This Fourth of July, the world declares its independence from America

The Guardian

2 days ago

This year, like every other year, Americans will celebrate Independence Day with flag-waving, and parades, and fireworks. The political system the flag and the parades and fireworks are supposed to represent is in tatters, but everybody likes a party. It was 249 years ago, when the United States separated from the British Empire. Over the past year it has separated from the world order it built over those 249 years, and from basic sanity and decency as well. For Americans, the madness gripping their country is a catastrophe. For non-Americans, it is an accidental revolution. This Independence Day, the world is declaring its independence from the US.
As the United States retreats from the world, it is reshaping the lives of its former trading partners and allies, leaving huge holes in its wake. For Canada, where I live, the sudden absence of a responsible United States has been more shocking and more terrifying than for other countries. Americans are our friends and neighbours, often our family. We have been at peace with them for 200 years, integrating with their security apparatuses and markets. Now they are explicitly planning to weaken us economically in order to annex us.
The Canadian strategy, undertaken with vigor by the newly elected government of Mark Carney, has been clear in spirit at least: a polite 'go fuck yourself.' After you've told America to fuck off, though, the real work starts. You have to figure out how to live without them.
Carney has already signed major pieces of legislation to lower trade barriers inside the country, to create new trading partners, and to cement security arrangements with the European Union. But those are only the obvious beginnings. Since Donald Trump's inauguration, I have been working on Gloves Off, an audio series trying to figure out how Canada can navigate the post-American world. I've been shocked by how much needs to be done. Canada is like a beautiful mansion with huge chunks of the foundation missing. We don't even have our own secret service, just an internal security apparatus. Our military would be comically unprepared for an American annexation. Large scale-changes to national life – becoming a nuclear power, undertaking a whole society defense – may be required to survive a neighbour who is backsliding into authoritarianism every week.
Under protection from America, under the assumption that its economy was globally dominant, Canada has never had to ask itself hard questions. Now we're facing a pop quiz with terrifying consequences.
The decline of America leaves a psychological gap, too. America, for all its problems, was aspirational. It was easy to poke holes in its claims to exceptionalism, but it genuinely served millions of people, myself definitely included, as a beacon of freedom and openness. But I keep thinking of that line from No Country for Old Men, just before Anton Chigurh kills Carson Wells in a hotel: 'If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?'
Its great founders knew America's vulnerabilities from inception. Washington predicted, almost exactly, the effects of partisanship the country is undergoing today: 'The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism,' he wrote in his Farewell Address. 'But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism.' Abraham Lincoln saw it all coming: 'If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die by suicide.' The suicide is tackier than anyone imagined, but it's been predicted since 1776.
One of the great ironies of history is that the triumph of Maga has led to the piecemeal destruction of everything that once made America great, and on every level. Its power derived from a reliable trade network, with logistical chains that were the wonders of the world, combined with a huge alliance network, and the greatest scientific and technological institutes in the world. It is systematically destroying all of those strengths far more thoroughly than any enemy could.
America is turning away from itself, and the rest of the world must follow. The new independence requires frankness, even brutality. There is no such thing as a deal with America any more. Canada and Mexico made one with Trump in 2018. He broke it at the first possible opportunity. Their national word is worthless. They understand only force and money, and increasingly not even those. Their military actions are more or less random, half-considered, about as deep and significant as a social media rage post. They instantly forget who helped or hurt them. All those Afghans who saved American lives a decade ago have lived to regret it, being deported, just for the spectacle of it all, back to their torturers. There is exactly no security in being their ally. If the American government declares war on something – poverty, drugs, Islamic terrorism, anti-democratic governments – you can be quite sure that whatever they're opposed to will be much stronger by the end of the fighting.
US scholars of fascism are fleeing to Toronto, and the city has become a kind of lens through which to see the American collapse. Canada sees what America is becoming. Travel from Canada to the United States is down 45% year over year which is partly a political statement by way of boycott, but it's also a demonstration of common sense: America has made it perfectly clear that foreigners are unwelcome and subject to violence with total impunity. But the simplest way to explain the need to step away from the United States is the most basic: no problem the world faces has an answer that can be found in America. Not politically, not economically, not socially, not culturally.
It is clear that we have to start looking for answers to the world's problems elsewhere, in ourselves and in others. There is a celebration of independence this Independence Day and it is real; it's just for countries other than America. The lesson the Americans once taught the British, they are teaching the rest of the world: there are no necessary nations. There are no exceptional countries. There are no permanent global orders. There's just more history, and trying to survive to stay yourself it.
Stephen Marche lives in Toronto and is the author of The Next Civil War and On Writing and Failure