Normally right now I would be writing about the geopolitical implications of the war with Iran, and I am sure I will again soon. But I want to interrupt that thought to highlight a stunning advance in artificial intelligence — one that arrived sooner than expected and that will have equally profound geopolitical implications.
The artificial intelligence company Anthropic announced Tuesday that it was releasing the newest generation of its large language model, dubbed Claude Mythos Preview, but to only a limited consortium of roughly 40 technology companies, including Google, Broadcom, Nvidia, Cisco, Palo Alto Networks, Apple, JPMorganChase, Amazon and Microsoft. Some of its competitors are among these partners because this new A.I. model represents a “step change” in performance that has some critically important positive and negative implications for cybersecurity and America’s national security.
The good news is that Anthropic discovered in the process of developing Claude Mythos that the A.I. could not only write software code more easily and with greater complexity than any model currently available, but as a byproduct of that capability, it could also find vulnerabilities in virtually all of the world’s most popular software systems more easily than before.
The bad news is that if this tool falls into the hands of bad actors, they could hack pretty much every major software system in the world, including all those made by the companies in the consortium.
This is not a publicity stunt. In the run-up to this announcement, representatives of leading tech companies have been in private conversation with the Trump administration about the implications for the security of the United States and all the other countries that use these now vulnerable software systems, technologists involved told me.
For good reason. As Anthropic said in a written statement on Tuesday, in just the past month, “Mythos Preview has already found thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities, including some in every major operating system and web browser. Given the rate of A.I. progress, it will not be long before such capabilities proliferate, potentially beyond actors who committed to deploying them safely. The fallout — economics, public safety and national security — could be severe.’’
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Project Glasswing, Anthropic’s name for the consortium, is an undertaking to work with the biggest and most trusted tech companies and critical infrastructure providers, including banks, “to put these capabilities to work for defensive purposes,” the company added, and to give the leading technology firms a head start in finding and patching those vulnerabilities.
“We do not plan to make Claude Mythos Preview generally available, but our eventual goal is to enable our users to safely deploy Mythos-class models at scale — for cybersecurity purposes, but also for the myriad other benefits that such highly capable models will bring,” Anthropic said.
My translation: Holy cow! Superintelligent A.I. is arriving faster than anticipated, at least in this area. We knew it was getting amazingly good at enabling anyone, no matter how computer literate, to write software code. But even Anthropic reportedly did not anticipate that it would get this good, this fast, at finding ways to find and exploit flaws in existing code.
Anthropic said it found critical exposures in every major operating system and Web browser, many of which run power grids, waterworks, airline reservation systems, retailing networks, military systems and hospitals all over the world.
If this A.I. tool were, indeed, to become widely available, it would mean the ability to hack any major infrastructure system — a hard and expensive effort that was once essentially the province only of private-sector experts and intelligence organizations — will be available to every criminal actor, terrorist organization and country, no matter how small.
I’m really not being hyperbolic when I say that kids could deploy this by accident. Mom and Dad, get ready for:
“Honey, what did you do after school today?”
“Well, Mom, my friends and I took down the power grid. What’s for dinner?”
That is why Anthropic is giving carefully controlled versions to key software providers so they can find and fix the vulnerabilities before the bad guys do — or your kids.
At moments like this I prefer to do a deep dive with my technology tutor, Craig Mundie, a former director of research and strategy at Microsoft, a member of President Barack Obama’s President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology and an author, with Henry Kissinger and Eric Schmidt, of a book on A.I. called “Genesis.”
In our view, no country in the world can solve this problem alone. The solution — this may shock people — must begin with the two A.I. superpowers, the U.S. and China. It is now urgent that they learn to collaborate to prevent bad actors from gaining access to this next level of cyber capability.
Such a powerful tool would threaten them both, leaving them exposed to criminal actors inside their countries and terrorist groups and other adversaries outside. It could easily become a greater threat to each country than the two countries are to each other.
Indeed, this is potentially as fundamental and significant a turning point as was the emergence of mutually assured destruction and the need for nuclear nonproliferation. The U.S. and China need to work together to protect themselves, as well as the rest of the world, from humans and autonomous A.I.s using this technology — a lot more than they need to worry about Russia.
This is so important and urgent that it should be a top subject on the agenda for the summit between Trump and President Xi Jinping in Beijing next month.
“What used to be the province of big countries, big militaries, big companies and big criminal organizations with big budgets — this ability to develop sophisticated cyberhacking operations — could become easily available to small actors,” explained Mundie. “What we are about to see is nothing short of the complete democratization of cyberattack capabilities.”
It means that responsible governments, in concert with the companies that build these A.I. tools and software infrastructure, need to do three things urgently, Mundie argues.
For starters, he says, we need to “carefully control the release of these new superintelligent models and make sure they only go to the most responsible governments and companies.”
Then we need to use the time this buys us to distribute defensive tools to the good actors “so that the software that runs their key infrastructure can have all their flaws found and fixed before hackers inevitably get these tools one way or another.” (By the way, the cost of fixing the vulnerabilities that are sure to be discovered in legacy software systems, like those of telecommunications companies, will be significant. Then multiply that across our whole industrial base.)
Finally, Mundie argues, we need to work with China and all responsible countries to build safe, protected working spaces, within all the key networks, both public and private, into which trusted companies and governments “can move all their critical services — so they will be protected against future hacking attacks.”
It will be interesting to see what history remembers most about April 7, 2026 — the postponed U.S. release of bombs over Iran or the carefully controlled release of the Claude Mythos Preview by Anthropic and its technical allies.
A giant roadside sculpture of a mosquito in Komarno, Man. If you want to get off the highway of your problems, you need to find the gravel roads, writes Kate Bowler.Shannon VanRaes/The Globe and Mail
Kate Bowler’s most recent book is Joyful, Anyway. Originally from Winnipeg, she is a professor of history at Duke University and hosts the podcast Everything Happens.
These are dark times. Democracy is under attack. Canada is caught between hegemons. The Arctic sits waiting to be plundered. The economy flounders. There’s war in the Middle East. What makes joy possible, even now?
I have a simple answer to that: Manitoba. Or, at the very least, the World’s Largest Statues of the greater Winnipeg area.
For the last few years, I have been studying the nature of joy. What makes joy? As a historian and a theologian, I’ve been trying to understand the mysterious nature of the way that joy – that bright, enlivening emotion – can break into our lives.
Joy eludes many of us. I have been a human bulldozer since I was a child growing up on the prairies. My parents once returned home to Winnipeg from a trip to discover that I had renovated and staged their entire basement (“Did you know that wood panelling can be painted? I organized your record collection. I hope you weren’t attached to the treadmill. It didn’t work with the new floor plan.”) Back from my American college for a weekend, I came extremely close to signing the paperwork for a cabin in Lake of the Woods they did not yet realize they needed. Had they ever really considered the benefits of a four-door Toyota sedan? I oscillated between considerate and wildly presumptuous as I streamlined our processes, refined everyone’s preferences, and compressed more and more activities into smaller units of time like a human trash compactor.
I always wondered if I felt so at home in America because of its famous love of efficiency, an ideal untarnished since the Industrial Revolution. Workers of all kinds dramatically improve outputs by behaving like cogs in a human machine. The virtues of mass production are seductive. Speed. Productivity. Growth. When I explain this to my divinity students, I try to sound ominous. The church labour my students are preparing for is slow and inefficient. Most of their week will be spent trying to offer kindness to a deacon who never liked you or weeding heresies out of the Sunday School material you bought online. You’ll spend days coming up with enough beauty and truth to fill an hour on Sunday only to receive a dozen comments from parishioners on their way out the door about how much they miss the old pastor.
If you want progress, take up running. If you want meaning, run a church. I say this with great solemnity before I rush off to a faculty meeting, where I will answer e-mails with a lot of vigorous nodding to demonstrate my attentiveness to the agenda. I deftly outmanoeuvre such joys as mid-afternoon naps in my attempt to winnow my inbox down to zero, record another podcast episode, and immerse my son in Canadian folk music. I am a magician with a single trick: gather round and watch how this woman can take a solitary moment and divide it into a million uses!
But no one has seen me worship at the altar of productivity more than my husband. When I woke up one morning with a stuffy nose and sore throat, I accidentally took the wrong pills. Instead of the non-drowsy decongestant (a cheerful yellow pill), I had taken the nighttime edition. My husband found me sobbing over the toilet, desperately attempting to gag myself at 7 a.m.
“It was green! The pill was green, not blue!” I protested, half laughing and mostly crying.
“Why can’t you just take a nap?” he asked sensibly.
“I have so much work I want to get done! WHY? WHY IS THIS HAPPENING TO ME?”
It was intoxicating, at first, to imagine that I could be more and more like the machines meant to improve us. But we have been watching the sunset of the postwar American consensus for some time now, and we see the long shadows it has created. Division. Confusion. New forms of conspiracy and autocracy. And we are afraid. We fear that we are creeping up the edge of environmental extinction, that we see the fissures of our democracy causing us to worry less about ugly arguments at the dinner table and more about the peaceful transfer of power, that we have lost most forms of intimacy to heavily surveilled forms of digital servitude. It is impossible now to maintain technological confidence without qualification, since the very systems designed to increase efficiency have also exposed and monetized our fragility.
