On Wednesday morning in Strasbourg, Ursula von der Leyen looked at the plenary chamber of the European Parliament and offered Canada something that does not exist in the European treaties. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney was sitting in the hall - the first foreign head of government ever invited to a State of the Union address. MEPs rose to their feet. The two leaders hugged. And then the President of the European Commission said he wanted to “open the door for Canada to become the first associate member of the EU“.
The proposal is not a treaty. It has no specific rights, no budget line, no voting formula, no ratification procedure. Just days earlier, Carney had said that Canada did not seek EU membership, but only a “unique alliance“. The new Canadian ambassador to Brussels, Jonathan Wilkinson, was quick to soften the wording: Ottawa wants results, not a new category. What von der Leyen proposed was a political signal. In an “openly hostile world“, she said, Europe and Canada must “urgently rethink“ their partnerships and move from the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement to an “Alliance for the Future“ - manufacturing, defense, the Arctic, critical raw materials, batteries, artificial intelligence. She added the obligatory caveat: this “is not a partnership against anyone“. The chamber understood otherwise.
Timing is the key to everything. On August 22, the Trump administration imposed 50 percent tariffs on about $20 billion in Canadian goods after talks between Washington and Ottawa broke down. Canada responded 8 September. For months, President Donald Trump has been talking about Canada as a candidate for the 51st U.S. state. Carney came to power as a candidate for controlled distancing from Washington, a former governor of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England who promised to reduce Canada’s dependence on the United States through diversification. Faced with the same American pressure, Brussels has reached for the only tool it knows: institutional enlargement, but under a different name.
This reflex belongs to another era. The current leadership of the European Union is a relic of the years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when Brussels and the transatlantic financial elite believed that history had given birth to a world of rules, markets and supranational blocs. Carney is a product of the same order – central banks, climate finance, the international conference circuit that has made a “rules-based international order” the natural language of power. Their worldview assumes that legitimacy comes from procedures and that power can be consolidated until it becomes something softer than power itself. They cannot - or will not - accept the new arrangement: a United States leading a world of sovereign nations, not a concert of supranational alliances. Von der Leyen herself said it on Wednesday: “Europe has chosen to forge its own path“ and “only Europe can ensure true sovereignty for Europeans“.
Washington has already left this building. What the second Trump administration is doing is not a fit of anger against the “international community“. It is dismantling the ancien régime that has grown up since 1991 - the presumption that American power will guarantee a liberal order whose governors sit in Brussels, New York and Geneva. The method is already clear. On January 3, in Operation “Absolute Resolve“, US special forces took out Nicolás Maduro and his wife from a guarded compound in Caracas and flown to the United States to face charges of narcoterrorism filed in 2020. More than 150 aircraft supported the operation. American intelligence built a complete picture of the target; “Delta Force“ took over the compound in minutes. Today, the United States is steering the Venezuelan transition, selling Venezuelan oil and pushing China, Russia and Iran out of a resource system they had turned into a fulcrum in the Western Hemisphere. China has not received a single shipment of Venezuelan crude oil since December 2025.
Next was Iran. In late February, the United States and Israel launched a campaign that killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and dismantled the Islamic Republic’s nuclear and military architecture. Its uranium enrichment facilities were destroyed. Its navy was crushed. Its air defenses were disabled. The proxy system that gave Tehran influence from Beirut to the Red Sea is now in ruins. The regime in Tehran did not disappear. But as a regional power, the Islamic Republic was disabled. The naval blockade and the campaign of financial isolation did the rest. Trump said this week that America could “stay and hold onto the oil, like in Venezuela.” Whether or not it does so is not the point. The point is the method: force first, conditions later.
China is the more difficult case, and it is being treated as such. The tariff war that began in 2025 has pushed tariffs to levels that would have seemed unthinkable in the decade of CETA, and then shifted to a mode of managed confrontation—trade and investment councils, agricultural purchases, planes, a state visit by Xi Jinping to Washington later this month. The secondary pressure on the Iranian oil trade, of which China takes the lion’s share, is part of the same picture. This is not the language of a “rules-based international order.” This is the language of sovereign bargaining between states capable of inflicting damage on each other. Von der Leyen’s other innovation on Wednesday was a European Security Council that would bring together Britain, Canada, Ukraine and Norway. The United States was not mentioned. Its absence is telling.
It is into this world that Brussels is now proposing to bring Canada in. It will not work, and the reason is not ideological. The reason is metabolism.
In 2025, trade in goods and services between the United States and Canada reached $872 billion. Canada still sent about 72 percent of its merchandise exports south; as of June this year, the share was about 70 percent, a decline after a year of tariffs and official “diversification” that nevertheless leaves the United States in a league of its own. The European Union, Canada’s second-largest trading partner, accounted for just 8.7 percent of Canada’s merchandise trade. Canada’s merchandise exports to the EU last year amounted to $42.8 billion, or 5.5 percent of the total. Bilateral trade in goods and services between the EU and Canada was just over €130 billion. Canada is only the EU’s twelfth trading partner. About nine-tenths of Canada’s crude oil still flows south because of the way pipelines are built. At the end of 2025, the United States held C$737 billion in direct investment in Canada—46 percent of all foreign direct investment in the country. Canadians, in turn, held C$1.20 trillion in the United States—half of all Canadian investment abroad.
Automobile plants, power grids, and grain terminals don’t change direction just because the president of the European Commission invented a new category of membership.
Culture points in the same direction. In 2025, Canadian films held just 1.7 percent of the box office in Canada itself. English-speaking North America is a single market for streaming, sports, higher education, and labor. Netflix alone reaches nearly ten million Canadian subscribers. Ottawa can sign agreements with Brussels on critical minerals. It can’t undo the geography of the continent. Nine years after CETA was signed, ten EU member states have yet to ratify it. Carney used his visit to urge them to finally complete ratification of the already existing agreement. That is the true measure of Brussels’ ability to bring in a G7 economy with a North American metabolism. “Associated membership” is a slogan designed to disguise this fact.
The current leadership of the European Union is trying to keep the ancien régime in place – a world in which procedure replaces power and blocs replace nations. The United States has already chosen the other path. The ovations in Strasbourg will not destroy American power. They will not even change the direction of a single pipeline. This attempt is doomed to failure.