Trump Edition: Can Europe defend itself without America?
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That's $50 off with code LISTEN at BlueNile.com. Stark strategic realities prevent the United States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe. We will measure our success not only by the battles we win, but also by the wars we end. Right now, all eyes are on Washington. But who's actually watching Europe today?

At the moment. Zelensky wants to make a deal. I don't know if Putin does. He might not. Some elections are important, some are not. But this one, this one really matters. Dear President Trump, listen very carefully. Greenland has been part of the Danish kingdom for 800 years. We're not going to be defeated. We're not going to be humiliated. We're only going to win, win, win. We're going to win, win, win.

I'm Roland Olofsen and this is Battlelines. It's Friday 14th February 2025. Today, can Europe defend itself without America?

On Wednesday, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin announced that they were negotiating peace in Ukraine between them, apparently cutting out President Volodymyr Zelensky and Ukraine's European allies. Meanwhile, Pete Hegseth, the US Defense Secretary, said this: "We're also here today to directly and unambiguously express that stark strategic realities prevent the United States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe."

The United States faces consequential threats to our homeland. We must and we are focusing on security of our own borders. The message is blunt. Europe and Ukraine are on their own. The American commitment that has guaranteed peace in Europe since 1945 is over.

Can Europe really defend itself without American troops, American money, American logistics, American intelligence and American nuclear weapons? And there is an even bigger question. If Donald Trump is willing to cut a deal with Vladimir Putin about Ukraine, what else will they divide between them? In a world where Vladimir Putin wants Ukraine, Xi Jinping wants Taiwan and Donald Trump wants Greenland, is there a deal to be done?

Will smaller countries, even European countries, have a say in their own destiny? Or are they to be divided up by the big three? Later in this episode, I'll be speaking to Michael Ignatieff, the former leader of the Canadian opposition, who fears that that is exactly where the world is headed. But first, let's get into that knotty question. Can Europe even fight a war on its own to defend itself?

Ed Arnott is a Senior Research Fellow for European Security at the Royal United Services Institute. Ed, is this the end of the post-1945 world order? I think it is starting to get to that post-1945 area, and I think the

The US have been dropping these hints to Europe for well over a decade now. I mean, operationally, the first time was the NATO intervention in Libya, which was effectively something that the Americans said, Europeans, you've got to do this. The Europeans couldn't, so they did it through a NATO framework. And the US was saying, well, okay, we'll do it through a NATO framework, but we're going to take a backseat.

and it was a poorly executed operation, and Libra was still in a sense of turmoil. And then from 2013, the Obama administration was saying, we are pivoting to Asia. That's implicit that we're going to spend less attention on Europe. So we're actually getting to the point now that the Americans have very gently tried to get the Europeans to act in the way that they want. And I think they're quite frankly fed up of giving them

too much leeway and also the security environment. I mean, the great sort of view on the European side is always, well, it's a wake-up call. I mean, how many more wake-up calls do you need? And this is just very stark to say, no, no, we're serious about this time. You need to do this. And then obviously the ball's in the Europeans' court. I think that's an interesting point to make because a lot of this has been framed as

You know, Donald Trump has come in. He's breaking up, you know, the America that we used to know and rely on. Everything is completely different. And what you're saying is, no, in a way, this is a blunter expression of a trend in American foreign policy and its attitude to Europe and the world that's been coming for a long time. Yeah, absolutely. And I think bluntness is, quite frankly, required. And we can, you know, as European policymakers, we can disagree with the language, disagree with the messaging, but really...

We've got to take this seriously. And actually, I mean, this would probably be happening had the Democrats won the election as well. I think it would happen at a less acute pace for the Europeans, but it's something that would already be happening. This is a strategic shift by the US. They are just being very, very clear this time. And actually, I think Europeans should really appreciate that clarity. All right. So let's move on to the practical implications here. Can Europe defend itself without America?

