At this point, every country in the world should acknowledge that Canada’s Mark Carney is the only world leader who knows how to handle Donald Trump. Last Friday, just before midnight, he applied with great force what might be called the Carney doctrine. The only response to American insanity is firm rejection and direct retaliation. Dealing with Trump is like dealing with any other bully: take your lumps, hit back, walk away. The metaphor I use for the current iteration of the United States is this: it’s like seeing your favourite cousin go on a drug binge and show up at your door with a knife asking for money. Keep calm and Carney on: the Canadian premier is showing the rest of the world how to deal with America (AFP/Getty)Canada has figured it out first, but the rest of the world is catching up. If you try to reason, you will get nowhere. If you invite him into your house, it will burn to the ground. Better to get out of the way. But if you need to kick him in the ass, there aren’t any real consequences. He probably won’t even remember.The negotiations between the American and Canadian sides fell apart because they weren’t really a negotiation in the first place. The list of demands that emerged in the final hours included concessions that have nothing to do with business. French language protections in Canada are sacred. It took generations to come to the mild accommodations we currently have. The idea that we would trade the ability to preserve the French language in Canada for any amount of money is ludicrous. That the Americans even brought it up is a sign of their deep unseriousness. If you try to reason, you will get nowhere. If you invite him into your house, it will burn to the groundYesterday, Canada announced countermeasures: the states targeted include purple states that voted for Trump: Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan will be hit. Let the people who inflicted this man on the world suffer for it. Canada’s finance minister, François-Philippe Champagne, say that would match US tariffs ‘dollar for dollar’ (AFP/Getty)The trade war has begun in earnest. America’s economy is roughly 12 times the size of Canada. They can hurt us a whole lot more than we can hurt them. That’s just a fact. And yet, here in Toronto, I can only describe the mood as relaxed and determined. Keep calm and Carney on. Why? Well, for one thing, there’s no choice. The American demands were so extreme that they amounted less to a proposal for trade than to terms of surrender. The Americans demanded full control over Canada’s ability to tariff other countries. Our trade policy would not be our own. We would be, in effect, a colony. Carney must have known that the politics of that situation were simply untenable. If he had accepted the American deal, his government would have fallen in a week. By one poll, 76 per cent of Canadians approve of Carney walking away. I doubt you could get three-quarters of Canadians to agree that they like chocolate ice cream. It’s as close to unanimity as you’re going to find. But there’s also this: At a certain point, you have to ask yourself how bad it’s going to get if America turns on you. And that’s where it gets interesting. For my podcast Gloves Off, which explores how Canada is preserving its sovereignty, I interviewed leading trade experts on how much damage the US could do to us. With a blanket 25 per cent tariff on Canadian products (the current American plan is limited to $20bn worth of goods), Canadian potential GDP growth would slow by between 1.8 and 2.4 per cent over a decade. People would lose jobs. Canada would suffer. But it’s not exactly a number that’s going to break us. The United States does not have anywhere near the discipline or capacities or solidarity to respond with any kind of organised will to retaliationAmerica is simply not that powerful anymore, and its power declines every week. If your national security is based on the US military, you are vulnerable. Their forces can’t beat anybody. Their logistics are thin. If you really need them, they won’t be there. There’s an old Texan expression that describes the current American reality: all hat and no cattle. The only thing they really know how to do is swagger. There’s a simpler calculation, too. The EU tried to mollify Trump. Britain tried to mollify Trump. The Middle Eastern states tried to mollify Trump. How did that work out for them? Meanwhile, the openly defiant ones like China? The Iranian regime? Never been better. It is in every country’s national interests to have America as an enemy rather than a friend. The European Union has tried to treat Trump with kid gloves – and it has gotten them no further than those who are outright hostile to him (AFP/Getty)The United States does not have anywhere near the discipline or capacities or solidarity to respond with any kind of organised will to retaliation. It’s in the middle of a debt crisis that’s going to cripple the borrowing power of multiple generations. Its military wanders from humiliation to humiliation. Its population is bitterly divided on virtually every issue. America is much bigger, much stronger, much richer, than Canada. But how much are ordinary Americans willing to suffer in order to harm Canada? I imagine the answer is either zero or near zero. Carney is being strategic. He has not pulled out the big guns, like export taxes on Canadian energy which powers the Northern states, or selling Canadian potash to China. Meanwhile we wait. “When the Americans go to the negotiation table first, with the right attitude toward our industries and a true partnership, of course we’ll come to the negotiating table,” Carney told reporters recently. “But an attitude at the negotiation table that Canada is a subsidiary of the United States … that’s not something we’re going to accept.” That is the lesson the rest of the world needs to learn about Trump: What you can’t accept, don’t accept. The sun will come up tomorrow. Stephen Marche is the author ‘The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future’, published by Simon & Schuster