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Comment by jorblumesea | Hacker News Reader

Being a good ally isn't just doing entirely what the US says the should do. The US needs to coordinate responses to China and work with allies to come to a shared understanding. How the current administration operates is assuming these allied country are fiefdoms. The economic situation in Canada isn't great, and the US could make it stronger, but refuses to.

The same feedback is largely true for most US allies. If you want people to decouple from China, you need to offset and fix the underlying reason they are trading with them.

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I have many complaints about Trump's handling of foreign policy. Don't mistake my tone for approval of his approach. He is needlessly aggressive and domineering. We have tried the carrot approach though. Coalition of the willing. By and large I would say our allies are spiritually willing but physically unable to. If we use Canada for example, I don't think they need to jump at every demand, but things like stopping counterfeit sales (Pacific Mall), taking meaningful steps to stop cartel money laundering (Vancouver), actually meeting military commitments (Ukraine promises). A lot of it doesn't get reported because people don't really want to hear it. Like I said, Trump is not right in his handling of these issues, but Canada allows them to fester because its in their interest.

That's pretty vague compared to concrete good ally behaviour like the arrest of Meng Wanzhou.

And then waiting 4 years to actually ban his company from operating in Canada.

China captured 2 Canadians as retaliation. Wanting to de-escalate and get them back seems pretty reasonable. Unless the US proposed a military operation to get them back?

They still did that. Even though being a pawn in another player's game (USA trying to kill its technological competitor) and paying for it in many different ways was definitely not in the Canada's interests.

You seem to have this strange position that "what's good for the US is also automatically good for Canada, or at least it doesn't matter what Canada things and what it's national interests might be; just shut up and do what we say (even if it's a command to jump from the building)".

You have a laundry list of complaints about Canada's action wrt the US. What would someone like you on Canada's side of the border offer in response, do you think?

All of these issues go back long before Trump, who has made things uniquely worse. But any two countries with as long (and tightly bound) a history as ours are going to have constant points of friction. Are you suggesting Canada is uniquely a "fake friend" in this equation?

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