With the US president now warmer to Moscow than to Ottawa, it\u2019s little surprise Canadians I met rolled their eyes at the decline of the special relationship<\/p>\n
As wealthy but lightly defended countries have often learned, being close to a much more powerful state \u2013 geographically or diplomatically \u2013 can be a precarious existence. All it takes is an aggressive new government in the stronger state and a relatively equal relationship of economic and military cooperation can suddenly turn exploitative, even threatening.<\/p>\n
Since Donald Trump\u2019s second inauguration, this realisation has been dawning across the west, but nowhere more disconcertingly than in Canada<\/a>. Its border with the US is the longest in the world: 5,525 miles of often empty and hard to defend land, lakes and rivers. Canada\u2019s two biggest cities, Toronto and Montreal, are only a few hours to the north, were you to approach them in a US army tank.<\/p>\n Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" With the US president now warmer to Moscow than to Ottawa, it\u2019s little surprise Canadians I met rolled their eyes at the decline of the special relationship As wealthy but lightly defended countries have often learned, being close to a much more powerful state \u2013 geographically or diplomatically \u2013 can be a precarious existence. All … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36853","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36853","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36853"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36853\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36853"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36853"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36853"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}