America’s global leadership slide under Donald Trump has left an opening for the European Union, and an opportunity for Canada, writes Jeremy Kinsman/Shutterstock
September 8, 2025
I once heard a Chinese Ambassador to the European Union describe European unity as the sort of hugely transformative idea that, every few hundred years, changes the world’s calculus of power and influence.
So far, the postwar dream of economic and political union has indeed transformed Europe. The EU’s consolidated global economic weight positions it in the world’s exclusive top tier along with the U.S., China, and ascending India.
But in this moment of global re-alignment, the EU, after years of deferring to America’s position as the world’s democratic superpower, is struggling to make its weight felt beyond economics. Or, as Mario Draghi, former president of the European Central Bank, said recently, the EU needs to respond to the “very brutal wake-up call” from Donald Trump.
“Our political organization must adapt to the demands of its time when they are existential,” Draghi said in a speech to Italy’s annual Rimini Meeting.
The EU’s influence and standing on international security issues has long lagged, partly because 23 of 27 EU members are also NATO members, which triangulates the bloc’s security footprint, and partly because of America’s influence both within NATO and without.
Now, amid uncertainty as to America’s global role so acute as to have rationalized a massive defence spending increase by Western democracies coerced by an autocratic U.S. president, Europe is still finding its feet.
That includes the reanimation of an idea whose most serious recent-history iteration dates back to Balkans crisis of the 1990s: European self-defence.
While the Europeans still hope to keep the U.S. engaged in the defence of Europe, they are preparing, in the wake of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, to re-arm significantly in their own defence, per the Readiness 2030 defence initiative. There will not be a “European army,” per se, but leaders anticipate deployable joint military assets that can form inter-operable units in an exercise such as a possible post-armistice “reassurance force” in Ukraine.
As the U.S. withdraws from the leadership role it has filled since 1945, and from the rules-based world order it has shaped, the vacuum has left an opening for China, India, and to some extent Russia to fill. The natural successor to America’s democratic geopolitical leadership is the EU, and its natural ally is Canada.
Trump’s assault on the status quo of multilateral global trade hit the EU and Canada hard. The EU leadership accepted a far-from perfect “deal” in order to reclaim predictability, but now accepts that EU relations with an inward, nationalist and volatile America are in rupture.
As a consequence, Europe’s dance card of alliances needs an urgent refresh.
Canada, too, has taken the hard decision to move from reliance on the U.S. (now deemed dangerous over-reliance) to resilience and economic diversification and reconstruction.
The respective EU and Canadian shifts underscore Canada’s natural alliance with the EU on two themes — building on the foundation of our shared Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) to develop joint economic and infrastructure projects, and to align on world outlooks and specific security cooperation, in Ukraine and beyond.
There is a human factor involved. Trump’s assault on U.S. norms and democratic institutions has enhanced, by comparison, Canada’s favourable image in Europe as “the other North America.” And a Canada-specific, trans-Atlantic partnership has been made more viable as technology and mutual necessity have transcended geography.
Constructing a unified single Europe was never easy from the project’s beginning, despite the project’s majesty of ambition.
At university in Paris in the mid-60s, I was instantly converted to the grandeur of the aim to “end Europe’s murderous wars forever,” starting with confidence-building pooling of national sovereignty on economic cooperation.
But the dreamy, pan-national schema for an eventual EU had never been accepted by French President Charles De Gaulle. Consumed by une certaine idée de la France, De Gaulle revered the force of national identity, stopping the European project well short of a political confederation, and making sure that national parliaments retained the exclusive power to tax and spend by each member state.
The dichotomy and tension between the natural identity impulses of nationhood and commitment to pooling national sovereignty to deter nationalism still complicates the dynamics of the 27-member bloc of 450 million citizens.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Prime Minister Mark Carney, and European Council President António Costa at the 2025 Kananaskis G7/Costa X
Though the EU’s weight as an economic and trade superpower was never accompanied by influence on geopolitical and security affairs, the EU did acquire a single voice for human security, rights, and humanitarian commitment. Combined with America’s leadership on those issues, the weight of the two democratic behemoths bestriding two continents provided a pre-emptive counterweight to China’s global autocratic aspirations.
Brexit’s defection from the bloc in 2020 for reasons ostensibly of national sovereignty, diminished the UK more than it did the EU. Since then, progress in Brussels has become more straightforward without constant British exceptionalist objections, though UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has recently edged closer to the EU security family, co-chairing with French President Emmanuel Macron the “Coalition of the Willing” process for obtaining security guarantees for Ukraine.