In the meantime, the language of optimization migrated from factory floors to fitness trackers, from supply chains to selfhood. We audit our sleep. We quantify our moods. We speak of “maximizing” time with our children. Even rest is recast as strategic recovery. We do not know how to extend our happiness without duplicating the most absurd forms of pretending not to be human at all.
There is a necessary form of happiness that cannot be given to us by machines. And it happens when we abandon efficiency as a goal. In fact, it requires that we do not take, like a human bulldozer, the shortest path between two points.
It is joy and it requires detours.
While happiness is a sense of ease, joy jolts us awake. Truthfully, joy is unbelievably annoying to study because it is wildly unpredictable, and therefore cannot be pinned down in a lab. Joy can appear at a funeral, in the hospital, or, in my case, in the midst of a Stage 4 cancer diagnosis. While you can’t be happy and sad at the same time, you can be joyful and sad at the same time, which is a neat trick. Joy can co-exist with our most difficult emotions – pain, grief, anxiety – because joy is a moment that also tells us an existential truth: that it is good to be alive.
Because joy is impossible to schedule, you have to find the preconditions of joy, ways that try to make joy more available or possible to show up. And one of the easiest ways to put yourself in the way of joy is to get out of your routines. Abandon your efficiencies. Joy feels like a surprise, so find ways to be surprise-able.
There is a habit of joy that I developed growing up in Manitoba, which became really important to me in difficult seasons of life.
Canada is one of the greatest – if not the greatest – country on Earth, but it will never say so. Canada is a middle power with middle-child syndrome. As a child of the 1980s, I grew up watching Saved by the Bell and thought a great deal about the inner lives of California teenagers because we were all forced to watch American culture on repeat. Though I faithfully practised my overhead clapping in preparation to be a contestant on Kidstreet, I knew that whatever anyone believed to be important was probably not happening in Winnipeg. Think you matter? Try moving to the United States and realizing that saying “We’re north of North Dakota” will only prompt the question: “Where is North Dakota?”
But I return to Manitoba every summer to see my family and to noodle around. Whenever I was going through something difficult in my life, I found that I could go on a little adventure, take my mind off of things, and give myself time to process. If you want to get off the highway of your problems, you need to find the gravel roads.
A large ox-and-cart statue in Winnipeg’s Assiniboine Park. Manitoba claims more than 60 such roadside attractions, giving it one of the highest per-capita “giant thing” densities in the nation.Shannon VanRaes/The Globe and Mail
Some places boast oceans or mountains. Manitoba has the world’s largest curling rock, a giant mosquito, a giant pumpkin, a giant ox-cart, a giant turtle, and, of course, the majestic Coca-Cola can made out of an abandoned water tower looming like postapocalyptic deities over roads off the Trans-Canada Highway. Though often dismissed as fantasy, absurdity is not a distraction from real life. Absurdity is one of the last refuges of the human soul in an age that treats us like machines. Algorithms crave efficiency. Systems want optimization. But human beings – wonderfully, tragically – need the unnecessary. Absurdity is how we remember that the world is more than problems to solve.
The places that have saved me again and again have rarely been the destinations themselves. Manitoba road trips have always been the through line of my life – how I’ve coped with heartbreak, confusion, change, and the general humiliations of being human. When someone I love was dating a lying, cheating disaster of a man, we put his belongings in garbage bags and threw them in the parking lot. And then we did what we always do: we got in the car. We followed signs that read “Perogies 100 km … 50 km … 10 km …” until we found ourselves standing before a woman who explains that the perogies are in her freezer downstairs in her home nearby and actually, sorry, there’s none left.
Joy is not the same as happiness or positive thinking or an emotional upgrade. Joy is that sudden, surprising sense that existence is still good – even now. It sneaks up on us. Joy can co-exist with grief, uncertainty, boredom and frustration. It interrupts us, pulls us back into our lives for a moment. Joy is relational, embodied and always slightly absurd. It’s the flicker of colour in an otherwise grey day, the technicolour moment that catches us off guard.
When I am standing underneath the World’s Second Largest Fire Hydrant created on a whim by volunteer firefighters, I am reminded that these are some of the last places where joy is still allowed to sneak in. We are living in an age of relentless optimization and apocalyptic fragility. But if we are to have reminders of what it means to be human, perhaps we might pursue joy that is gloriously, unapologetically wasteful. Your joy will not scale. Your joy cannot be optimized. And it will do nothing to improve your productivity metrics or your morning routine.
Manitoba is, at its heart, a province that delights in its detours. We are stitched together by farm roads, tiny towns and an unspoken understanding that a Brobdingnagian pumpkin can be the reason for fall itself. Manitoba alone claims more than 60 rural roadside attractions, giving us one of the highest per-capita “giant thing” densities in the nation. We may be a “have-not” province in conventional economic terms, but we are abundantly blessed in giant moose, enormous catfish, gargantuan snowmen and titanic beverage cans. These are our cathedrals of nonsense, our monuments to delight.
The philosophers tell us that meaning is found in truth, beauty, and goodness. I would add a fourth category: the magnificently ridiculous. These side trips, these boondoggles, these wildly unnecessary landmarks are one way of staying human in a world increasingly structured to make us efficient at the cost of our souls.
Joy lives on the detours. It lives in the places where we let ourselves be interrupted, where we choose delight over duty, where we remember – perhaps for the first time all week – that being human is not a problem to solve. And in the meantime, the World’s Largest Garter Snake Mating Pits in Narcisse, Man., (off Highway 17; turn east at the entrance sign and follow the short road to the parking lot) are only a few weeks away from being peak orgy. What a time to be alive.
Ethan Lou is the Opinion Editor in The Globe and Mail’s Report on Business.
There’s a psychological concept called the sad-clown paradox. That those who try to bring joy and make us feel better, who seem unflappable, carry deep sorrow inside.
In one famous joke, a depressed man is told to see the clown Pagliacci. The patient responds, “But doctor, you don’t understand. I am Pagliacci.” Ali G, the comedic character, says of the burger mascot Ronald McDonald: “Even though him [sic] may seem like he’s always smiling, there’s a sadness in the eyes.”
Such were European leaders at the Munich Security Conference this month, the world’s premier geopolitics summit, where the elders of the Old World spent a weekend telling everyone it was all going to be okay.
Times are bad, but we are strong. Such was the energy of the conference. The embodiment of this message was French President Emmanuel Macron, who, without saying the words, anointed himself Captain Continent. “Europe has been vilified as an aging, slow, fragmented construct,” but in fact “everyone should take their cue from us,” he said.
French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer meet on the roof of a hotel hosting the 62nd Munich Security Conference on Feb. 13, 2026.Kay Nietfeld/Reuters
“We should be proud of our European achievements,” he added, talking up continental prowess in finance, policy and technology. Europe can be a major power, he said. “I really believe in the power of our audacity.”
Considering the state of the world, it was about as good a weekend as one could expect. Even U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who said the two sides “belong together,” browbeat Europe only a little, avoiding a repeat of Vice-President JD Vance’s angry performance at the 2025 conference.
But tension was thick in the air nonetheless. Behind closed doors, U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham reportedly exploded on Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, calling her a “little lady.” Walking the halls of the neo-renaissance-style Hotel Bayerischer Hof, past the Hermann Kaspar painting and one of Europe’s largest chandeliers, watching the geopolitical theatre in a storied building touted to “tap into our collective nostalgia,” one might feel a certain loss and longing. Try as they might to project otherwise – and perhaps because those continental leaders tried so hard – it is plain that outside, beyond the hotel’s 19th-century façade, Europe’s light is fading.
The Bayerischer Hof hotel on Feb. 12, a day before the Munich Security Conference kicked off.Michael Probst/The Associated Press
The EU has irreversibly fractured with Brexit, no matter how much British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said it ain’t so in Munich. War creeps from the east, and Big Brother USA unfriends Europe and eyes its wallet. Not that there’s much to take. Britain’s and France’s economies are barely growing, and Germany’s is stagnant. Facing crushing debt and populist upheaval, continental governments are revolving doors where nothing gets done. Today prisoner exchanges are done in the United Arab Emirates. Gaza peace talks are held in Qatar. Ukraine negotiations might be held in Geneva, but Europewas not at the table.
A proud moment might have come in January at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, when Europe made U.S. President Donald Trump back down on Greenland annexation.
But here’s what also came out of the WEF: Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney gave a generation-defining speech on middle-power solidarity – and European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde and Britain’s Mr. Starmer both distanced themselves. In the audience, they might well have clapped, but before the camera and Mr. Trump’s eyes, they shrugged their shoulders and looked at their feet. Last year, NATO head (and former Dutch prime minister) Mark Rutte resorted to literally calling Mr. Trump “daddy.”
