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For forty-odd years after World War II, the policy of the free world towards the Soviet Union was one of containment: a strategy of collective resistance, rather than (on the one hand) appeasement or (on the other) open conflict. We now face the sad reality that, for the next four years at least, some version of containment will have to be our policy towards the United States.

Territorial expansion, of course, is not the issue, as it was then. But the policies of the United States under President Donald Trump, it grows more clear each day, cannot be regarded in the same light as those of any president we have known. On trade, on defence, on international law, in its choice of allies as much as its antagonists, his administration is not only wholly indifferent to the international order that presidents of both parties have laboured to build over seven decades, but actively hostile to it.

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I think this is the correct lens through which to view the challenge confronting Justin Trudeau, as he prepares for his first summit meeting with Trump. There has been much discussion of what sort of “tone” Trudeau should strike: Should he forthrightly condemn such gross abdications of responsibility as the executive order suspending all refugee admissions for the next 120 days — indefinitely, in the case of Syria — or the ban on all travel from seven predominantly Muslim countries? Or should he, in the interests of good trade relations, grit his teeth, look the other way, and cozy up to the president, in the ingratiating style Japan’s prime minister adopted on his visit? Perhaps some ungainly combination of the two?