Cauldron of Chaos
How America’s implosion of focus is reshaping Canada’s trade, politics, and priorities.
The Empire’s Distraction
I was listening to the latest episode of Beyond a Ballot — “Put Your Aces in Their Places” — when a few phrases stopped me cold.
David Cochrane, the longtime CBC journalist and host of Power and Politics, was describing what he’s been seeing from his vantage point in Ottawa — and from repeated visits to Washington. His analysis wasn’t sensational or speculative; it was weary, grounded, and deeply unsettling.
At one point he said, “There’s a cauldron of chaos all the time in the U.S.”
It was such a simple image, but it instantly captured what I’ve been struggling to articulate about the moment we’re in. The United States — our largest trading partner, our neighbour, our barometer for stability — has become a boiling pot of contradictions. The heat never turns off, and the froth on the surface keeps us mesmerized.
Cochrane also used another image, one that landed just as hard: the snow globe.
He described how each Oval Office photo-op and every tariff announcement shakes up the scene — glittering chaos for the cameras — and then everything settles back exactly as it was. That, too, feels right. The 24-hour news churn keeps us swirling in that snow globe, mistaking motion for meaning.
It’s a bit like watching a reality show that refuses to end — the same cast, slightly worse lighting, and higher global stakes.
But while we’re transfixed by the glitter, something heavier is shifting underneath. The United States is being rebuilt — brick by brick, tariff by tariff — into something fundamentally different. The idea of a “normal” reset in 2028 is wishful thinking.
Change doesn’t happen in reverse; it reinvents itself. It’s like fashion — we get nostalgia comebacks, but they’re never true returns. The ‘50s revival doesn’t bring back the 1950s; it just borrows the shapes and fabrics and remakes them with modern seams. A new generation’s version of old ideas. Any future attempt to resurrect America’s generational soft power and moral authority will be the same — a reproduction, not a restoration. A shadow of what it once was, stitched together from new materials, serving a different era’s purposes. Those days are gone.
And Canada needs to understand that truth quickly. Trump will eventually be gone, but the system he’s reshaped will not. The next administration, of any stripe, will take what advantages it can from what he built. Soft power — the kind that once defined America’s partnerships and ours — takes generations to rebuild once it’s broken, and make no mistake, it has been badly eroded.
We’re watching a new United States under construction, and pretending otherwise is how countries lose focus — or worse, sovereignty.
Listening to that conversation, what struck me most was how normal the chaos has begun to feel. The endless churn of headlines has dulled our sense of proportion. A tariff doubles here, a pipeline resurrects there, a friendly Oval Office photo-op follows — and then another rupture. We react, we scroll, we move on. But the pattern isn’t random; it’s directional. The United States is deliberately redefining what power looks like, and Canada is still reacting as though we’re dealing with the same partner we’ve always known. That’s the real danger — mistaking a transformation for a phase. This is no phase.
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The Boiling Point — From Partners to Prey
What once functioned as the most successful economic partnership in modern history — $3 billion in trade daily — is being redefined as a zero-sum contest.
Trump’s presidency didn’t create that shift; it revealed it. He made explicit what had been implicit for years: that Washington no longer sees allies as partners, but as competitors or clients.
The Canada–U.S. relationship that began with Auto Pact in the 1960s was built on mutual advantage and stability. That model has now collapsed. What’s emerging in its place is extractive — a continental power dynamic where Canada’s resources, industries, and even provinces can be picked off one by one.
It’s a strategy as old as empire itself: divide and absorb. If Washington can lure factories and corporate headquarters across the border with tax breaks and tariff shields, why not lure disillusioned provinces too? The notion of a “51st state” used to sound like political theatre; now it’s an outcome we could stumble into through our own fragmentation.
Canada cannot afford to carve itself up for American benefit. Every region that trades national cohesion for short-term advantage feeds the very playbook that seeks to weaken us.
It may look different here — quieter, more polite, less theatrical — but the effect is the same. Our own infighting and self-interest plays are becoming a slow-motion version of the American chaos we claim to deplore. While the U.S. burns through its institutions in real time, we risk eroding ours through apathy, cynicism, and provincial turf wars.
