In 2018, the year I left my reporting post in China for the US, the Chinese security services kidnapped two Canadian citizens from the streets of Beijing and Dandong. Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor were interrogated and held in gruelling conditions for the next two-and-a-half years in a naked act of retribution for Canada’s detention of the Huawei heiress Meng Wanzhou, who was arrested in Vancouver at the request of the US. Kovrig’s partner gave birth while he was in solitary confinement. He met his daughter for the first time when she was two.
Canada can thus have no illusions about the nature of Xi Jinping’s approach to power. As well as detaining the two Michaels, Beijing also cut off imports of major Canadian agricultural goods in an attempt to pressure Ottawa into releasing Meng. (She was released, along with Kovrig and Spavor, in 2021.) The prime minister at the time, Justin Trudeau, accused China of trying to interfere in Canadian elections in 2019 and 2021. Last year, despite protests from Trudeau, China executed four Canadians for alleged drug crimes.
China is not a benign actor. Far from the “staunch force for stability” its diplomats like to present, China is a one-party state whose growth depends on an aggressively mercantilist strategy and whose dictatorial leader has no problem weaponising his country’s trading relationships and critical role in global supply chains to get what he wants. Yet still, Canada’s current prime minister, Mark Carney, has decided China is a “more predictable” partner than the US.
The timing of Carney’s recent visit to Beijing – the first such visit in almost a decade – offered a remarkable, split-screen illustration of the seismic geopolitical shifts now reordering the world. On one side there was Donald Trump threatening to seize Greenland, prompting Denmark and seven European allies to rush troops to the island, which in turn led Trump to threaten economic retaliation against his supposed allies. On the other, there was Carney, smiling and shaking hands with Xi as they announced a “new strategic partnership” that will include Canada cutting its tariffs on imports of Chinese electric vehicles and China reducing its tariffs on Canadian canola products. More significant were Carney’s remarks in Beijing, where he told Chinese officials they were working within a “new world order”, explaining to reporters afterwards: “We take the world as it is, not as we wish it to be.”
Carney’s pragmatism and clear-eyed appraisal of the growing threat to his country from the US has attracted praise. In October, when European leaders were still clinging to the hope that Trump’s repeatedly stated desire to take control of Greenland and antipathy towards Ukraine was just bluster, Carney delivered a prescient speech on the need to diversify Canada’s economy away from dependence on its closest ally. The “decades-long process of an ever-closer relationship between the Canadian and US economies is now over,” he said on 22 October. Canada’s relationship with the US, he concluded, “will never be the same”.
Europe now finds itself grappling, belatedly, with the same conclusion. How can the relationship with Washington ever be the same when the US is actively threatening to seize European territory and using economic blackmail against fellow Nato members who have the temerity to intervene? Yet predictably, even as EU officials are said to be drawing up options for retaliatory tariffs on US imports worth around £80bn, there are familiar paeans to the importance of the transatlantic relationship, and calls to negotiate. “I think that this can be resolved, and should be resolved, through calm discussion,” Keir Starmer insisted on 19 January.
I have bad news for the Prime Minister. To paraphrase Leon Trotsky: Europe might not be interested in a war, economic or otherwise, with the US, but Trump has already embarked on a campaign against Europe. JD Vance delivered the first blow at the Munich Security Conference last year, when he warned that Europe’s greatest threat came not from Russia or China but “from within”. The US National Security Strategy unveiled in December (which contains not a single mention of the Arctic) claimed that Europe was facing the prospect of “civilisational erasure” due to immigration and vowed to cultivate “resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations”. The crisis for Europe is here – and it goes far beyond Trump’s ambitions in Greenland.
Europe’s lesson from the Carney model of international relations is not that China offers an enticing alternative to the US. As the Canadian prime minister understands, the Chinese party-state will absolutely kidnap your citizens, attempt to interfere in your elections and exploit trade imbalances for coercive ends. The fact that Xi is not actively threatening to annex European territory might distinguish him from Trump, but that only makes him a more predictable belligerent. Buyer beware. It is important to remember that China is also perpetuating Russia’s war on Ukraine by providing technology and economic support.
Europe is caught in an authoritarian pincer movement between Russia – backed by China on one side – and its own closest ally across the Atlantic. The real lesson to take from Carney is that it is time to acknowledge the world “as it is” and to reckon with what the US under Trump has become.
[Further reading: The special relationship is dead]
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This article appears in the 21 Jan 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Europe is back
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