Canada has threatened U.S. trade partnership with China EV deal, deepening division, says Oren Cass

The Trump administration’s aggressive renegotiation of North American trade relationships has exposed fundamental disagreements within the conservative movement about whether the U.S. should function as a global empire or retreat on the world stage, according to a leading voice in the American right’s intellectual realignment. Oren Cass, founder of American Compass and a prominent architect of the “New Right” economic agenda, argues that the contrasting responses from Mexico and Canada to U.S. trade demands reflect broader questions about America’s role in the world, questions that are reshaping conservative politics and policy. The Hub, in partnership with the New North America Initiative at the School of Public Policy at the University of Calgary, spoke with Cass to better understand how these debates are influencing U.S. trade policy, and ultimately what they mean for Canada. Here are five key takeaways from the conversation: Mexico embraces realism while Canada pushes back The contrasting approaches from America’s two Canada-United States-Mexico partners reflects deeper philosophical differences about the post-Cold War order, according to Cass. Mexico quickly aligned itself with U.S. priorities, which led to Chinese investment projects like BYD’s planned manufacturing facility being canceled. “Mexico has been quite distinctive in how open to that reality it has been in acknowledging, ‘Yes, we don’t have to like it, but it makes sense and we should move forward on that basis,’” Cass said. “I would say Canada has been at the other extreme [of accepting the new reality], pretty much of all the countries the U.S. has been engaged with.” This divergence has consequences at the negotiating table. “From a negotiating perspective, it starts to become a case where it seems like the tenor of those two negotiations might be somewhat different.” Three demands, not just tariffs Cass outlined three interconnected demands from President Trump: military burden-sharing within alliances like NATO, “balancing” trade relationships, and aligning on excluding China from critical supply chains. The China dimension is particularly critical, according to Cass. “You can’t actually build a functioning balanced trading system if some countries, let’s say United States, decide, well, obviously China has to be out, and other countries, let’s say Canada, decide, well, we still want to do a lot of trade with China,” he argued, noting concerns about transshipment and competitive disadvantages for U.S. companies. Canada’s trade partnership with China threatens North American integration Mark Carney’s diplomatic outreach to Beijing and suggestions of opening Canada to more Chinese electric vehicles represent fundamental obstacles to the kind of North American partnership the U.S. envisions, according to Cass. “Those are sort of deal breakers for the United States if we are actually going to have the kind of trading system in North America that I think would be most beneficial to all three countries,” he said. The issue extends beyond simple trade flows. Cass argued that allowing Chinese production into North American supply chains undermines security cooperation and creates competitive imbalances. Generational change is reshaping  conservative economics The intellectual foundation for Trump’s trade policy reflects a broader generational shift within American conservatism. Cass described how conservatives under 40 have no memory of the Cold War consensus that united free-market economics with anti-communism. “If you’re 40 or younger, you don’t remember the Cold War, you don’t remember Ronald Reagan, you don’t remember the Berlin Wall falling,” he explained. “And so the entire ideology and orthodoxy that was built around that is interesting to learn about, but you certainly have no fealty to it.” This younger cohort grew up witnessing a series of failures at the hands of  the old political order. “The set of issues in America that [they] grew up with were…all of the ways that American overreach and empire and globalization did not work,” Cass explained. The result is a conservative movement far more skeptical of free-market fundamentalism and more willing to embrace industrial policy, trade restrictions, and worker power. Should America look inwardly or outwardly? A key intellectual tension within the New Right centres on whether the U.S. should function as an empire or return to republican principles. Cass positioned himself firmly in the latter camp, advocating for what he calls a “grand strategy of reciprocity.” “So much of [America’s] power was as a republic and its refusal to become so entangled elsewhere,” he said. This approach, he said, emphasizes balanced burden-sharing and mutual benefit rather than American dominance. However, Cass acknowledged a competing vision within the Trump administration. “And I think in the Trump administration’s actions, especially over the past few months and with the so-called Monroe Doctrine, [you see] an impulse toward: ‘No, no, we do want the U.S. to be an empire. We just don’t want it to be such a benevolent one.’” This tension reveals itself in the Trump administration’s aggressive approach to Canada, Venezuela, Greenland, and the Panama Canal. While Cass described the president as a “transitional figure” whose administration doesn’t represent “the finished version of what comes next,” the underlying shift in conservative thinking appears durable. The political realignment is already visible in election results, with working-class and multi-ethnic voters moving toward Republicans as the party adopts more economically populist positions. For Canada, the current tensions may persist regardless of who occupies the White House, as a new generation of conservative policymakers embraces a remarkably different vision of America’s role in the world. This story draws on a Hub video. It was edited using NewsBox AI. Full program here.