A once-mighty people has been brought low. “Europe is a myth,” Larry Fink, head of BlackRock, the world’s largest investment firm, said at a WEF panel. “It’s a beautiful myth, but it’s not working.” Or, using the gamer-speak recently adopted by Tesla’s Elon Musk, one might say the continent has become a “non-playable character.”
It raises a tough question: What is Europe even for? And for those on the other side of the West, who draw our values and institutions from the old country, it raises a further question: What does an irrelevant Europe mean for us?
THE SAD CLOWN OF THE WEST
Stańczyk, a historically important court jester of the Polish Renaissance, during a ball at the court of Queen Bona in the face of the loss of Smolensk, painted by Jan Matejko in 1862. National Museum, Warsaw/PUBLIC DOMAIN
Mr. Trump has said Europe faces “civilizational erasure” because it has “gone woke” on migration and climate change and because of its alleged suppression of populist voices. He both misdiagnoses the problem and presents questionable evidence. But Mr. Trump is broadly correct on one issue: There is a problem in Europe, alright.
We can trace the source of European decline endlessly. Brendan Simms, the Cambridge scholar, writes about five centuries of the destructive “struggle for supremacy” among the closely packed European powers that led to their second-fiddle status to the United States. Ian Morris of Stanford University traces the origins of Brexit for 10,000 years. Canadian prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King once said “some countries have too much history.” Such is Europe’s tragedy.
History was what culminated in the Second World War and the utter devastation it wrought. It was only American money that saved the continent, aid from a land unravaged by war. And the Old World was never again the same.
In 1956, Britain and France invaded Egypt after the latter seized the Suez Canal, a major shipping route they funded. But U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower, who disdained such echoes of colonialism, had his own geopolitical priorities. Mr. Eisenhower, who had Britain deeply in his pocket, threatened to sell British bonds and ruin its economy. Prime minister Anthony Eden lost that standoff, and then lost his job.
Then Britain would find it could not even win a stare-down against China, a backwater only recently recognized by the world. In 1982, a steely Deng Xiaoping, the chain-smoking Chinese leader no taller than five feet, bluntly threatened to invade Hong Kong. Britain made concession after concession and walked away with what is arguably nothing. It left prime minister Margaret Thatcher “depressed,” she later said. So shameful was that moment, Queen Elizabeth II was deliberately kept away from the handover ceremony.
History has these moments sometimes, which capture the tides of centuries: Europe had become neutered, wearing a veneer of wealth but underneath just a sick man of the West.
A placard of Helsing, a Munich-based software and Defence company, near Hotel Bayerischer Hof, the venue of the annual Munich Security Conference, on Feb. 12.Thilo Schmuelgen/ReutersA decoration depicting a fool at the Karlstor hangs near a banner of defense electronics company Hensoldt that reads ‘defending Europe,’ on Feb. 23.Thilo Schmuelgen/Reuters
In a rules-based world where institutions are respected, all of this might have mattered less. It may even have been better. One man’s lustrous past is another’s colonial nightmare. The world was moving in a new direction, away from the might-makes-right that has defined much of existence. A new Europe emerged: less powerful, more compassionate, an enthusiastic champion of a new multilateral world. And Europe found a new sort of power.
But then that veneer of wealth started to crack. As entitlements piled up, debt grew and growth slowed. The 2008 financial crisis sparked the eurozone sovereign-debt crisis. The American economy was once about the same as the EU’s, but over the past 20 years, the U.S. economy has more than doubled to US$30-trillion; the 27 EU countries’ economies are at only US$20-trillion, barely more than that of one rising China.
Six U.S. companies founded in the last five decades are valued at more than €1-trillion. In Europe, no company founded during that period is worth even a tenth of that. Some higher-education rankings show only one EU university in the world’s top 30. “Europe is no longer at the forefront of progress,” the European Central Bank’s Ms. Lagarde said in 2024. Europe has been content with old-school industries such as machinery, trains and cars. And those depend on two items that are now either gone or going: cheap Russian energy and abundant Chinese demand. On top of that, China now also makes machines. The proportion of sectors in which China vies directly with the eurozone is 40 per cent now, up from 25 per cent at the turn of the millennium.
Meanwhile, France has now seen five prime ministers in just over two years. Its troubles are the same ones that broke the unwieldy coalition of Germany’s former leader Olaf Schulz, the same that Chancellor Friedrich Merz now faces and the same afflicting the British government that saw six prime ministers in 10 years and its chancellor of the exchequer crying in parliament: Welfare, pensions, healthcare – the entitlements that once stemmed from prosperity now weigh on budgets, but woe be to any government that tries to cut them or raise taxes to fund them.
And so radical politics rise in Europe, for anger and empty stomachs push people toward flashy prophets. In France and Germany, centrist coalitions are barely holding on.
Add to this the return of Donald Trump and geopolitical brinkmanship. The United States does not want to carry Europe or the world order anymore. And we live now in an era of extremes: If you’re not a superpower, you’re not a power at all.
There’s a reason that reaction to Mr. Carney’s Davos speech was so lukewarm in some quarters of the continent. European leaders now walk on eggshells around Mr. Trump, with Germany’s Mr. Merz saying, “We know what we owe you,” to not have a public scolding for not showing gratitude, an experience now known as getting Zelensky’ed. In addition to calling Mr. Trump “daddy,” NATO’s Mr. Rutte sent him grovelling texts describing his moves on Iran as “truly extraordinary” and a “big success,” thanking him for making Europe pay more for defence.
The fraying of the transatlantic partnership, like a rotting carcass, is now attracting vultures. China sees the decay of what Germans call the Weltordnung, and it sees further reason to test Europe, to play hardball in trade talks. Russia, already bent on regional dominance, flies drones into Poland and Romania. Seldom before, perhaps not since the Dark Ages or the fall of Constantinople, has such a proud continent seemed so small in such a big world.
THE SLOW FADE OF SOFT POWER
Paris Street, Rainy Day by Gustave Caillebotte (1877).Art Institute of Chicago/PUBLIC DOMAIN
After it came back from a season break in 2024, Emily in Paris, the show about an American gallivanting across a caricatured continent, was 36.6 times more popular in Canada than a typical Netflix production. Forty-four per cent of Canadians want this country to join the European Union. These data confirm anecdotes: It’s hard to go a week without seeing friends’ Instagram pictures from Porto or Tuscany. And you somehow know six people who have done a semester abroad in Aarhus or Stuttgart.
This Euro-lust is not undeserved. Decline is long. Ask a Roman in the fourth century, and she would not know that her empire was falling. Even as Europe fades, its wellspring of soft power remains visible. Canada’s cultural ties aside, we live in a world that Europeans built. China’s super rich have snapped up European vineyards. North Korea’s Kim Jong-un studied in Switzerland. The Thai king treats Germany as a second home. The UAE loves France’s Louvre museum so much it spent US$1.3-billion on licensing and loan fees for Louvre Abu Dhabi.
Indeed, the vestiges of Europe’s power show precisely why its decline is a problem: We mourn a loss only when it has value.
Even with Mr. Trump’s disdain for Europe, he mandates that new federal buildings use classical architecture to “visually connect our contemporary Republic with the antecedents of democracy in classical antiquity.” Mr. Trump swears by Italian suits and Swiss watches. Germany’s Mr. Merz charmed Mr. Trump with an invitation to his ancestral hometown. Britain’s Mr. Starmer used a royal invitation as a trump card during his visit to the White House. Mr. Trump later also accepted an invitation to the Dutch royal palace. Mr. Carney, to assert Canada’s sovereignty, invited King Charles to deliver the throne speech, an event the likes of which have not been seen in nearly half a century. Cambridge’s Prof. Simms has suggested making Charles emperor of Europe, a modern day Charlemagne, to stabilize the continent.
A sculpture titled ‘The Orange Plague’ by Danish artist Jens Galschiot depicts U.S. President Donald Trump as a self-proclaimed King of Justice, during the Munich Security Conference on Feb. 13.Johannes Simon/Getty Images
There’s even some power left that is more than soft. There’s a saying that the United States innovates, and the EU regulates. It’s meant derogatively – that the United States gives the world internet giants and the artificial-intelligence boom, and Europe mandates caps that stick on bottles (for better recycling) and made Apple use USB-C. But think about the impact. The EU sets global standards in regulating climate protection, competition, food handling, privacy and social media. In a world often criticized for unbridled capitalism, where trillion-dollar corporations are gaining unprecedented power, the EU is the lone bulwark against problems that the free market either creates or cannot address.
And where Europe retreats, its antithesis fills in the blanks. It sounded like a good thing when the colonial powers left Africa, and it was, but now we do not live in a good world. Russia’s Africa Corps, mercenaries who took over from the Wagner Group, have been active in six countries that we know of and probably more that we don’t; more than half of that continent has some military pact with Moscow. China has stakes in 46 ports and includes all but two countries in its Belt and Road infrastructure program. In Djibouti, Chinese debt has accounted for as much as 70 per cent of the economy. Eyeing Africa’s natural resources, Russia and China now own so much of the continent that there are reports of them meeting and clashing with each other. In the United Nations, most of Africa votes with China and Russia, although that’s probably no big deal – who cares about UN votes these days?