Very complex question, but I mean, I would say no. And I'd start that in reference probably to defense spending, which has...

been far below what is required on the European side. I mean, some analysis suggested in pre-2020 environment that Europeans might need to invest up to 350 billion extra in order to manage those shortfalls that are potentially brought by the US disengagement and could potentially take 20 years.

And that is actually a report that hasn't been sort of refreshed in a post-22 environment, which is obviously going to be far more acute. And also, I mean, the fact that Russian defense spending is actually higher than European defense spending. I think the other issue is sort of where those shortfalls lie. So we always assume that the issue with the U.S. and their withdrawal is lack of combat capability, which is important.

but also the enablers, so the logistics infrastructure, the ability to do intelligence surveillance reconnaissance, especially in the north. So it's not just about the amounts of soldiers. And then there's also the command and control. So this is the bit that probably needs to be clarified now from Peg's statement in terms of the US stepping back from European security. I mean, is that stepping back from...

European, well, NATO command structure, for example, and the Supreme Allied Commander Europe being a US post, you know, is that then going to be a European post? And actually, the US will deal with this through the European command. And, you know, I'll refer back to Libya, you know, Afghanistan, Iraq, all of these things that the Europeans have plugged in

two US command and control arrangements. There is no guarantee that the Europeans can actually do that on their own without this sort of the US glue that holds it all together. I wanted to ask you about that because I think it may have been you actually. Someone's definitely put it to me before that this isn't just a question of

how many dollars you have or how many troops you have and how many tanks you can buy which is obviously important but it's about all the other things around that that actually allow you to fight the war and the suggestion was that there are essential kind of essential services i suppose the kind of infrastructure of war fighting that is provided by the united states but not anybody else that the european militaries kind of rely on america to provide is that a fair description

Absolutely. And again, it's all of those things that the US has invested in and invested in for a long time. And while their defense spending did decrease during the Cold War,

There were these certain things that they kept on with, whereas in the US we effectively moved to expeditionary operations. And because we're all smaller militaries, from a UK point of view, you can't really do both. You can't do conventional deterrence and expeditionary. And I think the other aspect about the US is about that deterrence value in the eyes of Putin, because that's ultimately who you are trying to deter.

And he sniffs the fact that the U.S. are not as committed to NATO, not as committed to Article 5.

then that really puts a target on, for example, the Baltic states. And also in terms of the military mission that might have to go into Ukraine if these peace negotiations start to develop between Trump and Putin. The fact that the flag on Iran matters. I mean, will Putin be that worried about stray missiles going over and killing 10 French soldiers in Ukraine? Probably not. When

Would he be worried about doing that if they're Americans? Absolutely. Because of the American strategic and sort of military culture that they know, or he would know that if US soldiers were killed by Russians in Ukraine, Trump would have to respond. Give us some really concrete examples about these gaps in European capability that are going to have to be filled if the Americans vanish from the equation on the continent. So, you know, in terms of concrete examples,

So intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets. So that's the ability to really understand what the Russians are doing, force dispositions. And that's really important because it would effectively determine whether the Russians are just posturing, they're on exercise or they're actually going to potentially make a move.

on the Baltic states. So a variety of countries within Europe operates, for example, the Poseidon P-8 maritime patrol aircraft. So planes go over the sea and can hunt for Russian submarines, which are a critical requirement for how Russia would potentially go to war with NATO. So at the moment, there's a trilateral operation between the UK, Norway, and the US. We look around the Greenland, Iceland, UK gap, a little bit further north on Russian submarine activity.

If those maritime patrol aircraft, which are American, go over to the Indo-Pacific to start trying to monitor Chinese subs, then there's a gap there that needs filling that you can only do with maritime patrol. Now, Germany are going to acquire some, so they might actually join with the UK and Norway. But if there's limited capabilities, then you effectively have blind spots within Europe that the Russians would therefore exploit. So that's, for example, one thing.

