Threatening Canada Is More Putin Than Reagan
With his talk of what Canadians call "Canschluss," Donald Trump is showing not that he's strong, but that he's a bully running amok.
Siblings at half-mast.
Photographer: David Ryder/Getty Images
To grasp the aberration of US foreign policy under President Donald Trump, consider an abbreviated history of America’s shifting attitudes toward just one country, Canada. And start with Ronald Reagan, who stood for the original and genuine version of “peace through strength.”
When signing a free-trade agreement with Canada in 1988, Reagan marveled at the world’s longest land border. “No soldier stands guard to protect it,” the 40th president said. “Barbed wire does not deface it. And no invisible barrier of economic suspicion and fear will extend it.” Canadians and Americans, Reagan remarked on another occasion, are “more than friends and neighbors and allies; we are kin.”