Europe’s decline exacerbates the trajectory the world is on, and we will end up with a meaner, smaller place. If Europe does not fix its trajectory, it would be to the detriment of not just itself – and therein is also a lesson particular to Canada.
THE ‘EXISTENTIAL CHALLENGE’
Destruction, from The Course of Empire by Thomas Cole (1836).PUBLIC DOMAIN
In this new era, institutions and soft power – no longer underpinned by the hard power of the United States – no longer command the clout they used to. Now it is all about defence and industry. It’s about power and money, although it boils down to just money, for that is where power comes from.
Mario Draghi, the former European Central Bank chief and Italian prime minister, painstakingly wrote 400 pages on this subject in 2024, calling for regulatory reforms, a unified capital market and €800-billion more per year in business investment, among 170 recommendations. “We have reached the point where, without action, we will have to either compromise our welfare, our environment or our freedom,” Mr. Draghi said. “This is an existential challenge.” But, as Politico noted, “Draghi’s report got about a day’s worth of coverage in the continent’s major media outlets and then was quickly forgotten.” European leaders must heed that report.
Beyond the major, structural changes, there’s a simple solution: Work harder. Continental productivity is still relatively high – how much economic value a worker produces with how much work. It’s just that Germans work 86 hours for every 100 hours Americans work, and the French work even less at 77 hours. In Britain, critics say, decades of social policy that saw work as inherently bad for mental health has resulted in a vicious circle of unemployment. Germany’s Mr. Merz lectured his country earlier this month, saying, “Work-life balance and a four-day week will not be enough to maintain our country’s current level of prosperity.”
In that respect Canada shares something with Europe: Through our trade and security dependency, we, too, have been propped up by the Americans, who now grow weary of that role. We must take in a lesson: Throughout modern history, dark trends originate on the continent and then ripple forth. In Europe, this country sees a crystal ball, threatening a future in which we, too, will be so irrelevant.
Some of Canada’s path will be easier than Europe’s. Canada has vast natural resources, and a handful of provinces and territories is easier to corral than 27 countries plus the others. But while Europe can simply work harder, Canada is already working hard – we work the same hours as Americans, but with our abysmal productivity we make only European wages. Something has got to change.
The greatest issue of all is that one of Canada’s strengths is also a weakness: We have but a handful of provinces and territories – a small internal market that has problems trading with even itself. Europe, the second-biggest economy, can stand alone and be the big cheese if it musters the will. But Canada, the world’s 10th-largest economy, never can. For Canada to prosper and stand tall, we need a stable world order and big players in it that respect that order. Canada needs a strong Europe.
So, it is all the more important that Europe gets its act together. It must accept the inevitability that life will get harder. The only choice is when. For all the 100-page reports and complex proposals from various policy shops, it really boils down to a marshmallow test: Will Europe make the hard decisions today so that it may have a better tomorrow, or will it coast on accumulated wealth and standing until it all runs out?
A new age of ‘total war’ may be approaching. What would it mean for a generation of young, fighting-age Canadians to be thrust into a military conflict? For that, we look to UkraineIra WellsSpecial to The Globe and MailPublished February 21, 2026
Cadets of the Military Institute of Taras Shevchenko National University take part in a swearing-in ceremony at the National Museum of the History of Ukraine in the Second World War in Kyiv in September, 2023.VIACHESLAV RATYNSKYI/Reuters
Ira Wells is an associate professor at Victoria College in the University of Toronto and the President of PEN Canada.
Around this time of year, Grade 12 students across the country are starting to hear back about their university applications. For many, an acceptance letter represents the pinnacle of a long and arduous process – not only the countless hours of studying and prepping for exams, but also the gauntlet of sports practices, music lessons and volunteer hours that fill out the applicant’s extracurricular profile.
University admissions are but one milestone in a larger social script – one that reflects our assumptions about what it means to “make it” in contemporary society. It’s a familiar script, whose story beats are the stuff of a thousand bank advertisements: convocations, starter jobs and starter homes, painting a baby’s room, a luxury car, a long stretch of golden years, laughter on a beach.
That script does not include military service or going to war. Indeed, Canadians seem disinclined to imagine themselves in uniform. According toa 2025Angus Reid poll, about half of Canadians claim to be willing to fight in an armed conflict. Of that half, however, most said that they would enlist only if they “agreed with the reasons for fighting.” Only 19 per cent would fight for Canada unconditionally.
Zoom in on 18-34-year-old men, a crucial demographic for replenishing the ranks. Only 21 per cent said that they would volunteer if called upon by their country, while 36 per cent said they would not volunteer at all, and 34 per cent said that they would volunteer if they agreed with the reasons.
These numbers are not encouraging for a country facing a crisis of military recruitment. According to the federal government, our current force strength is 63,000 Regular Force service members – 0.15 per cent of our population of 41.5 million Canadians. Canada may be more comfortable in the role of peacekeeper than warrior, but it was not always thus: Approximately 1.1 million Canadians and Newfoundlanders, or 10 per cent of the population, served in the Armed Forces during the Second World War. Of course, we might believe our current modest numbers, like our emaciated military expenditures over the past few decades, befit the comparatively peaceful world over that period, and Canada’s privileged place in it.
But that world is changing, and changing fast. Canada’s territorial integrity, which no one has thought much about for decades, suddenly feels precarious. Our military has begun modelling a Canadian response to a hypothetical American invasion, as The Globe reported last month. Abroad, the largest land war in Europe since the Second World War grinds on, while the prospects of an even larger global conflagration continue to grow.
“Conflict is at our door,” Mark Rutte, the NATO Secretary-General, warned in December. “We must be prepared for the scale of war our grandparents and great-grandparents endured.”
Landing craft carrying Canadian tanks and infantry approach the Dieppe Beach on Aug. 19, 1942, during Operation Jubilee, also known as the Dieppe Raid.Courtesy of the Alexander family.An army chaplain offers prayers for the safety of the men of the Royal Canadian Engineers before they leave the decks of the HMCS Prince Henry for the invasion of the coast of France in June, 1944.Canada. Dept. of National Defence
After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the ensuing “war on terror,” the era of state-on-state conflict appeared to have ended. The first two decades of the 21st century were dominated by conflicts not between nation states, but between states and terrorist organizations, insurgents, and other nonstate actors.
According to Mara Karlin, a scholar of International Relations at Johns Hopkins and former U.S. assistant secretary of defence for strategy, plans, and capabilities, that era of limited war has come to an end, and a new age of “comprehensive conflict” has begun: “[W]hat the world is witnessing today is akin to what theorists in the past have called ‘total war,’ ” Dr. Karlin argued in Foreign Affairs, “in which combatants draw on vast resources, mobilize their societies, prioritize warfare over all other state activities, and reshape their economies.”
Warfare of the future, Dr. Karlin suggests, may look less like the limited anti-terrorist operations of the past 20 years, and more like the whole-of-society efforts that defined the previous century’s world wars.
If this is accurate, Canada’s long respite from military history may be coming to an end. And if a “whole of society” response is required, we will need to rethink the time-worn social script that we’re handing down to young Canadians.
We have been preparing young people for one kind of life, but their destinies could take a very different path. We should think harder about equipping them with the spiritual and psychological resources to deal with what may be coming.
A young military cadet does pull-ups after a ceremony to mark the start of the new school year in Kyiv in September, 2025.Gleb Garanich/Reuters
What would it mean for a generation of young, fighting-age Canadians to take up arms, whether in Europe or in defence of our own borders? What kinds of changes would be required to allow for widespread social mobilization? What kinds of individual adjustments would be necessary – adaptations of our own self-understanding and world view, our deep-seated beliefs about what it means to live a life of purpose?
If push came to shove, would enough Canadians be willing to take up arms and fight for our continued survival, or would the country collapse under foreign military pressure?
I have been troubled by these questions since I visited Ukraine last fall on a trip co-sponsored by PEN Ukraine and PEN Canada.During a week in Kyiv, I spoke with human rights advocates, journalists, broadcasters, government officials and former prisoners of war. These individuals had their own perspectives on what transpired since Russia’s full-scale invasion on Feb. 24, 2022, but I was struck by the way in which an entire society had seemingly leaned into the war.
In Ukraine, too, youth had been preparing for their professional futures, only to find those plans radically interrupted. When I asked the young man known as call sign Stan if he had, as a kid, imagined a future in the military, he said, “not in the slightest. I never imagined myself as a military guy or soldier.”
Call sign Stan, UGV technician with the 3rd Assault Brigade in the 3rd Army Corps of the Ukrainian Ground Forces.COURTESY 3RD ARMY CORPSUKRAINIAN GROUND FORCES
Stan was born in Kyiv in 1987. He was an artistic kid who loved video games and eventually got into game development. He worked as a concept designer in studios in Shanghai, Beijing, and Singapore, before co-founding his own studio.
He said he felt the urge to enlist as soon as Russia launched its full-scale invasion, but wasn’t sure if he could contribute. “I didn’t have specific skills,” he recalled. “I had never held a rifle, I didn’t know how to drive, I wasn’t a medic. I was like an IT guy – I was an artist.”
