How Trump’s new National Security Strategy targets Canadian sovereignty

The National Security Strategy issued by the Trump administration last Friday isn’t merely a restatement of “America First” principles; it is a codified assertion of unilateral American power within the Western Hemisphere, carrying serious implications for Canada.

The strategic heart of this declaration lies in the commitment to “reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine” in the Western Hemisphere. Although the doctrine’s historical association is with Latin American stability and stemming unwanted migration, its “Trump Corollary” expands the scope to explicitly include preventing “non-Hemispheric competitors” from controlling “strategically vital assets” and, crucially, ensuring America’s “continued access to key strategic locations.”

To execute this mandate in the North American Arctic—an area of rapidly intensifying geopolitical and economic competition—the Trump administration is creating the national security justification to take another step towards formalizing Canada’s satrap status, this time by forcing a permanent change in the status of the Northwest Passage.

The report is full of “tells” that this is where an “America First” foreign policy is headed, and likely faster than we think. The most aggressive language is found in its operational directive demanding “establishing or expanding access in strategically important locations,” backed by the requirement for a “more suitable Coast Guard and Navy presence to control sea lanes… and to control key transit routes in a crisis.”

To state the obvious, the Northwest Passage, the sea lane connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans through the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, is the only major strategic transit route in the North American half of the hemisphere. For decades, the legal status of the Passage has been managed by a diplomatic compromise: the 1988 Arctic Cooperation Agreement, under which the United States agreed to seek the Canadian government’s consent before sending its icebreakers through the waterway.

The National Security Strategy’s mandate to actively establish or expand access serves notice that this consent-based arrangement is now deemed strategically incompatible with America’s hemispheric interests. To the point: Washington views the Passage as strategically vital to deterring Russia and China—powers already active and staking claims in the far North— and cannot afford, for reasons of deterrence and defence, a contingent capacity (i.e., Canadian permission) to secure the Arctic and the hemisphere.