be discovered as we go along. My headline observation around digital sequence information and the Cali Fund is that if it’s going to be meaningful, it has to be a regulatory requirement. That also needs to apply to BBNJ areas, which obviously have more complexity to it by definition because it’s beyond the territorial boundaries of any of these countries. But to be effective, it needs to be legally binding.
What’s at stake if we don't reach an agreement on finance at COP16.2, and what are the best- and worst-case scenarios for the marine sector?
The money is very important as part of the biodiversity COP process, not just because of the funding, but also because it’s a currency of seriousness. If we are asking the Global South to protect some of the last great wild places in the world that are providing vital infrastructure to the whole planet, then we need to be prepared to pay for it. This is not about charity – nor should it be considered aid. Donor countries need to show seriousness on this, and finance is one of the ways to do that.
It’s also important to consider our political context. Given budget and geopolitical constraints in the Global North, we need to continuously make the case as to why this is important. It is not just because nature is beautiful and special. We’re protecting it because it provides us all with an essential service, and this is an extension of our national security budget. We need to keep making that case. We also need to keep making the case that the private sector, which is making a lot of money and continuing to drop significant externalities onto this infrastructure, needs to pay its way. That’s an example of where governments need to intervene more in the market: tax and regulate.
The plastics negotiations have a lot of interlinkages with the biodiversity talks because of the Global Biodiversity Framework’s (GBF) Target 7 on pollution. Do you see any implications from the UN plastics treaty negotiations on your work?
We focus more on spatial targets and protection because the biggest threat to the global ocean, other than climate change, is not plastics, it’s overfishing. This is really worth reminding people. Plastics and pollution are very serious, but overfishing is a bigger threat. The crisis of overfishing is an absence of something, which is a harder narrative to sell than showing people an ocean full of plastic. The risk of the plastics narrative is that people think using paper straws means the crisis is solved. But, the ocean is facing so many more threats than plastic straws. However, the issue can be an important way to introduce people to the crises of climate change, coral bleaching, ocean acidification, and invasive species.
My final point on that is that the single biggest polluter of plastic in the ocean is not PepsiCo or Coca-Cola — it’s the global fishing industry. The single biggest source of plastic in the ocean is discarded fishing nets known as ghost gear. It doesn’t biodegrade, it’s hugely destructive, and it’s very helpful to the global fishing industry if everyone obsesses about plastic straws and bottles instead.
Conversations around fishing are tricky because they become a discussion about livelihoods and food security. How do you navigate these difficult issues?
It’s much easier to campaign against Coca-Cola than it is to campaign against local fishermen dropping their nets in the ocean. However, the most destructive fishing is conducted by very large and wealthy industrial fishing vessels, almost all owned by rich countries from Europe and Asia, not by local small-scale fishers. That said, there also needs to be training and engagement at the local level, which is difficult and time-consuming. One answer is to set parts of the ocean aside where you state there’s no fishing, and that makes it a lot easier to regulate. This requires government intervention and financial support for fishers who need to, for example, change their gear types or face a reduced catch for a short period while the spillover effect takes place. It becomes very complicated, and that’s why we’re making very slow progress toward the 30x30 goal.
One of the things we’ve been paying attention to is the nature tech market. What are some concrete examples of nature tech in the marine sector, and what role is the private sector playing?
I think it’s a really positive story. One of the most important, disruptive technologies that has helped in establishing and enforcing marine protected areas is satellite technology. I've been working for years on a UK program called Blue Belt. We work with local communities that are concerned about illegal fishing coming into their waters and far too remote to have their own enforcement capacity. The UK Government runs the satellite monitoring programs and then provides them with the intel. They can tag any suspicious activity and pursue the vessel legally through the Port State Measures Agreement. It’s a legal process where, if one of these vessels fishes illegally in these protected areas and then pulls into a port to offload the fish, the port state can take legal measures against the vessel, even though the vessel didn’t break any laws in that port state. This has been a very effective tool for protecting these areas.
This would not have been possible probably 15 years ago. That’s a really positive tech story to tell and something people should take some hope from because presumably this technology will only continue to improve and get more affordable. Bad news can be very overwhelming for people. So I think it’s good to remind people that good people are doing good things in the world.
María José (Majo) Valverde is a global sustainability analyst at Eurasia Group.