My Take | US and China playing whack-a-mole with Canada
- Ottawa has been trying to be a good ally and friend with the two superpowers, and it’s being burned by one after the other
Canada is being squeezed between two superpowers and its leaders are being treated with contempt by both. Long before the Huawei furore started by Americans, US President Donald Trump had wasted no time to humiliate Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in ways big and small. It’s hard to think of a world leader who has been so frequently at the receiving end of Trump’s bitter and often demeaning tweets.
In the summer, before a trilateral trade deal between Canada, the United States and Mexico was reached, Trump had called his Canadian counterpart “dishonest” and “weak”, and that “he [Trudeau] acts hurt when called out”.
Taking his cue, Trump’s hawkish trade adviser, Peter Navarro, unloaded on Trudeau: “There’s a special place in hell for any foreign leader that engages in bad faith diplomacy with President Donald J. Trump and then tries to stab him in the back on the way out the door.”
Trump adviser apologises for saying Trudeau has ‘a place in hell’
And just to gain a bit of leverage over steel and aluminium imports from Canada, the Trump White House was willing to classify Canada’s trade practices as a threat to national security.
But America’s greatest trap so far has been to ask Canada to detain Huawei’s chief financial officer and founder’s daughter, Sabrina Meng Wanzhou, for extradition.
Trump will have final say in Huawei case, says former prosecutor
Right or wrong, Americans must know that going after such a key member of China’s corporate elite during their intensifying war against the country’s most important telecoms company and an unprecedented trade war would trigger a “nuclear” response from Beijing.