The Rot of American Culture, Part 1
Kevin Duska | Civil Defence Canada | Op-Ed |
February 7, 2025
When Mark Carney speaks in the Australian Parliament in March, he will stand in a room full of people who are reaching the same conclusion Canada is: that the United States cannot be relied upon as a stable partner. This is not an emotional reaction to Donald Trump’s threats to annex Canada. It is a structural assessment based on observable patterns that persist across administrations, across decades, and across the entire post-1945 order.
The question Canadians need to answer is not whether Trump will be replaced by someone more reasonable. The question is whether the system that produces American behaviour toward its allies — the cultural, institutional, and ideological architecture that governs how the United States relates to other nations — is fundamentally compatible with the kind of partnership Canada requires to maintain its sovereignty.
The answer is no. And understanding why requires looking not at individuals, but at systems.
Exceptionalism Isn’t a Bug, It’s the Operating System
American exceptionalism is not rhetoric. It is constitutional doctrine, embedded in the founding texts and reinforced through every major strategic document the United States has produced since the Monroe Doctrine in 1823.
The principle is simple: the United States is qualitatively different from other nations, its role in the world is ordained rather than negotiated, and the rules that govern international conduct apply to others but not to itself. This is not a fringe position held by extremists. It is mainstream consensus across both major political parties and across the permanent institutions of the American state.
When the United States violates international law — invading Iraq without Security Council authorization, conducting rendition programmes, engaging in mass surveillance of allied populations — it does not see these as violations. It sees them as exceptions justified by its unique role. The International Criminal Court has no jurisdiction over American personnel not because the US signed a treaty exempting itself, but because the US refuses to recognize the court’s authority in the first place. The rules do not apply.
This creates a structural problem for allies. You cannot negotiate reciprocal obligations with a partner that does not accept the premise of reciprocity. You cannot build mutual trust with an institution that reserves the right to act unilaterally whenever it deems necessary — and that defines “necessary” entirely on its own terms.
Canada’s mistake has been treating this as a negotiable difference rather than a foundational incompatibility. It is not negotiable. It is what the system is.
The Monroe Doctrine Never Ended
The Monroe Doctrine, announced in 1823, declared the Western Hemisphere an American sphere of influence and asserted that European interference in the Americas would be treated as an act of aggression against the United States. It was not a treaty. It was a unilateral declaration. And it has never been rescinded.
Every subsequent articulation of American strategic policy — from Theodore Roosevelt’s Corollary (which justified American intervention anywhere in the Hemisphere) to the Trump National Security Strategy (which explicitly claims rights to control “strategically vital assets in our Hemisphere”) — is a continuation of the same principle: sovereignty in the Americas is contingent on American approval.
Trump’s annexation rhetoric is not new. What is new is that he says it publicly rather than embedding it in classified National Security Council memos. The operational doctrine has been consistent for two hundred years.
For Canada, this means that every assertion of independence — every trade deal with China, every refusal to participate in American wars, every attempt to chart an independent course — is interpreted in Washington not as the normal conduct of a sovereign nation but as defiance of the established order. And the response is proportional: economic coercion, political pressure, intelligence collection, and when necessary, direct interference.
The mistake is thinking this will change when Trump leaves office. It will not. The next administration will operate from the same foundational assumption: that Canada’s sovereignty exists at American discretion, not as an inherent right.
The Surveillance-Industrial Complex Is Bipartisan Infrastructure
The surveillance apparatus revealed by Edward Snowden in 2013 was not a Republican programme. It was built over decades, expanded under Democratic and Republican administrations alike, and formalized through the PATRIOT Act and subsequent legislation that passed with bipartisan support.
The Five Eyes intelligence-sharing arrangement — which binds Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand into a coordinated signals intelligence network — was not designed to protect allies. It was designed to enable mass collection on allied populations while circumventing domestic legal restrictions. The NSA could not legally conduct bulk surveillance on American citizens, so it collected data on everyone else and shared it with allies who did the same in reverse. The result was a system in which no population was protected, no oversight was meaningful, and no legal framework applied.
This is not speculation. It is documented in the Snowden revelations, confirmed by subsequent reporting, and acknowledged (though rarely prosecuted) by the governments involved.
For Canada, participation in Five Eyes means that Canadian communications are subject to American collection regardless of Canadian law. It means that Canadian citizens’ data — their emails, their phone records, their browsing history — flows through American servers and is accessible to American intelligence agencies without warrant or disclosure. It means that Canadian sovereignty over its own population’s privacy does not exist in practice, even if it exists in theory.
And it means that any Canadian institution — including Prime Rogue Inc., including Civil Defense Canada, including anyone publishing analysis the American state finds inconvenient — can be monitored, catalogued, and acted upon without ever being informed.
This is not a Trump policy. It is permanent infrastructure.
What Canadians Should Actually Be Preparing For
The logic of total defense — the model developed by Finland, Norway, and Sweden to maintain sovereignty in proximity to a hostile great power — is not built on the assumption that the threat will go away. It is built on the assumption that the threat is structural, persistent, and independent of who happens to be in charge at any given moment.
Finland does not prepare for a “bad” Russian administration. It prepares for Russia. The distinction matters.
Canada has spent decades preparing for aberrations in American behaviour — the assumption being that the baseline relationship is functional and that disruptions are temporary. That is the wrong frame. The baseline is what we are seeing now. The coercion, the surveillance, the subordination — that is the normal state of the relationship when American interests diverge from Canadian ones. The periods of apparent cooperation were contingent on alignment, not guaranteed by partnership.
Total defense means preparing for that baseline. It means building infrastructure that functions without American approval. It means developing supply chains that do not depend on American markets. It means maintaining communications networks that cannot be monitored by American intelligence. It means training a population that understands sovereignty is not granted by allies — it is maintained by readiness.
None of this is anti-American. It is structurally sound. And it is what every other middle power in proximity to a great power has already figured out.
The Canberra Address and the Question Canada Must Answer
When Carney speaks in March, he will make the case for middle-power coalitions. Australia will listen, because Australia is in the same position Canada is: dependent on an American security guarantee that is visibly eroding, integrated into an economic system that subordinates rather than partners, and running out of time to build alternatives.
But the coalition is not the end state. The coalition is the mechanism. The question Canada must answer is what it is building the coalition for.
If the answer is “to negotiate a better deal with Washington,” the coalition will fail. You cannot negotiate with a partner that does not accept your sovereignty as legitimate.
If the answer is “to make Canada independent of Washington,” the coalition has a chance. But that requires Canada to stop treating the American relationship as something that can be repaired and start treating it as something that must be replaced.
That is the structural case. That is what total defense is for. And that is what Canadians should be preparing for — not because the next American administration will be worse, but because the system itself produces this outcome regardless of who is running it.
Civil Defense Canada advocates for national resilience, total defense preparedness, and strategic sovereignty. This piece represents an analytical position grounded in constructivist international relations theory and observable institutional behaviour. For related analysis, see Prime Rogue Inc.’s assessment of the Carney middle-power strategy and The Signal Cage‘s reporting on Carney’s Canberra visit.
Related reading: Prime Rogue Inc.: “There Are No Friends: Why Carney Didn’t Go Far Enough at Davos” The Signal Cage: “Carney in Canberra”