But as a bloc that began based on the unifying power of economic self-interest, the EU’s current anemic economic performance in growth and productivity has been a poor advertisement for strength in numbers.
As compared with the early postwar decades of growth dubbed les trente glorieuses, the EU has grown in the last 10 years at half the U.S. pace. German GDP is up only 1% since 2017. While safety nets have largely protected the European social model, country after country in the EU has come pressure from right-wing populist movements, fuelled by anti-immigration sentiment that surged in response to recent waves of refugees.
On August 31, 2015, at the height of the European migrant crisis, Chancellor Angela Merkel famously declared what became the unofficial slogan of German Willkommenskultur: “Wir schaffen das,” (“We can handle this”). Germany did — two thirds of 2015’s one million asylum seekers are today gainfully employed and integrated. Initially, Germans identified with Merkel’s “generous and humane” impulses. But in time, a confluence of forces —jihadist terrorism, the slowing of the economy, and reflexive hostility to the impression of top-down bureaucratic governance from Brussels — prompted the rise of populist right-wing movements, in Germany, France and elsewhere.
The backlash against the propaganda generated by those movements has enabled the Trump administration to portray Europe as a fallen human rights champion — a development as ironic as it is hypocritical given events unfolding in the United States.
A decade later, after a few months of embarrassing deference toward Trump by individual European leaders in the manner of crisis negotiators placating an armed madman, the damage of collective exposure to Trump’s tariff chaos was compounded by the collective security implications of his breathtaking bias toward Vladimir Putin. The absurdity of the Alaska summit has concentrated the energies of a new coalition of like-minded democracies, including Canada, Australia, Japan and others.
Of course, no country is more vulnerable from over-dependence on the U.S. than Canada. The insult and threat of the U.S. President’s repeated musing about “annexing” Canada that propelled Mark Carney into national leadership, can’t be laughed off (the failing Trudeau government tried).
That it has sparked a renewed Canada-Europe rapprochement is neither surprising nor without foundation in recent history.
When I arrived in Brussels as Canada’s EU ambassador in 2002, Prime Minister Jean Chretien, having earlier opposed NAFTA, still aspired to the sense of balance that a separate trade accord with Europe could provide and made its pursuit a central objective of my mandate.
By then, the EU was well-advanced in international advocacy and action in support of the same human rights, international security, and climate policy thrusts as Canada. EU Commission President Romano Prodi designated Canada as one of the EU’s six strategic partners (with the U.S., China, Russia, Japan, and India). In time, our political relationship had leapfrogged over trade.
But negotiating a Canada-EU free trade agreement was seen as unseemly when the failing World Trade Organization (WTO) Doha Round seemed immutably stalled. Astute EU Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy counter-proposed a more ambitious “21st century” Canada-EU economic cooperation agreement, beyond trade.
CETA has boosted significant growth in economic activity, encouraging interest in the possibility of consequential projects in infrastructure and energy. Our economic relationship with the U.S. and access to the U.S. market must remain primary national interests despite Trump’s wish to attenuate both. But the U.S. relationship is now risky and unreliable, unless CUSMA renewal negotiations in 2026 prove otherwise. Productive diversification is a Canadian imperative.
Prime Minister Carney knows our EU partnership is not about talking and declaring but about doing. Capital projects take time, but urgency is driving cooperation with Europe on LNG access (requiring Canadian infrastructure), submarine construction, real engagement with Nordic and Baltic countries on Arctic security and development and hopefully, abundant partnership across key industries.
Geopolitically, a closer Canada-EU partnership of values can drive a wider like-minded campaign to rally concerned countries to the committed retention of reformed international institutions and rules of conduct.
The recent meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Council in Beijing advertised the alternative to the longstanding U.S.-led, liberal international order represented by an autocratic China, an increasingly illiberal India, a rogue-state Russia, and a totalitarian North Korea.
A revived EU, joined by like-minded partners including Canada, among others, and extending to the Global South, can fill the leadership space vacated by the U.S. to project our shared stake in peace, order, and humanity.
That, along with the reborn dream of an end to war in Europe, is a cause European citizens could get behind, partnering with what Mark Carney has called the “most European of non-European nations.”
Policy Contributing Writer Jeremy Kinsman served as Canada’s ambassador to Russia, high commissioner to the UK, ambassador to Italy and ambassador to the European Union. He also served as minister at the Canadian embassy in Washington. He is a Distinguished Fellow of the Canadian International Council.