Last time I was in Canada, I went into a café and saw an item on the menu I’d never seen before: a “Canadiano”. The barista helpfully explained that this was just an Americano. But it was striking to me that Canadians had just come up with their own version of freedom fries – and specifically out of anti-Americanism.

By itself that might not have been much; Canadians have always had a tendency to shit-talk Americans. But in normal times that’s something of a joking matter, like Bostonians bantering about how much they hate New Yorkers. When passenger planes in flight needed to be diverted from the US on 11 September 2001, there was no Canadian hesitation to landing them all in Canada – the event made famous in the musical Come from Away.

Look to Canadian opinion polling, and something much deeper is going on. A February POLITICO poll makes the point more drastically: a plurality of Canadians think the US is no longer an ally of Canada. 69% agree the US tends to create more problems for other countries than it solves. Most striking of all, unlike Western European countries that overwhelmingly see Russia as the world’s greatest threat, a near majority of Canadians, 48%, see the United States as the greatest threat to world peace. That’s the United States’s largest trading partner, across the world’s longest undefended border – now viewing its longtime ally as a much greater threat to the world than the country that invaded Ukraine just a few years ago. Not coincidentally, applications to serve in the Canadian military surged 13% in the past year. And keep in mind, all of that was before the US invaded Iran!

Thus it is for good reason that Prime Minister Mark Carney attracted worldwide attention for his speech at Davos this year, despite his delivery being characteristically uncharismatic. What Carney was articulating was a fundamental global realignment in which “middle powers” like Canada, who had once grouchily if comfortably viewed themselves as simply in the orbit of larger powers like the United States, now had to stake out their own multilateral paths. That includes getting much closer to China, the US’s greatest contemporary rival – unthinkable just a few years ago in the light of China’s alarming human-rights violations. Those violations have, if anything, gotten worse in the interim – but, Canadians understandably reason, what choice do they really have?

The saddest part is I probably don’t even have to explain why all this has been happening. Donald Trump’s sudden and frequently altered decision last year to impose tariffs has wreaked havoc on the Canadian economy, which had – until this point – integrated itself very deeply with the American. Meanwhile he has repeatedly threatened to annex Canada and make it the 51st state – and while Trump is known worldwide for making shitposty comments he never acts on, one can never be entirely sure which such comments he will refuse to act on. This is all a marked difference from his first term, which (reassuringly!) was really all talk and no action. In his first term it was easy to laugh off his comments about invading Greenland; that became a lot less easy when it came on the heels of his invading Venezuela. The damnable cowardice of American Republican politicians, their unwavering refusal to treat their insane and dangerous leader the way UK and Korean right-wingers treated theirs – combined with the foolishly dangerous doctrine of presidential immunity – means that Trump can go ahead and act on his most feverish fantasies knowing he will face no consequences for them. Just like Greenland, amazingly, Canada cannot consider itself safe – from the United States. China might be musing plausibly about conquering Taiwan, but at least it ain’t talking about conquering Canada.

There have long been Canadians who warned against the danger that this sort of thing could eventually happen; it’s just that for a long time they were treated as the crazy ones. Two or three decades ago, globalization was viewed as so inevitable that Carney’s Liberal Party, which in had based its whole 1988 election platform on opposition to a free- trade deal with the US, then went ahead and expanded the same deal once it took power. Look how well that worked out.

There is one person I can imagine having positive feelings about all of this – a philosopher, no less. Whie he’s no longer with us, I can imagine George Grant looking at the present state of the world and feeling vindicated. This Canadian philosopher’s most famous work, Lament for a Nation, argued that Canada had lost its nationhood by agreeing to station American nuclear warheads on its own soil. For Grant, the point of Canada was to have a North American country that stayed well apart from the United States and the things it represents, tying its fate much more closely to the UK it had remained loyal to; the “continentalism” in a close North American alliance meant the idea of Canada was effectively over. Now Carney’s emerging multilateral Canada still looks very different from the small-town agrarian country that Grant wanted to hold on to – but so, of course, does the UK itself. Grant, who shared much of Heidegger’s critique of technology, would not look happily on the 21st-century world in general. But I hope that Grant could look at Carney’s turn away from the US and give himself a brief respite from the usual spinning in his grave.