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Later Wednesday evening during a major foreign policy speech, Canada’s top diplomat broadened her focus with a sweeping defence of something Trump has little time for — the international rules-based system that the U.S. led in creating after the Second World War.

She told a crowd of diplomats, academics and politicians blocks from the White House that she realizes that some Americans no longer think that world order is of any benefit to them, even though they helped create it and wrote “the biggest cheques” to support it.

“We see this most plainly in the U.S. administration’s tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum,” Freeland said in her acceptance speech for winning the Foreign Policy journal’s diplomat of the year award.

“They are a naked example of the United States putting its thumb on the scale, in violation of the very rules it helped to write.”

Freeland argued that the United Nations, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization and other global institutions created in 1945 were never perfect. But she said those institutions remain the guardians of liberal democratic values at a time when populism and authoritarianism “is on the march” in Russia, China, Venezuela and elsewhere.”

“We all know we will be strongest with America in our ranks — and indeed in the lead,” she said. “But whatever this great country’s choice will turn out to be — let me be clear that Canada knows where it stands.”

Freeland gave a thinly veiled thumping to Trump’s America First foreign policy.