The Divorce We Didn’t Seek
And the New Marriage That Might Finally Bring Us Happiness
Preface: How My Thinking Has Evolved
When I first wrote about NATO in June, I thought the core issue was structural drift. NATO looked tired. Article 5 felt like a trapdoor. Europe and America were no longer aligned. I argued that we needed more strategic autonomy. A simple recalibration. A grown-up version of “we need to see other people.”
But the world kept moving, and so did my thinking. It is not that NATO is broken. It is that the assumptions beneath it no longer match the century we are living in. The Soviet Union is gone. America is no longer the stabilising adult it briefly pretended to be. Europe needs partners who do not demand obedience. And Canada cannot tie its fate to a neighbour that oscillates between nostalgia and impulse.
Canada’s procurement choices reflect this shift. We are buying air defence radar from Australia, submarines from South Korea, and fighters from Sweden. These are not random purchases. They are signals. They show Canada aligning with a wider democratic ecosystem, not simply orbiting a single hegemonic supplier.
NATO was the question in June. The rules-based world is the question now. The issue is no longer whether Canada should step back from automatic obligations. It is whether Canada should help build something new, broader than NATO, more credible than the American century, and more durable than the architecture of 1945.
The essay below is the result of that evolution. It argues for a bloc of peers that can uphold a rules-based order without relying on the whims of giants. A bloc where rules are followed, consequences are real, and no member has a veto over justice. A bloc for the world's adult nations.
America’s Illusions and Canada’s Awakening
Canada sits beside a superpower that no longer behaves like a steward of global order. The United States spent a short period acting as the world’s stabiliser. That period is over. What remains is the historical America: force over restraint, leverage over partnership, mythology over responsibility. We cannot base our national future on a neighbour that treats alliances as transactions and rules as optional.
And we cannot keep pretending this is all about Trump.
For most of its history, America acted with a narrow, self-interested logic. It expanded across a continent through conquest. It protected markets that suited its interests and undermined those that did not. Even its entry into global affairs was guided more by opportunity than ideals. The Second World War is remembered as the moment America stepped forward to save the free world. The fuller record is more complicated.
In the years leading up to Lend-Lease, Washington used financial pressure to push Britain toward exhaustion. It forced London to sell assets at distressed prices, drained its reserves, and dismantled the economic scaffolding that had sustained British influence for a century. By the war’s end, Britain had lost nearly ninety percent of its overseas wealth. America did not defeat the British Empire with armies. It defeated it with terms.
Washington also stood aside as France collapsed. The French never forgot. They never again trusted that America would reliably honour Article 5 when the cost was high. This is why de Gaulle withdrew France from NATO’s integrated command in 1966 and maintained an independent strategic posture for decades. Britain, by contrast, placed its faith in American leadership and learned slowly that the price of that trust was the erosion of its own power. Special relationship indeed.
After the war, America inherited responsibilities it had not sought but could not avoid. With Britain weakened and Europe in ruins, the United States rebuilt Western Europe, shaped new institutions, and presented itself as the defender of freedom. But even this moral era was conditional. It required the Soviet Union. It required a clear enemy. It required external pressure to discipline American behaviour. When the pressure disappeared, the discipline did as well.
Trump did not break America’s postwar identity. He revealed its temporary nature. He belittled allies, dismissed commitments, and treated institutions as pay-to-play clubs. He embraced any strongman willing to flatter him. Trump did not create transactional America. He exposed it.
Canada now faces a United States that will remain powerful but no longer reliably responsible. Its domestic politics are volatile. Its foreign policy swings between impulse and nostalgia. The stabilising America we grew up beside is gone.
And the uncomfortable truth is this: the other giants are worse.
China is driven by a cultivated sense of historical grievance. It is a grievance engine that converts insecurity into ambition. It sees rules as conveniences, not commitments. And it is a single-party state that fears its own population and manages that fear by externalising anger toward convenient enemies.
Russia is a thugocracy. It destabilises neighbours, weaponises vulnerabilities, and treats violence as a primary instrument of statecraft. It does not build order. It exports disorder.
The world is sorting itself into three temperaments: grievance, force, and impulse. China embodies grievance. Russia embodies force. America has drifted toward impulse.
Canada must choose law.
The Case for a New Bloc of Democracies
The strategic question for Canada is not whether America will recover its postwar identity. It will not. The question is who remains capable of upholding a rules-based order.
That list is shorter than we pretend.