The other issue is military mobility. And this comes back to logistics. I mean, there's a lot of programs that are predominantly in the EU, making sure that it's easier to send things west to east when crisis happens.

But actually, the U.S. is so strong in this area that in terms of support to Ukraine, they were able to get things from mainland U.S. into Ukraine quicker than, for example, France was able to get things into Ukraine, which just shows the strength of the U.S. system. That's airlift. That's like putting things on big planes and just flying across the Atlantic. Yeah, airlift, transport, everything, which is really important when you go into a potential warfighting scenario. It's this ability of scale.

It is going to be very difficult for the Europeans to do that. And while everyone is still now unambiguously focused on Russia, particularly after 2022, there's still a bit of a disagreement between the North and the South, between the West and the East of actually how to go about that. And this is the worry that you actually might see a sort of a splintering of NATO.

especially if the Americans say to Europeans, okay, well, you now have to put troops into Ukraine to monitor any potential ceasefire, right?

And the UK and France probably say yes. Poland probably says yes. But then the Germans, the Italians, the Spaniards say no. These are all issues that sort of played the alliance within Afghanistan, but they were not sort of existential questions. There were annoyances and there were some issues within that about where to deploy troops, national caveats, et cetera. But I mean, this is really about the future of Europe now and can change.

NATO managed that diplomatically. For example, if the Germans who have suggested that they wouldn't, they have a federal election later on this year so that that position may change. You know, if the largest European defense vendor, second largest defense vendor in NATO says, actually, no, we're not going to deploy troops. That's going to be very, very difficult from an alliance cohesion point of view.

Do we have to start thinking about a Europe without NATO, about a post-NATO world? Thinking about NATO where the US commitment is, there's a question mark around it. And I think that's different. I mean, NATO can still survive as an entity with reduced commitment to the US if managed well.

But the issue is, I mean, you can't say sort of really post-NATO because there's nothing else that really is comparable to that. I mean, the EU absolutely can't do this because they just don't have the sort of the military maturity and command maturity. You'll probably get a coalition of the willing if there is going to be a military mission within Ukraine itself.

It's really difficult to see how NATO can manage this with a big question mark over the US. Well, that's what I mean. You know, I mean, is the credibility of NATO gone? And then what does Europe look like in which that no longer exists, in which there is no Article 5 and there is no guaranteed assumption of collective defense?

Yeah, but also, I mean, there are things that Europeans can do. They just really just need to push ahead. So, I mean, again, if you're looking at the US disengaging from Europe, if you read the US DOD Arctic strategy from last year, you know, they highlight the Arctic as a, you know, fulcrum for geopolitical competition between the US, China and Russia and see the cooperation between Russia and

and China is an acute threat. And if you look at a map of Europe, not as the Mercator projection that we would from the UK with the UK in the middle and the US on the west and Russia on the east. Actually look at it from the way that the US sees it directly over the North Pole. Like look at a map like that and also it shows why Greenland is potentially so important strategically to the US. That's how the US sees Europe.

Very, very different to how we see Europe. So can those countries, so principally the Nordics and the UK, leverage their diplomatic and military responsibility and heft with the US to keep the US engaged in Northern Europe?

Because that is where US interests and European interests align. Yeah, I think they can make a good case. And when you're talking to Trump, his administration, the modern US Republican Party, when they say, yeah, but you don't spend enough on defense, you say, well, actually, the Nordics, Baltics and the UK, we all spend over 2% and we've increased more than all of the rest of Europe combined.

since 2014, when they say, well, you're actually not contributing enough to Ukraine. You say, actually, yes, we can. So Joint Expeditionary Force nations have committed 20 billion more to Ukraine than the rest of European NATO combined, which is pretty significant when you think it's larger economies such as Germany, France, Spain, Italy.