Canada is fighting for her life — not in a cinematic sense, but in the day-to-day struggle to hold her pieces together while the ground shifts beneath our feet. We can get with the program and show a united front, or we can keep squabbling over jurisdiction, pipelines, and political points until we’re blown clean out of the park — ball and all.
Sectoral Scars — When Tariffs Bleed into Towns
The pain of tariffs is measurable — steel and auto “bleeding out,” as Cochrane put it — but the deeper damage is philosophical. The post-war principle of shared growth has been replaced with something meaner: every nation for itself.
In Sault Ste. Marie, 60 percent of Algoma’s output goes straight to the U.S. market. If that link breaks, the city becomes a northern rust-belt ghost. We’ve seen this before: the collapse of Newfoundland’s fishery in the 1990s, prairie wheat pools absorbed by global giants, the hollowing out of Ontario’s manufacturing base. The industry changes; the consequences don’t.
By early next year, Cochrane warned, the temporary buffers — stockpiles, contracts, goodwill — will run out. Both sides of the border will feel the scarring. But the U.S. will still control the knife. The longer the pain drags on, the more leverage Washington gains in the next round of trade talks.
For Canada, this is the new calculus: we can’t win by waiting for fairness to return. We have to adapt to a neighbour who no longer values parity.
Snow Globes and Photo Ops
Every Oval Office meeting now unfolds like a scene from tawdry political theatre — all overdone gold trim, flattery on cue, and scripted warmth that dissolves the moment the cameras are packed away.
Some days it feels less like diplomacy and more like a long-running improv act where the world economy plays the straight man.
Smiles and superficial cordiality have become the measure of success, defined less by progress than by relief that an ill-considered word or glance didn’t send the photo-op spiralling into full meltdown.
As David Cochrane put it, these encounters are less diplomacy than “friendly sprays” — a ceremonial misting of optimism that hides how little has actually changed. The snow globe gets shaken, sparkles briefly, and settles right back into the same uneasy pattern.
The Real Danger — Fragmented Attention
“We’re talking about the Epstein files while the state is imploding.”
Cochrane’s offhand remark cuts straight to the heart of it: distraction is the defining feature of American politics today. The empire’s attention span has collapsed, and with it, its sense of proportion. Outrage drives the clicks, algorithms feed the outrage, and governance gets buried beneath the noise.
The chaos isn’t accidental — it’s functional. A distracted electorate is an easily managed one, and America’s political machine has learned to monetize that distraction. The danger for Canadians is that we start doing the same — chasing every shiny outrage instead of building long-term strategy.
Empires don’t fall from invasion; they corrode from within, when gossip overtakes governance and spectacle replaces statecraft. The snow globe spins; the cauldron bubbles. But the work that matters — stabilizing, planning, building — can only happen once the cameras move on.
Canada’s Tightrope — Do No Harm
Cochrane called it a “Hippocratic Oath” strategy: do no harm. It’s not passivity; it’s discipline. In a world where provocation is policy, restraint is strength.
Refusing a White House invitation would be self-inflicted damage. So Ottawa keeps showing up, shaking hands, and trying to buy time — for markets to calm, for allies to regroup, for voters to realize that the crisis next door isn’t a passing storm but a permanent climate.
At home, though, the risk is internal. Premiers spar over pipelines and tariffs, Western alienation simmers, and populist frustration grows. Canada’s greatest vulnerability isn’t that the U.S. wants to break us apart — it’s that we might do the job ourselves through impatience and short-term politics.
The New Imperatives of Power
The imperatives of this era are not the same as those that built the old trade order. The United States is no longer a confident creditor nation exporting prosperity; it’s a debtor empire managing decline. Tariffs now serve a double purpose — economic leverage abroad and quiet revenue at home. They’re a consumption tax by another name, one that lets Washington raise funds without ever admitting to Americans that they’re being taxed.