But after his son was born, something changed. “That’s when I realized, you know, after the war, he will ask me: ‘Dad, what did you do?’ ”
He volunteered and signed a contract in January, 2025, with the 3rd Assault Brigade in the Third Army Corps, taking a position as a technician.
Stan told me how, in the face of war, the old versions of our imagined futures can melt away: all of your personal and professional dreams for the future become secondary to securing the freedom in which those dreams can become possible.
“There will be a moment,” he said, “a specific moment, when you will decide. Either you will run, or you will stay and fight. And that will define you as a person.”
“If you’re not that guy,” he continued, “you’re gonna run. And if you have it in you, you’ll stay and fight. Nobody wants to die, but you just have to cross the line.”
He didn’t tell me what line he meant, but I think I know: a mental line when you accept that what you are fighting for is worth more than your own life.
Call sign Darwin, Commander of the 2nd Mechanized Battalion of the 125th Separate Heavy Mechanized Brigade of the 3rd Army Corps, Ukrainian Ground Forces.COURTESY 3RD ARMY CORPS/UKRAINIAN GROUND FORCES
Call sign Darwin is 27 years old and when I spoke to him was Commander of the 2nd Mechanized Battalion of the 125th Separate Heavy Mechanized Brigade of the 3rd Army Corps. He grew up in Pokrovsk, in Eastern Ukraine, where he witnessed early incursions of Russian soldiers in 2014. Like Stan, he did not imagine a future in the military. Darwin remembers a high school teacher who taught him about history and the current political situation. It was only later, in university, that he decided to enlist.
This was 2017 – years before the full-scale invasion – but Russian forces were carrying out operations in Donbas. “I wanted justice,” Darwin told me. “It felt like a shame not to be a part of it, because I’ve always felt that the big actions in history, in your country – you must be in the avant-garde of it, or it’s just a useless life.”
In 2022, Darwin fought in the Battle of Kyiv, taking part in many assault and physical intelligence operations, which involved crawling into enemy positions. Since then, he has fought in Zaporizhia, in Kherson, and in Bakhmut where, as an infantryman, he took part in defensive and assault operations in surrounding villages and tree lines. In his mid-20s, Darwin commanded a company in the Battle of Avdiivka, one of the most intense clashes of the war: Russians reportedly lost more soldiers in Avdiivka than in the entire Soviet-Afghan War, though precise numbers are unknown.
So Darwin has seen his share of action. Yet he can remember a time when war itself felt like a fantasy, something from another life.
“We used to think war wasn’t for us – it’s for the movies, it’s for our grandfathers,” Darwin told me. Now, he thinks the capacity for war is “inside all of us.”
A woman walks behind a bus stop displaying a Ukrainian army recruiting placard during heavy frost in Kyiv on Jan. 16, amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine.SERGEI SUPINSKY/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGESA Ukrainian serviceman stands next to residential buildings heavily damaged by Russian military strikes in the front line town of Avdiivka, Ukraine in November, 2023.Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty/Serhii Nuzhnenko via REUTERS
“It’s the things that we think are normal that are not normal. Going to an office every day, every week for your whole life – that isn’t normal. After you take part in war – you can understand it only after you try. After you try to do something brave, the bravery itself appears.”
WhenI confessed to Darwin that I was unsure of whether Canadian youth were prepared to take up arms to defend their homeland, he said that he used to feel the same way about Ukrainians. “We used to be the same,” he told me. “Before, we used to think, this isn’t a war, it isn’t a real occupation, it’s just a small conflict. It won’t be that bad.”
While many people cannot bring themselves to face reality “until bombs are falling outside their own windows,” Darwin said, he thinks the world should learn from what is currently happening in Ukraine. “They should look at us. Hear our words and what we say. And we say that it can happen in any country, any city, if the world will not stop Russia now.”
Prime Minister Mark Carney speaks during a press conference at Canadian Forces Base 8 Wing Trenton in Trenton, Ont., in August, 2025.Spencer Colby/The Canadian Press
Of course, Russia is not knocking on our doorstep. But if the conflagration in Europe spills out of control, Canada may well consider playing a strategic role, as previous generations of Canadians felt compelled to do. In the meantime, we are faced with the imperial fantasies and threats of annexation emanating from the White House.
Would a drastic change in world events, or a direct threat to our own security, incite a sudden shift in thinking among the 51 per cent of Canadians who claim to be unwilling to fight in an armed conflict? To be sure, our most recent federal election provided an object lesson in how threats to Canadian sovereignty can radically shift public opinion. Still, the decision to hit pause on major life goals – to set aside professional aspirations, to put on a uniform and be prepared to kill or be killed in service of your country – is fundamentally different than casting a ballot. (It might also be noted that the Angus Reid numbers cited above come from after the election and Trump’s 51st State rhetoric.)
For their part, the Ukrainian soldiers I interviewed believe that we have entered a new epoch of warfare, and that the horizons of this conflict will extend far beyond their borders. “There is no future in which the war simply finishes in Ukraine, and it’s all over, and the world is peaceful again,” Darwin said, adding that he believes that we have entered a “century of war.”
Canadians should “be ready,” Stan told me, “because this is not going to end in Ukraine … I don’t know in what format, or who’s going to war with who, but the West is definitely under threat. And you will have to fight, sooner or later.” He brought up Trump’s 51st State taunts, suggesting that Canadians have now been given a slight taste, a “demo version” (in his phrase) of this possible future.
These conversations led me to three conclusions about our current predicament. The first is that, as both young men emphasized, we will not know what we are capable of until the decisive hour arrives. “Every [one] who will read this article should understand that [they] can do things like this,” Darwin said of his work as a soldier.
The second is that soldiers like Stan and Darwin are drawing power from a core of beliefs – about the self-evident value of their homeland, about the virtues of courage and valour, and about their own capabilities as men – which are largely absent from mainstream Canadian discourse. We have, perhaps, become a little too attached to the version of life presented to us in the bank ads, a cushy future that takes our continuing physical security as a given. If the abysmal statistics about mental health outcomes for young Canadians are to be believed, this script isn’t working very well for anyone these days. More urgently, the survival of our national experiment will depend upon some critical mass of citizens being willing to defend it.
Which brings me to my third conclusion: the best way to avoid an apocalyptic conflict may be to prepare for one. Replenishing our ranks and regenerating our capacity to make war may offer us the best hope of deterring would-be rivals. This was scholar Mara Karlin’s argument about what is necessary for survival in the age of “comprehensive war.” We must convince all hostile forces, including the United States, that they might lose a war with Canada – that the upsides aren’t worth the risk.
But to give that deterrence the bite of plausibility, we need to reorganize our society now. That reorganization will require the kinds of government investment that we are already seeing – the acquisition of new military platforms, infrastructure upgrades, and the promise of further increases to defence spending. This week, Mr. Carney announced an intention to bolster “sovereign capabilities” by doubling the share of Ottawa’s military spending earmarked for domestic suppliers.
But it will also require a cultural shift. Military service needs to be seen not as a last resort for your delinquent nephew who needs more structure in his life, but as a viable, even enviable path for the most courageous and ambitious Canadians. Over the past few decades, universities have positioned themselves as the exclusive talent pipeline, promising to identify the most meritorious students for leadership positions in our society. The Armed Forces could perform a similar function, helping to identify those extraordinarily gifted in leadership and courage under fire.
However we go about it, we need to prompt young people to imagine a rewarding chapter of life in service of our country, to reawaken our instincts for self-defence, and remind ourselves that we have – and that we are – something worth fighting for.
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Federal agents detain a protester during clashes after the fatal shooting of a demonstrator earlier in the day, on Sunday in Minneapolis, Minn.KEREM YUCEL/AFP/Getty Images
In 1935, American author Sinclair Lewis published It Can’t Happen Here, a dystopian novel about the rise of a populist demagogue named Berzelius (Buzz) Windrip, who becomes the U.S. president after cultivating a cult following for his nationalism, anti-elitism and quixotic promises. Windrip was fixated on restoring domestic production of material goods and hated the press.
He establishes a paramilitary force called the “Minute Men,” or “M.M.,” who are initially primarily made up of retired military personnel, but grow to include farmers, industrial workers and even former criminals, all of whom appear to revel in the opportunity to wield control and power over their fellow citizens. M.M. officers spy for the state and violently break up protests, and as Windrip’s presidency metastasizes into authoritarianism, they arrest and execute perceived dissidents with complete impunity. The regime justifies these actions by claiming the M.M. only targets malicious agitators: “The way to stop crime is to stop it!” Windrip declares to great fanfare.
Mr. Lewis’s novel was of course informed by the real-life tyranny engulfing parts of Europe at that time, but his point was that America was not impervious to those same forces. “All dictators followed the same routine of torture, as if they had all read the same manual of sadistic etiquette,” he wrote. “And now, in the humorous, friendly, happy-go-lucky land of Mark Twain, [Americans] saw the homicidal maniacs having just as good a time as they had had in central Europe.”