So actually start to use that leverage and say, no, no, no, we take this seriously. So you can actually keep the US involved in Northern Europe, which is actually principally where the Russian threat is. Then you can sort of mitigate for this quite a bit. Now, the Europeans as a whole won't like that because it seems to sort of split things up and work with the US administration transactionally. But I think that

You're in so much danger territory now that you actually have to leverage what you're able to do. And so to my final point on that is from the Europeans as well, you have to recognize that this is not just Trump.

This is not just the next four years that you need to manage. This is longer term trends. Trump has hijacked the modern US Republican party. This doesn't end with his second administration. This is a long-term strategic shift. This is not something you can weather like his first administration. And that's got to be front and center of what the Europeans are looking at now. You've talked a lot about conventional forces. We talked about moving tanks around and getting a division out the door and all of that.

Could you talk a little bit about the nuclear umbrella? What are the implications of what Hegseth said for nuclear deterrence? Yeah, and I think this is, again, where we need now more detail in terms of the NATO command structure, everything that sort of fits under that, the US taking a back step and whether that would also be in the nuclear planning group.

as an example within, and that's what people will be most concerned about, especially in the frontline states, because it sort of puts that fait accompli mission back on the table for the Russians in the sense that Putin knows that he can't take on NATO militarily and probably now post-2022, even without the US in terms of where his forces are and sort of the vulnerabilities that he has.

But this idea that he could take a bite out of Estonia and then it forces NATO to either respond conventionally or respond nuclear, that second option is very unlikely.

And the first option is going to be very difficult without the US. So it's one of those issues now that I think the Europeans need to do far more. I think France and the UK need to do far more in terms of that. So as a concrete example, the French could rejoin the NATO nuclear planning group.

the US and France could do far more joint statements in terms of how they see their deterrence working. So the UK assigns its nuclear forces to NATO, whereas the French doesn't, and start to try and complicate Putin's decision-making calculus.

on that but I think the nuclear umbrella part is now far bigger question than the conventional part of it because also the Russians at this present moment in time they're not in the position to really provide that credible conventional threat just because they've been so denuded in Ukraine that could change quite quickly in European assessments so two years is probably about the likely part where they could actually pose a credible conventional threat to the Baltics

Yes or no, really. I mean, do either European countries need to think about getting a bomb? I think it will increase the discussions now. And this is where I say, you know, the precursor to that is more clarifications, particularly on the French position on what that means. But, you know, the very fact that it's been a discussion over the last couple of years, principally in countries like Germany, you know, just shows how high the stakes are in terms of defending Europe. Thank you, Ed Arnold.

After the break, Michael Ignatieff, the former leader of the Canadian Liberal Party, tells me why he suspects Donald Trump is looking to carve up the world into spheres of influence and why his country, Canada, may be one of the first to be sacrificed. Work management platforms, endless onboarding, IT bottlenecks, admin requests. But what if things were different? Without love.

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Stop wasting money on things you don't use. Cancel your unwanted subscriptions by going to rocketmoney.com slash cancel subs. That's rocketmoney.com slash cancel subs, not submarines. Welcome back. Last week, Marco Rubio, the new American Secretary of State, was speaking to Fox News when he made the following remarks.

It's not normal, he said, for the world to simply have a unipolar power. Eventually, you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet. It's not unusual for an American Secretary of State to observe that we're living in an era of great power competition, but the language is remarkable. The multipolar world has been a Russian foreign policy objective for years.

and it is the first time an American Secretary of State has used it, at least to my knowledge. It's a term that doesn't simply imply an equality of nations, a world in which everybody's sovereignty is equal, but that only a few powers, those who are able to decide the fates of others, can truly be independent. So, have the Russians won the intellectual argument?

Is this White House embracing that worldview? And what does that mean for the rest of us? I'm joined now by Michael Ignatieff, a former leader of the Canadian Liberal Party and leader of the opposition. Michael, thanks for speaking to us. There's a specific bit of work that you authored recently in your Financial Times that I want to get to, but I wanted to start off with your

Your initial kind of thoughts about where Canada is with its relationship with its southern neighbor right now. Did you ever imagine that you would see an American president talking openly about Canada?

