That was fast. Just days after announcing a punitive digital tax aimed squarely at U.S. tech giants—and being promptly met with a tariff whip from Donald Trump—Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney has tucked tail and pulled the plan. What we’re witnessing in Ottawa resembles the chaos in Brussels: a globalist outpost in full panic mode, lurching without strategy, caught off guard by geopolitical gravity.

These erratic moves betray the same confusion spreading across the Western managerial class: they have no idea how to respond to America’s looming reshuffle of global trade. And more than that—they still don’t know what to do with the unruly figure of Donald Trump. His tariffs are real. As real as the quiet protectionism long practiced by the EU and Canada. Suddenly, the world isn't operating according to the neat prescriptions of the Eurocrat’s socialist playbook, where Brussels reigns without dissent.

Still, nothing changes in Europe. Faced with the coming trade talks, the continent doesn’t budge an inch. Except for provocations—like Germany’s own Canada-style digital tax proposal targeting U.S. firms—there’s little but strategic inertia. Heads are buried in the sand. They’re running down the clock.

Carney’s tax gambit was a second probe—a second attempt to goad Trump into a misstep. But Trump held the line. He knows exactly what he’s facing: a cartel of power that has never learned to lose. A bloc accustomed to issuing demands while giving no ground. The very hard nut Trump always said he would crack.

Whether they like it or not, America is preparing to smash the protectionist cartel with sweeping tax reform, deregulation, and a fully national trade doctrine. And Trump will make sure realism returns to the world stage. He’ll expose the Europeans for what they are: protectionists dependent on trade and imported energy—still clinging to a postcolonial defiance, unwilling to accept that the world has turned.