There is a video, taken this weekend in Minneapolis – nearly a century after Mr. Lewis wrote his book – of an ICE agent clapping after his colleagues execute an American citizen on the street. That American citizen – 37-year-old Alex Pretti – was recording ICE agents conducting their work when he went to assist a woman who was shoved to the ground by one of the officers. Mr. Pretti asks her, “Are you okay?” and then is immediately pepper-sprayed in the face and tackled by a half-dozen officers. One agent removes a firearm that Mr. Pretti had in its holster – which Mr. Pretti had the right to carry under the Second Amendment – and only after Mr. Pretti is disarmed and on the ground, the agents execute him, firing a handful of bullets into his body. It’s in that moment that one of the ICE agents starts clapping. In the humorous, friendly, happy-go-lucky land of Mark Twain, we see the homicidal maniacs having just as good a time as they had a century ago in central Europe.
The regime then came out to justify the killing, just as it had weeks ago, when an ICE agent shot another U.S. citizen on the street – Renee Nicole Macklin Good, also 37 – whom the White House and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) subsequently labelled a “domestic terrorist,” though she was actually a mom in an SUV who seemed to be turning her car away from the agent in front of her. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem almost immediately declared that Mr. Pretti “attacked” law enforcement and was “brandishing” a gun, which were lies easily disproven by various videos of the interaction. But White House staff persisted with the fiction that Mr. Pretti “tried to murder federal agents” anyway, telling Americans not to believe what they could plainly see with their own eyes. The people being executed by state agents on the street were effectively criminals-in-waiting, according to the White House, and the way to stop crime, of course, is to stop it.
A witness to the killing of Mr. Pretti gave a statement hours later in which she said the story that the DHS has fed the public is wrong. But just as disturbingly, she said she fears reprisal from the government because she witnessed what actually happened. “I feel afraid,” she said. “Only hours have passed since they shot a man right in front of me and I don’t feel like I can go home because I heard agents were looking for me. I don’t know what the agents will do when they find me.”
Even poor students of history recognize what it means when governments shrug off their own citizens’ rights, as members of the Trump administration have done in insisting that Ms. Macklin Good and Mr. Pretti decided their own fates. They know what it means when an administration blocks investigations, when citizens are afraid that members of a masked, state-backed militia might show up at their homes to interrogate them or worse, when innocent people are executed on the street, and when the public is fed lies about agitators and domestic terrorists. It happens slowly, and then all at once. And as Mr. Lewis presciently noted, it could happen anywhere.
Each year, the Danish military deploys 12 men and more than 150 huskies into the vastness of northern Greenland. Divided into six groups of two sleds, they fan out over thousands of kilometres of snow and ice on missions that last six months.
The Sirius Patrol was created during the Second World War to search out and destroy secret German weather stations. It’s also one of the ways that Denmark maintains its claim over the world’s largest island.
In 1933, the Permanent Court of International Justice held that Denmark had successfully established sovereignty over all of Greenland because the presence required to do so in a remote and extreme location is less than that required elsewhere.
Today, satellites and aircraft fulfill most of Denmark’s surveillance needs. The Sirius Patrol survives because some on-the-ground activity is still required.
It helps that the United States has recognized Danish sovereignty over Greenland on numerous occasions, including in a 1951 defence agreement that was updated in 2004.
The Sirius Patrol contributes to maintaining public support in Denmark for the considerable expense of patrolling Greenland and supporting its remote communities. From a public-relations perspective, it’s the equivalent of an astronaut program, with its members being feted as heroes when they return home.
The Sirius Patrol is just one part of Denmark’s small but highly capable military. In May, 2023, I taught at the Royal Danish Defence College in Copenhagen. My students were mid-career officers; most had served in Afghanistan. Denmark lost 43 soldiers in that conflict, the highest per-capita casualty rate of any NATO country.
In addition to being Arctic-trained and battle-hardened, Danish soldiers are also motivated by a historic humiliation. In 1939, the Danish government sought to appease Nazi Germany by signing a non-aggression pact. But Adolf Hitler did not respect international treaties and, in 1940, German forces invaded. Danish soldiers fought back – but only for two hours, at which point they were ordered to surrender by their own government. The Danish people suffered under a Nazi occupation for the duration of the war.
One fine spring day in Copenhagen, I met with Thomas Winkler, the senior lawyer in Denmark’s foreign ministry. He chatted happily about the 2022 resolution of the Hans Island dispute, which included the creation of very short land border between Canada and Greenland.
“It was the greatest moment of my career!” Mr. Winkler exclaimed.
“But the most interesting moment of my career,” the Danish diplomat-lawyer continued, “came in 2019, when Prime Minister [Mette] Frederiksen phoned me in the middle of the night. Donald Trump had just told her that he wanted to buy Greenland. She needed to respond, and was seeking my advice.”
“What did you tell her?” I asked.
“That Denmark cannot sell Greenland, because Greenland belongs to Greenlanders!”
Most of Greenland’s 57,000 residents are Inuit. In 2009, they concluded a self-government agreement with Denmark that limits Copenhagen’s responsibilities to defence and foreign affairs. It also recognizes that the right of self-determination extends to full independence, if and when Greenlanders make that choice.
And so, on that night in 2019, Ms. Frederiksen politely informed Donald Trump that he could not buy Greenland from her. Enraged by this response, he cancelled an upcoming state visit to Denmark.
Since returning to the White House one year ago, Mr. Trump has been pressing the issue of Greenland again. He even raised the possibility of using military force, saying that, “One way or the other, we’re going to have Greenland.”
What began as a curiosity is quickly becoming a crisis.
On Wednesday, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, the Prime Minister of Greenland, said: “We choose the Greenland we know today, which is a part of the Kingdom of Denmark.”
Mr. Trump responded that anything less than U.S. control of Greenland was “unacceptable” to him.
On Thursday, the Danish and Greenlandic foreign ministers met with Vice-President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Washington. The meeting ended after the Greenland and Danish leaders refused to give ground.
Mr. Trump might decide that further negotiations are pointless. But let’s be clear: If the United States invades, Denmark and Greenland will fight.
Nobody should assume that the conflict would end quickly. Danish soldiers and Inuit hunters know the land and ice. In the Winter War of 1939-1940, the Soviet Army was pushed out of Finland by snipers equipped with cross-country skis and white camouflage. More recently, the all-powerful U.S. military was pushed out of Vietnam and Afghanistan by local forces employing guerrilla tactics.
What can Canada do to prevent an armed conflict between two NATO allies?
First, we must understand that there is no rational basis for Mr. Trump’s security concerns, as the U.S. already has full access to Greenland under the 1951 defence agreement.
The fact that there is only one U.S. military base on Greenland is the result of choices, made by the Pentagon, based on expert assessments that there is no state-to-state threat to Greenland.
Russia is a dangerous country. But it already has unquestioned sovereignty over half of the Arctic, and doesn’t need more.
Russia does use the waters between Greenland and the other Nordic countries to access the Atlantic Ocean and play “submarine games” with NATO navies. But none of this is new.
China, meanwhile, accesses the natural resources that it needs through foreign investment and international trade. This explains why China has never used force in Africa or Latin America. Some of its companies have explored the possibility of establishing mines in Greenland, but none have actually done so.
Greenland is immense and will therefore have lots of critical minerals, but about 80 per cent of the island is covered by an ice sheet that is several kilometres thick. As for oil, an exploratory drilling campaign, conducted off the southwest coast of Greenland 15 years ago, found no exploitable reserves.
Even if the prospects for resources were good, U.S. companies already have access to them – provided they comply with the laws and regulations set by the Greenlandic government.
Mr. Trump recently said that ownership of Greenland is, for him, “psychologically needed for success.” There’s the nub of this matter. Mr. Trump is using Greenland to test how far he can impose his will. If NATO countries acquiesce on this, he will own all of us.
This is why Greenland is the first, best, and last opportunity to stand up to Mr. Trump.
Standing up alone is a losing strategy, because Mr. Trump understands basic game theory. He operates one-on-one and forces concessions by focusing power and creating deliberate uncertainties – about what he might do, and what others might achieve or concede in their separate dealings with him.
The only way to overcome this “prisoner’s dilemma” is to communicate constantly with allies, speak with one voice, and insist that all negotiations take place multilaterally.
After a year of divide-and-conquer, there are signs that some NATO governments have figured this out. Last week, two joint statements affirmed Greenland’s right of self-determination, the first by Denmark, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Poland and Britain, and the second by Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Norway and Iceland. Canada was more cautious, with Prime Minister Mark Carney expressing support during a meeting with the Danish Prime Minister.
It’s time, also, to engage global institutions. Canada and our European allies should call an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council. The United States will veto any draft resolution, but the issue could then be taken up by the UN General Assembly. A resolution there, affirming the right to self-determination of Greenlanders, would achieve widespread support.
A soldier walks toward the Joint Arctic Command headquarter in Nuuk, Greenland, on Thursday.ALESSANDRO RAMPAZZO/AFP/Getty Images
Canada and European countries also need to be present in Greenland. Canada will officially open a consulate in Nuuk next month, which is commendable but insufficient. The Canadian Armed Forces should be conducting exercises with other NATO militaries in Greenland. The first Swedish and French soldiers have already arrived.