It would be naive to assume any future administration will simply drop those tariffs once the political theatre ends. As long as tariff revenue helps pay the interest on an astronomical national debt, protectionism will masquerade as patriotism.
Washington insists it “needs nothing from Canada.” The truth is the opposite. The United States now needs what it once took for granted: clean water, energy stability, and northern access. Canada holds 20 percent of the world’s fresh water — 85 percent of North America’s. As the Great White North melts, the Northwest Passage is transforming from myth to maritime reality, and its control carries enormous geopolitical weight.
To the south, America’s own aquifers are shrinking and its climate volatility is rising. To the north lies a neighbour with the minerals that will power the post-oil economy — lithium, nickel, cobalt, graphite — and the shipping corridor that could cut weeks off global routes.
The uncomfortable truth is that the U.S. needs Canada more than it ever has, and it is behaving like a nation that knows it. Expansionism doesn’t always announce itself with armies; sometimes it comes dressed in trade talks, corporate acquisitions, and “continental integration.” The next phase of North American politics will not be about friendship. It will be about leverage.
The Hammer at Home
The warning signs aren’t limited to how the U.S. treats its trading partners. Look at how this administration treats its own member states. Governors and legislatures that deviate from the federal line are met with punishment, withheld funding, and public humiliation. Washington has become a capital that governs by hammer — not handshake.
Do we really think a president who bullies his own governors will respect Canada’s sovereign autonomy any better?
Every strong-arm gesture within the United States foreshadows how it will behave abroad: flexed arms, transactional deals, and the unspoken assumption that might equals right.
And we’re already seeing it. The “right is might” posture that dominates U.S. domestic politics has spilled over the border — in tariff threats, energy ultimatums, and public scolding of Canadian policy. The tone isn’t negotiation; it’s enforcement. For Canada, that means the old diplomatic comfort zone — the polite fiction that “friends can disagree” — no longer applies. When power is exercised through threat and spectacle, respect becomes conditional and sovereignty negotiable. We must assume the same tactics tested on American states will, sooner or later, be used on us.
The Cauldron, the Clock, and Keeping Our Eye on the Ball
The cauldron will keep bubbling; the snow globe will keep swirling. The test for Canada is whether we can keep our eyes on the ball.
What’s taking shape south of the border isn’t a detour. It’s a rebuild — a new America that prizes dominance over partnership, and chaos over cooperation. Waiting for a “reset” is like waiting for yesterday’s weather to come back.
We can dress for the forecast, but we’re not getting spring in February — no matter how many pundits promise a chinook.
So what does “keeping our eyes on the ball” actually mean? It means refusing to get lost in the play-by-play.
Turn down the volume on the sports-style coverage of every tariff tweet and Oval Office tantrum. Focus instead on what Canada can control: building capacity, backing evidence-based policy, and investing in industries that can withstand American mood swings.
It means resisting the dopamine hit of outrage and choosing endurance over reaction. It means reading beyond the headlines, supporting media that verify instead of amplify, and calling out political theatre when we see it — at home or abroad.
Because the game isn’t about the next inning; it’s about whether there’s still a field to play on. And if we lose sight of that, we’ll find ourselves spectators to our own decline.
Our job is to stop watching the pot and start minding our own fire — our industries, our unity, our sovereignty.
History doesn’t move backward, and when empires stop paying attention, it’s always the neighbours who pay the price first.
This article first appeared on Between the Lines, where it is published as the canonical version.
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My read is that we do not "go blithely into the night".
Rather we seem to be responding in two ways each of which enable the other.
Our government on the one hand seems to be reacting as you outline but, we only see shadows of what is happening out of the public eye. Economic and defense coalitions are being pursued and developed.
Responses by individuals has enabled the government to cancel counter-tariffs. It has become a cultural imperative to avoid US products when shopping and tourism from Canada to the US has fallen dramatically.
Yes some provinces (ALBERTA) have decided that the currying of favour is the way to go but that's mostly a political response to placate their populist supporters. I suspect they are going to be surprised by how little of the populace agrees with that sentiment.
Excellent outline of current events, and fair warning to all Canadians who think the grass is greener down south…