Canada becoming a 51st state about annexation about apparently quite bluntly threatening economic coercion to force this This Anschluss as it were. No, I think I join most Canadians in being Shocked and angry it is unprecedented in my lifetime. There's no question. We've lived beside the United States and had a

moments under President Nixon in which he suddenly turned the economic basis of our relationship upside down. So we've been through some rough patches before, but this is without any doubt the roughest

And what's very difficult and it's infuriating to everybody is we can't tell how much is bluff and how much is the prelude to unilateral action that will have devastating consequences. We're still trying to figure it out. We've got tariffs on steel supposed to come in in March. We don't know whether they're going to come in or not. But if they do come in, we're the largest exporter of steel to the United States and a very large supplier of aluminum. And this will devastate the industries involved.

And we make cars together with the United States and ship stuff back and forth across the border. And this has worked partly because, you know, we have a 65 cent dollar. So we're a very competitive place to make cars and do stuff in. And Trump has some...

I think, insanity about imports. He thinks it's kind of weakness in some sense. He simply doesn't understand how globalization works. So we're dealing with a president where you just kind of can't understand the economics at all.

And every politician from Canada who goes down to the States says, are you aware that this will have inflationary impacts on your economy? What is the worst case scenario for ordinary Canadians here? I mean, if all these tariffs go through? It depends how systematic it is. If it is in a

He started with across the board 25 cent tariffs on pretty well everything. Now we're down to steel and aluminum. So we don't know. But I think given the degree of the integration of the Canadian economies and American economies in energy and in minerals and in aluminum and steel, the knock-on effects are going to be very, very serious. And the Trump actions have laid bare for Canadians the

the degree to which we have integrated our economy north-south and neglected the east-west connectors of our economy. So we're especially vulnerable. So it's been a kind of wake up to Canada to begin to rebuild its economy east-west and reduce its north-south dependency, but you can't do that overnight. I wanted to kind of put this in a broader kind of continental context.

Mike Waltz, the national security advisor, Donald Trump's national security advisor, he was on television the other day saying, look, we've neglected our own hemisphere for a long time. America has to pay much more attention to the Western hemisphere and so on. I suppose what struck me over the kind of early moves in Donald Trump's presidency was

Which was directed at things like Canada, Mexico, talking about taking back control of the Panama Canal, talking about taking over Greenland, all very much focused on the Western Hemisphere, on asserting dominance in the Americas. What are the bigger kind of implications of that? So I think the implication that everybody needs to think about is that this is a declaration first that America has a sphere of influence from kind of Greenland in the north and

to Chile in the south and wants to get back control of the Panama Canal, wants to get our resources, wants to have seamless economic integration with Canada and basically absorb us economically. And that's a sphere of influence that America claims as exclusive and it wants to drive the Chinese out of their penetration into Latin America. But that's not the only implication. The thing that I think is most serious is

is that it might imply, I say might because nobody knows, it might imply conceding a sphere of influence to China in East Asia. It might imply conceding a sphere of influence to Russia at the eastern borders of Europe and basically say the world should be divided into three and we are renouncing our role as a provider of global public goods and

The Secretary of Defense of the United States, Mr. Hegseth, basically said our 80-year commitment to European security is now being rethought. Well, that's consistent with what I'm saying. That is that they will have a sphere of influence in North and South America. Russia will have a sphere of influence on our Eastern European frontier. And China will have a sphere of influence in East Asia. I hope that's not the case because...

Many of the public goods that globalization depends on, I mean, that is American ships guaranteeing open access to the seas, you know, the whole global apparatus of goods that we never think about, you know, air travel, the whole infrastructure that sustains people.

global trade and global economic growth has been basically underpinned by American power. If Trump is saying, look, my people back in the United States don't care about this global role anymore. We're tired of it. We're fed up with it. We're fed up with our allies freeloading on us, including the Brits, including the Canadians. If he's getting that signal from his electorate, it might really tear up the order that

an old fogey like me grew up in. There's various historical analogies that have come to mind while I've been chatting about this with colleagues. I like to use the Treaty of Tordesillas when the Portuguese and the Spanish drew a line down the middle of the Atlantic to divide up the new world. The other one that comes to mind, of course, is Yalta and the division of Europe by Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill.