The European Union stands at the centre. It is the only political entity of scale that still treats law and institutional constraint as architecture, not decoration. Japan, South Korea, and Australia share this instinct. South Africa remains anchored in constitutional norms. Chile and Uruguay show that democratic reliability is not restricted to the North Atlantic.
These countries do not yet form a bloc. But they could. And they should. None can shape the century alone, yet each believes that prosperity requires stability and stability requires rules that restrain both the strong and the weak.
The economic weight of such a bloc would be enormous. Together, the EU, Japan, South Korea, Australia, the UK, Canada, Chile, Uruguay, and South Africa represent a combined GDP of roughly 27 trillion dollars. That is larger than the United States at 25 trillion and significantly larger than China at 18 trillion. They already produce much of the world’s advanced technology, scientific research, and high-value manufacturing.
The military strength is just as striking. Europe alone spends about 350 billion dollars annually on defence. Add Japan, South Korea, Australia, and the UK, and total spending rises above 500 billion a year, nearly half of all democratic military expenditure, even without the United States.
And then there is Canada and Australia. Two vast, resource-rich territories far from immediate conflict zones. Hard to bomb. Hard to blockade. Perfect rear bases for minerals, energy, industrial capacity, and the high-tech components modern defence systems require. They are not simply contributors. They are strategic insurance policies.
The Countries That Would Join This Bloc First
If this bloc existed, its gravitational pull would be immediate. Not because countries want to sign up for someone else’s ideology, but because they are tired of surviving between giants with no place of their own to stand.
Vietnam: The Front Line State That Wants Stability, Not Masters
Vietnam lives with the memory of domination on both sides. China invaded it more times than history bothers to count. America devastated it in a war Vietnam never wanted. Today, it trades with China, relies on America for security, and trusts neither.
Vietnam does not want a patron. It wants a framework. Something predictable. Something it can bet its future on without becoming an appendage of Beijing or a forward operating base for Washington. A rules-based bloc gives Vietnam what it has never had: a partner that is neither imperial nor impulsive.
Brazil: The Giant That Cannot See Itself
Brazil is one of the world’s great powers in waiting. A continent-sized economy. A population of 215 million. A cultural and economic gravitational field across South America. And yet Brazil behaves like a mid-sized state because it has never been invited into a structure where its scale is acknowledged and its sovereignty respected.
It does not want to choose between America and China. It wants room to grow. It wants fair trade, not extraction. It wants influence proportional to its size. A rules-based bloc would be the first institution in modern history to treat Brazil as what it truly is: a democratic giant that has never been given a home.
India: The Power That Could Anchor the Bloc… If It Ever Chose To
India is the most complex of all. It is the only non-authoritarian power with the population, geography, industry, and civilizational depth to counterbalance China. It could be one of the central pillars of the democratic world. But India does not trust China. It does not trust Pakistan. And it does not want to be a junior partner to America.
India wants to lead, but cannot.
India wants autonomy, but cannot sustain it alone.
India wants alignment but refuses subordination.
A rules-based bloc would give India something the current system denies: a way to shape the international order without surrendering sovereignty to any single giant.
The Broader Tier of Fast Followers
Behind these three stand dozens more:
Indonesia, the sleeping pivot of Southeast Asia
Mexico is too integrated with the U.S. to detach but too large to be passive
Kenya and Ghana, anchors of African democratic optimism
The Philippines, trapped between treaty obligations and Chinese coercion
Colombia and Peru, reforming their way toward stability
Even Turkey, once given a place in the democratic world, has now been left to drift
These countries are not small. They are simply unclaimed.
Today, they walk tightropes between grievance, force, and impulse because there is no bloc of law to join. A functioning rules-based alliance would change their futures overnight. It would give them leverage, stability, negotiating power, and a strategic home that does not require them to kneel to any of the giants.
A bloc like this would not need to recruit.
It would need to manage the line at the door.
A functioning democratic alliance would change that. It would grow quickly, not through coercion but through attraction.
Stability attracts.
Predictability attracts.
Rules attract.
The Future Canada Should Help Build
This is the future worth pursuing. A bloc of peers. A community where no member holds a veto that denies justice. A bloc where rules are followed, and consequences are real. A place for the adult nations of the world to write humanity’s next chapter, instead of drifting into a new cold war among three blocs dreaming of imperial futures.
Canada has a choice.
Not between East and West.
But between past and future.
This is the future Canada should help build.