This article originally appeared in National Review. An excerpt of the article appears below.
By Stephen Nagy, April 13, 2026
There is a comfortable orthodoxy settling over editorial boards, university seminars, and policy conferences from Ottawa to Brussels. It goes something like this: Donald Trump broke the international order, the United States is an unreliable partner, and the remedy is diversification — toward China, toward the BRICS bloc of emerging economies (including players like Brazil, Russia, and India), toward anyone who is not Washington. This narrative is not merely incomplete, it is dangerously wrong, and the countries indulging in it are squandering what little time they have to prepare for a world that is about to change in ways that have nothing to do with who occupies the Oval Office.
Let’s begin with the diversification fantasy. Canada in particular has spent considerable political energy signaling that it can meaningfully reduce its economic dependence on the United States. The arithmetic tells a different story. Roughly 75 percent of Canadian exports flow south. The infrastructure — pipelines, rail corridors, and supply chains — is integrated on a north-south axis that took the better part of a century to build. As Michael Hart has argued, the Canadian-American economic relationship is not a policy choice; it is a geographic and structural reality. Talking about diversification may win applause at Davos panels, but it does not build liquified natural gas (LNG) terminals, nor conjure new consumer markets out of thin air.
The second delusion is that China represents a viable alternative anchor for liberal democracies. But Beijing’s long-term strategy is now well-documented. The Belt and Road Initiative, the Global Development Initiative, the Global Security Initiative, the Global Civilization Initiative, and the expanding architecture of BRICS are not charitable enterprises. They are institutional instruments designed to construct a parallel international order — one in which sovereignty is defined as regime security, human rights are culturally relative, and the rule of law is subordinate to the rule of party. Elizabeth Economy has argued persuasively that Xi Jinping’s China is not joining the existing order; it’s seeking to revise it from within and, where necessary, replace it from without. Canada, the European Union, and the broader constellation of democracies benefit enormously from the institutional architecture that emerged after 1945 — open trade adjudication, treaty-based security, and freedom of navigation. To flirt with Beijing as a counterweight to Washington is to saw off the branch on which one is sitting.
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Stephen R. Nagy is a professor at the International Christian University, a senior fellow and China project lead at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and a visiting fellow at the Japan Institute for International Affairs.