You talk about that as it might be like this. Has anybody else mentioned this to you? Is there anyone else you're aware of who's saying, no, this is actually what might be where we're going here? Well, there are some signs that the chairman of Trump's Council of Economic Advisors has written a kind of scholarly paper about tariffs, which basically makes the point not just about tariffs, but about geostrategy.

which is that Trump's basic instinct is that

All of the allies of the United States, Canada, NATO, the United Kingdom, everybody, has been freeloading off American generosity since 1945. And it no longer makes sense to America. It's drawn America into wars it doesn't want to fight. And the tail has been wagging the dog. I think that's quite a strong element of what

the music that Trump says he's hearing from the American public is,

You have to remember this is an American public that, you know, first fought and died in Vietnam and then fought and died in Iraq and, you know, fought and died in Afghanistan to no benefit. And people are fed up with the cost of empire. And they're fed up with the ways in which friends have been transferring the cost back to the American taxpayer. I think this is the grand strategy, whether it ends up in the

division of the world into three that I've been outlining is suppositional. I have no, I haven't got chapter and verse for you. Although this chairman of the economic advisors is saying that's why we're doing tariffs against our friends. We're doing tariffs against our friends because free trade doesn't really work for a lot of American domestic consumption. And,

Free trade thumps, you know, uncompetitive industries in the United States. And we don't like it. So we're going to put tariffs up and reshore a lot of our production. I think all of this adds up to a pretty comprehensible, from the American point of view, view of where they want to go in the world. But if they are going in that direction, it is a completely new way forward.

to exercise American power, very different from anything we saw in the 20th century. Marco Rubio was speaking on, I believe, on Fox News the other week. And at Kortmaier, he talked about how the unipolar moment of American total dominance after the end of the Cold War was always going to come to an end. And now we are in a multipolar world where you have multiple centers of power. Now,

It grabbed my attention because I used to work in Russia for a long time. And the ambition of building the multipolar world has been a buzzword of Vladimir Putin's and Russian diplomatic objectives for years and years and years. I don't know if you saw that or if you have any observations to make about the appearance of that term in official American rhetoric. Yeah, it doesn't sit very well with some of the other music coming out of them, which

which is a sense that they've got to maintain their superiority over China. You're a multipolar person if you think, yeah, I can live with a strong China, I can live with a strong Russia. But you're not a multipolar person if you basically think we still ought to be running the world. And I think they haven't quite sorted that out. They intellectually, I think, understand that America can't

bear the burdens that it's borne. They are, I think, genuinely worried about increasing Chinese competition, particularly in AI, particularly in green technologies. They look at that and think, let's get American power scaled in a way that makes sense to the American people.

It's very odd. It's make America great again by refusing to take burdens that just don't make any sense anymore. So the idea that a liberal internationalist would have had, you know, and Clinton, Obama, all these people had was you make America great by having people

terrific alliance structures around the world. America's strength after 1945 was alliance structures with friends. The Trump administration regards all of those alliances simply as costs, not as benefits. And whether you can then end up with accepting a multipolar world when you don't have any friends is anybody's guess. And my guess is you can't.

In this idea of this world of kind of American retreat and turning your backs on entanglements and so on, where does taking over ownership of Gaza fit into that? Because that particular example seems to go entirely in the opposite direction. I agree. I agree. It doesn't add up. It does not fit what I'm saying. A more consistent line would be to say, you know, we're out of here too.

