This article originally appeared in the Wall Street Journal. An excerpt of the article appears below.
By Brian Lee Crowley, March 20, 2026
President Trump this week complained that America’s allies hadn’t stepped up to help break the Iranian blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. “Some are very enthusiastic about it, and some aren’t,” he said on Monday. “Some are countries that we’ve helped for many, many years. We’ve protected them from horrible outside sources, and they weren’t that enthusiastic. And the level of enthusiasm matters to me.”
Some U.S. allies—including my country, Canada—have enthusiastically antagonized Mr. Trump’s America. In last April’s Canadian federal election, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s rallying cry was “Elbows Up, Canada”—a hockey term that means an aggressive style of play. That resonated with voters, who handed Mr. Carney’s Liberals a victory in a contest they had long been expected to lose.
To understand how Mr. Trump is reshaping Western alliances and why the Canadian attitude is a mistake, it’s worth stepping back and looking at the broader historical context. We are in the twilight of the postwar era, which began with the world divided into two camps—the democratic, freedom-loving West and the Soviet bloc, which sought to expand by subversion and intimidation.
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