NATO governments should also be sending a co-ordinated signal that any U.S. invasion of Greenland will have real consequences, such as the loss of access to military bases in Canada and Europe.
The North Atlantic alliance was born out of the need to present a common front to a nuclear-armed superpower with expansionist ambitions. The same logic applies today. If Mr. Trump does invade, Canada and its European allies could create a “new NATO” – one that excludes the United States but is open to democratic countries like Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea and Mexico.
Mr. Trump is a bully and a megalomaniac. If we let him take Greenland, he will only want more.
From the acclaimed environmentalist, a call to harness the power of the sun and rewrite our scientific, economic, and political future.
Our climate, and our democracy, are melting down. But Bill McKibben, one of the first to sound the alarm about the climate crisis, insists the moment is also full of possibility. Energy from the sun and wind is suddenly the cheapest power on the planet and growing faster than any energy source in history—if we can keep accelerating the pace, we have a chance.
Here Comes the Sun tells the story of the sudden spike in power from the sun and wind—and the desperate fight of the fossil fuel industry and their politicians to hold this new power at bay. From the everyday citizens who installed solar panels equal to a third of Pakistan’s electric grid in a year to the world’s sixth-largest economy—California—nearly halving its use of natural gas in the last two years, Bill McKibben traces the arrival of plentiful, inexpensive solar energy. And he shows how solar power is more than just a path out of the climate crisis: it is a chance to reorder the world on saner and more humane grounds. You can’t hoard solar energy or hold it in reserves—it’s available to all.
There’s no guarantee we can make this change in time, but there is a hope—in McKibben’s eyes, our best hope for a new civilization: one that looks up to the sun, every day, as the star that fuels our world.
This is portrayed as a Canadian national voice of resilience and resistance but really it should be considered a World voice. Yes the authors are Canadian but most of their writings could be from anywhere and certainly it would make sense for “Americans” to read this. The writers cover the gamut from fiction authors to non-fiction, business, Indigenous, artists, sports and just about every genre you can name. The common themes throughout are colonialism, repression, capitalism, resilience and resistance. These help to broaden our world perspective, encourage us to be positive and hopeful while at the same time remind us we need to be vigilant of our freedoms.
Elbows Up!: Canadian Voices of Resilience and Resistance
A blazing collection of responses to the ongoing Canada v. America trade war and ensuing swell of national unity, from a remarkable array of some of our sharpest and most influential Canadian minds.
It feels disorienting, and at times existential, to watch a trade war escalate and to hear an American president vow to make Canada the “51st state.” But amid the disorientation, there is an urgent how do we meet the moment?
The fact that treaties can be broken, that resources can be stolen, and that the consequences of land theft include loss of culture, ritual, and identity is not new to the Indigenous and refugee peoples living in this country. But to many other Canadians, this kind of threat is new. As a result, there appears to be a new sense of a “we” emerging. People are angry and standing together with renewed shared purpose. The swell of Canadian pride is undeniable and important to acknowledge. This is a pivotal moment in history to take stock of how we got here, to learn from our past and walk tenaciously together into an uncertain future.
Inspired by the 1968 collection The New Candid Canadian Opinions of the US, this new anthology will be edited by bestselling author and CBC host Elamin Abdelmahmoud, and will feature responses from Margaret Atwood, Omar El Akkad, Jesse Wente, Atom Egoyan, Canisia Lubrin, Tom Power, Niigaan Sinclair, Jay Baruchel, and many more, speaking candidly on America, and Canada, and the malleable contours of a national narrative still taking hold.
In Venezuela, a mighty U.S. will again meet an even greater power: sovereignty
America does not appear to have learned the core lesson of its Iraq occupation: Don’t underestimate a country’s determination to be free
Ben Rowswell
Special to The Globe and Mail
Published 13 hours agoUpdated 7 hours ago
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Government supporters demand President Nicolás Maduro’s release from U.S. custody during a protest in Caracas, Venezuela, Jan. 4, 2026.Ariana Cubillos/The Associated Press
Ben Rowswell is a consultant with Catalyze4 who served as Canada’s chargé d’affaires in Iraq from 2003 to 2005, and ambassador to Venezuela from 2014 to 2017.
The voice of a U.S. Army lieutenant-colonel I met more than two decades ago in Iraq came back to me last week, when I read that the U.S. had launched an attack on Venezuela.
Back in 2003, the two of us found ourselveswaiting for a helicopter shuttle from Baghdad Airport to the safe Green Zone downtown, where I lived among U.S. personnel sheltering themselves from the nation they occupied. He was curious about why the Canadian government had a diplomat in a country whose invasion we had opposed. I replied that Canada wanted to understand how the U.S. could possibly govern that distant and broken place. He was surprised and dismissive – telling me, in so many words, that they didn’t give a damn what Canada thought.
His fit of pique has remained with me, as a reminder of how oblivious power can make you to reality. After all, it wasn’t Canada’s judgment he needed to fear; it was the fury building among Iraqis.
The smaller countries of the world sensed it from the moment Iraq’s sovereignty had been tossed aside. Even in countries that admire the U.S. and want it to succeed, a quiet sense of fury builds when we think of a more powerful country dictating outcomes to us. But, being accustomed to power, this officer apparently could not intuit how strongly Iraqis were committed to their sovereignty.
The tidal wave of rage building among the population broke soon afterward. In their unfamiliarity with Iraqi politics, the U.S.’s occupying authorities alienated both the Sunni and Shia populations. Normally at one another’s throats, militias of the opposing sides took a brief respite from their brewing civil war to launch parallel insurgencies against U.S. forces. On one bloody evening in April, 2004, almost two dozen U.S. soldiers were killed across the country in a spasm of bloodletting. By the end of the war, more than 4,000 Americans would join them – the price the U.S. would pay for violating Iraq’s independence.
Sovereignty isn’t some morality play; it is better to think of it as a bulwark against violence. Forged in centuries of warfare, the principle emerged as a way to prevent countries from imposing their will on each other – a recipe for eternal war. Remove the bulwark, and violence resumes.
U.S. Marines evacuate Iraqi women following clashes in March, 2003 with Iraqi forces near the southern city of Nasiriyah.ERIC FEFERBERG/AFPIraqi men participate in a government-sponsored march in defiance of U.S. threats to invade Iraq on Feb. 4, 2003 in the city of Mosul, 450 kilometres north of Baghdad. Thousands chanted ‘No Peace, No Surrender.’Oleg Nikishin/Getty Images
The U.S. was overwhelmed by the violence unleashed against it in Iraq. It failed in every objective, both spoken and unspoken, that it set for the Iraq war: finding weapons of mass destruction, installing a stable democracy, making a profit from the country’s oil. After eight years of frustration, the Iran-influenced Iraqi parliament ordered American troops out of the country in 2011, and the U.S. duly withdrew.
By 2016, so many Americans had come to see the Iraq War as a disaster that even the presidential nominee for the party of George W. Bushwould say that the decision to invade “may have been the worst decision” by any U.S. president.
The mission in Afghanistan, to which Canada contributed as part of the NATO alliance, also resulted in failure a few years later. We had joined in 2001 after the U.S. secured a mandate at the UN Security Council, authorizing the mission under international law. Our alliance transferred power to an elected government once Hamid Karzai won a first election in 2004, but remained for years to help build up the Afghan army and police. We spent billions to jump-start social services in the hopes that the population would rally behind the new democratic government.
A U.S. army soldier secures a street as a man watches, near the Forward Operating Base Kuschamond on Sept. 12, 2011 in Kuschamond, Afghanistan.JOHANNES EISELE/Getty Images
But we also ran up against the realities of sovereignty. In Afghanistan, the ragtag remnants of the odious Taliban regime enjoyed little public sympathy – at least at first. But by invoking sovereignty, the Taliban were to able to rally their fellow citizens to their cause of opposing the presence of foreign troops in their country. Over two decades, each Afghan casualty that NATO troops inflicted only drew more people to their cause.
Canada proved our commitment to the alliance by taking responsibility for the reconstruction of Kandahar, the province the Taliban came from. But by the time I served asCanada‘s representative in Kandahar from 2009 to 2010, we had retreated to a Green Zone of our own to protect ourselves from the hostility of the local population.
Canada learned from that defeat. More than ever before, we acknowledge that sovereignty reigns supreme in international relations. Over time we began to shy away from activities that might be seen as infringing uponthe internal matters of other countries. For example, we have pulled back from humanitarian intervention – even in our own backyard, when Haiti hasso desperately needed outside help. Conversely, we have stood up for countries whose sovereignty was being violated, such as our fellow democracy Ukraine.
Four years after my time in Kandahar, I was appointed to serve as Canada’s ambassador to Venezuela. Burned by our experience in Afghanistan and conscious of the spectacular failure of the U.S. in Iraq, we introduced a fundamentally different approach to democracy support than what the Americans had attempted there, governed by the principle that sovereignty must come first. The initiative for any movement toward democracy, we decided, had to come from Venezuelans themselves; the only legitimate role for outside actors was to follow their lead.