If they're saying in Europe, Ukraine is basically a European problem, you would expect them to say, you know, Gaza is a Middle Eastern problem. But that's not what he's saying to, you know, the leaders of Jordan and Israel. He's saying, we want to come in there and you're going to stump up and we'll build a beautiful real estate development with lots of hotels and pools. Well,

It just doesn't fit. You've mentioned, I think, I mean, the implication of what you said. You said it in a piece in the FT, actually. In case of the scenario you described of a kind of division of the world into spheres of influence, Europe's probably got the most to lose because I suppose it would be on the right, you know, is it going to be in the American sphere or in the Russian sphere? Assuming you're right, assuming that we are looking at a return to old-fashioned spheres of influence where there's going to be

you know, two or three major global powers who are truly independent and everybody else is going to be in the orbit of one or the other. Who's got the most to worry about? Who's going to lose the most? Canada might be quite safe in a way. Canada will be absorbed into, you know, a sphere of influence and our problem will be that we'll lose our political sovereignty, which matters a hell of a lot to Canadians, but it's not going to matter to others.

I think the Europeans have an awful lot to worry about they've made a historic bargain that began with 45 with the arrival of American troops with Marshall plan and all that stuff in which that generation of American leadership from Roosevelt Truman onwards understood a linkage between American security and European security that was dictated by the Cold War antagonism with the Russians

And now it seems to me if you had a sphere of influence in which they basically come out of the Ukraine war saying basically, you know, if Russia wants 25% or 20% of Ukrainian territory, that's kind of okay with us. I mean, that's basically what Hegseth said. This is where we are. I think this is also existential for Europe is that Europe after 1945 built its welfare states

The things that we're proudest of, I'm talking to you from Europe and I love it. They built their welfare states on basically transferring defense costs to the Americans. Now, I think is going to change. And so the pressure is,

to maintain the social commitments, the welfare commitments that Britain has made, that France has made, that Germany has made. It's basically the social model of Europe will come under a tremendous amount of pressure from the sheer necessity of increasing defense expenditure. I wanted to finish off by saying

Just coming back to, I suppose, to Canada, you mentioned it right there. Look, our political sovereignty is really important to us. Just give us a sense of the Canadian relationship with the United States, its identity. It's a different kind of sense of national identity than I think the British or the French or the Germans can understand. You know, we speak the same language as the Americans. We

We have the same habits when we walk into a London pub. The Brits can't tell a Canadian from an American by and large. And that's why Canadians wear little Canadian flags everywhere just to say, hey, we're not Americans. So it's one of the most distinctive national identities in the world because it's invisible. And yet it's very, very strong.

We were created by people who escaped the American Revolution, who didn't want to separate from Britain. We created parliamentary institutions which are different from the American. We also have 25% of our population speaks French. That's part of our identity. And all of this, and then we have the weather, which is cold and it's much more difficult to live in Canada than it is in the nice, warm United States. So all of this adds up to...

a paradox, which is deep economic integration with a very, very deep commitment to remaining politically distinct. And whether we can manage that trick in a Trump administration is now the question that Canada will have to decide. I'm pretty confident we will, because I think history means we've done it before and we'll keep doing it. But right now, that's the question of the hour in my country. You've fought the Americans before in

in 1812 and so on. We did. We did. And we beat them. We beat them. We set the White House on fire. They don't seem to remember that. Will Canadians fight again? I think it's unlikely, but we'd certainly resist. Michael Ignatieff, thank you very much. That's all for this week. We'll be back on Monday. That was Battlelands. Goodbye.

Battlelines is an original podcast from The Telegraph created by David Knowles. If you appreciated this podcast, please consider following Battlelines on your preferred podcast app. And if you have a moment, leave a review as it helps others find the show. To stay on top of all our news, subscribe to The Telegraph, sign up to our Dispatches newsletter or listen to our sister podcast, Ukraine The Latest.

You can also get in touch directly by emailing battlelines at telegraph.co.uk or contact us on X. You can find our handles in the show notes. Battlelines is produced by Jolene Goffin. The executive producer is Louisa Wells.

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