These were the principles on which we built a group of fellow democracies in the Americas in 2017 to help Venezuela re-establish democratic rule. Named for the capital of Peru,the country that convened us, the Lima Group co-ordinated the regional response to the constitutional crisis that exploded the previous autumn when Nicolás Maduro’s government suspended the constitution.
Supporters of Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido attend a rally in Caracas on May 11, 2019.YURI CORTEZ/AFP/Getty Images
Venezuela is different from Iraq and Afghanistan in many ways, and one of the most striking is the existence of a large, well-organized and surprisingly cohesive democracy movement. Represented at that time in its National Assembly, which the movement had won in a massive landslide, they clearlyenjoyed the support of a strong majority of Venezuelans. They proved that through a huge electoral exercise they operated despite regime opposition in July, 2017, securing a massive rejection of Mr. Maduro’s coup d’état. Unfortunately, it was ultimately fruitless in the face of voter fraud and brutal repression.
In 2019, when the last remaining democratic institution implemented a constitutional provision to install an interim president, the Lima Group followed their lead. Their bid to install then-speaker Juan Guaidó in power seemed improbable, but since it was clearly the will of Venezuelan citizens as expressed through their federal legislature, the Lima Group duly recognized Mr. Guaidó as the president. Participating countries then expelled diplomats appointed by Mr. Maduro from our respective capitals, and our embassies eventually had to close too. When the democracy movement’s gambit failed, the Lima Group retreated into inactivity.
Now, Donald Trump – the same U.S. President that denounced the intervention in Iraq in 2016 – has launched an intervention in Venezuela, and he says “only time will tell” how long the U.S. will oversee it. The U.S. has demonstrated the same astonishing military prowess as it had in Iraq, and removed just as odious a dictator, with the capture of Mr. Maduro. But they have shown just the same oblivious attitude toward sovereignty as that lieutenant-colonel had revealed to me so many years ago.
A damaged apartment in Catia La Mar, Venezuela, on Tuesday, one day after Venezuela’s leader, Nicolás Maduro, was captured in a U.S. strike. On the wall of the apartment hangs a portrait of Venezuela’s liberator, Simón Bolivar.FEDERICO PARRA/AFP/Getty Images
Indeed, the U.S. has stirred the same beast as in 2003, and defeat is just as certain for themas it was back then. That’s borne out by U.S. history, but also the history of the last two centuries:From Napoleon to Kaiser Wilhelm II (and, one day, Vladimir Putin),just about every leader who has flouted the principle of sovereignty loses eventually. In time, the forces that stand up for it are more powerful than the forces any one country can muster – even if it has the strongest military in the world.
We can hear it already in the speeches that Venezuelans across the political spectrum are making. When a foreign military power distracted by its many other interests comes into direct conflict with millions of proud citizens of a country with nothing to lose, the outcome is not difficult to predict.
As the closest friend and partner to the U.S., however, Canada can help them save face in Venezuela. It is in America’s interest thatVenezuelareturn to stability as a country where citizens no longer flee north by the millions. AndCanada and our fellow democracies in the region have tested an approach that would achieve this, in full respect of Venezuelansovereignty.
Canada could convene the Lima Group once again, and co-ordinate a common position with Venezuela’s democratic neighbours. The group’s mandate would remain the same: to support a transition back to democracy by following the lead of Venezuela’s democracy movement, which is more united and legitimate than ever, headed as it is by president-elect Edmundo González Urrutia and supported by Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado. The U.S. does not belong to the Lima Group, but it has traditionally supported the important role it plays.
We may need to rebrand the Lima Group to today’s circumstances. Perhaps we can rebrand it as the Caracas Group, to reinforce who really should call the shots – Venezuelans. But we must remember that its origins lie in a distant land where the U.S. last met its match in confronting the power of sovereignty. The tragedy of Iraq need not foretell the tragedy of Venezuela if we pay due respect to the most powerful force in the international arena: the determination of all countries to be free.
U.S. President Donald Trump reacts as he speaks during the House Republican Party member retreat at the Kennedy Center in Washington, on Tuesday.MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images
Occam’s razor is the principle that the most plausible explanation of events is the simplest. Most often this is true. To account for Donald Trump, however, we need a different hermeneutical instrument.
Say hello to Occam’s kazoo: the principle that the most plausible explanation, so far as Mr. Trump is involved, is invariably the stupidest. To understand his motives in any given situation, pick the most aggressively simple-minded, crudely self-serving, absurdly moronic rationale you can think of. You will not be far wrong.
Take the abduction of Nicolás Maduro. Leave aside its arrant illegality, or the hugely destabilizing implications globally. Why did Mr. Trump do it?
A number of analysts claim to have detected some grand strategic design at work. Surely it was intended to restrict the supply of oil to Mr. Maduro’s sponsors in Cuba. Or no, it was another move in the great game with China, depriving it of an important foothold in South America.Default Mono Sans Mono Serif Sans Serif Comic Fancy Small CapsDefault X-Small Small Medium Large X-Large XX-LargeDefault Outline Dark Outline Light Outline Dark Bold Outline Light Bold Shadow Dark Shadow Light Shadow Dark Bold Shadow Light BoldDefault Black Silver Gray White Maroon Red Purple Fuchsia Green Lime Olive Yellow Navy Blue Teal Aqua OrangeDefault 100% 75% 50% 25% 0%Default Black Silver Gray White Maroon Red Purple Fuchsia Green Lime Olive Yellow Navy Blue Teal Aqua OrangeDefault 100% 75% 50% 25% 0%Video 1:23
U.S. President Donald Trump issued a warning to House Republicans Tuesday: ‘Win the midterms’ or ‘I’ll get impeached.’ He made the comments at a GOP retreat as the party enters a critical election year facing a razor-thin majority in the House.
The Associated Press
It is enough to debunk these hypotheses to ask oneself: do these bits of four-dimensional chess bear any resemblance to any previous act of Mr. Trump’s? Do they accord with anything we know about him? Or if you insist on seeing sophisticated geopolitical strategy where there is none: how is it “taking Venezuela off the board” if you leave the Maduro regime in power, sans only Mr. Maduro himself?
Certainly we can discount the idea that restoring democracy or freedom to Venezuela had anything to do with it: the Trump administration has been quite explicit about that, and if it were not, the abrupt dismissal of María Corina Machado, the Nobel Prize-winning leader of the democratic forces in Venezuela, left no room for doubt.
Neither is Mr. Maduro’s alleged role as a narco-terrorist of any serious import. There’s little doubt of his involvement in the trade. But almost none of it reaches the United States. Colombia supplies 84 per cent of U.S. cocaine; neither is Venezuela a significant source of fentanyl.
At any rate, just how seriously Mr. Trump takes official involvement in drug trafficking can be seen in his pardoning, barely a month ago, of the former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, for the same crime.
So it’s all about the oil? I don’t doubt this is top of mind for many in the Trump administration. Mr. Trump himself, in his cheerfully corrupt fashion, cites that as his primary motivation. That doesn’t mean it was, or that it would make any sense if it were. The U.S. is a net oil exporter. Prices are already falling. The last thing it needs is a massive new source of supply depressing prices further.
Not that that’s likely to happen any time soon. Venezuelan oil is of a peculiarly sludgy variety, expensive to drill and even more expensive to transport. Just to build the infrastructure needed to recover it in any large quantity is estimated to cost at least US$100-billion. And the regime’s history of corruption and arbitrary expropriations makes any substantial foreign investment vanishingly unlikely.
Rather than theorize about what animated Mr. Trump, I think we should rely on the testimony of those closest to him – what they tell us his motives were. These include: his irritation at seeing Mr. Maduro dancing in public; his pique that Ms. Machado was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, which he has openly coveted (if she had turned down the prize, according to a Trump confidant, “she’d be the president of Venezuela today”); his apparent endorsement of the belief that the Maduro regime was involved in rigging the 2020 presidential election against him.
To this add the advice he was no doubt given, that abducting Mr. Maduro would be easy, dramatic, and popular. Well, it was two of the three: Just 33 per cent of respondents told an Ipsos poll they approved of the operation, a day later. And that’s before the U.S. is plunged into the inevitable morass of “running” Venezuela, a subject to which Mr. Trump has evidently given zero thought.
Was there also a deal with Vladimir Putin, an exchange of “spheres of influence,” in which the U.S. leaves Ukraine to Russia, in return for Russian acquiescence in U.S. designs on Venezuela? Quite possibly – just so long as no one confuses this with statesmanship. Whatever may account for Mr. Trump’s desire to please Mr. Putin, Nixonian realpolitik is not it.
What unites Mr. Trump and his officials is a desire to dominate. But whereas the lunatics and fanatics around him appeal to various crackpot theories to justify their urges – bastardized Monroe Doctrines, phoney “pivots” to China, neo-pseudo-realism – with Mr. Trump the domination is sufficient motive in itself. The id is all there is.
Musings and Wonderings 