on chrystia freeland, "you aren't going to like what comes after america"
by and large this op-ed from the NYT a few days ago is pretty good, but there's a couple real groaner paragraphs in the middle (citations mine):
[...] A Pew survey published this month showed that in most of the 36 surveyed countries, China was viewed more favorably than the United States. That included Canada, where 33 percent of respondents saw America favorably, compared with 44 percent for China. People in France, Germany and Britain took a similar view.
At one level, that’s nonsense. China has an authoritarian12 communist government that imprisons345 and executes6789 dissidents1011 and ethnic minorities1213 and ruthlessly punishes foreign partners deemed to be stepping out of line, as it did with Canada a few years ago14, imprisoning two innocent Canadians in response to our decision to honor our extradition treaty with the United States in an unrelated case15.
literally the only word in that sentence you can't hang on the United States is "communist".
But given Mr. Trump’s choice to play by China’s rules and force smaller countries to suffer or to submit, the poll result shouldn’t be much of a surprise. Superpowers, even the most benign, are always resented. That means that America’s allies have all long harbored a latent strain of anti-Americanism.
maybe "America's allies" are just finding themselves presented with a choice between one violent, oppressive authoritarian regime that expresses a normal hyperpower's desire for self-interested cooperation, and another violent, oppressive authoritarian regime that is currently demonstrating that it will tear up its good relations with its allies for no good reason whatsoever except the Great Replacement conspiracy theory and a weird fixation on the policies of William fucking McKinley, and making a pragmatic choice.
maybe the rest of the Western world has realized that no matter how tight their ruling class clings to the American flag, at the end of the day, the principles it symbolized are dead (insofar as they existed in the first place), and they're moving on.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/designating-antifa-as-a-domestic-terrorist-organization/↩
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/31/us/texas-florida-terrorism-lists-cair-muslim.html↩
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detention_of_R%C3%BCmeysa_%C3%96zt%C3%BCrk↩
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_Kilmar_Abrego_Garcia↩
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killings_of_Aaron_Danielson_and_Michael_Reinoehl↩
https://abc7news.com/amp/post/golden-gate-bridge-protesters-7-pro-palestinian-demonstrators-found-guilty-lesser-charges-jury-deadlocked-felonies/19437543/↩
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Prairieland_ICE_detention_center_incident↩
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_racial_unrest_(2020%E2%80%932023)↩
as a reminder, this is a phrase embedded in an essay which is in part about the United States slapping an indefinite tariff on Canadian exports because Canada is suffering from uncontainable forest fires↩
for those who have forgotten (I had), this whole story was that the CFO of huawei was charged by the first trump administration for violating its sanctions on iran, in an attempt to use her as a bargaining chip in trade negotiations with china; canada extradited her to the US, in what the extradition judge himself said was a weird case for the federal government to go to the mat over; she was eventually allowed free on bail and offered a DPA by the biden administration where she had to issue a statement saying she did a crime but not actually do time, pay a fine, or admit legal culpability, in exchange for the government making the charges go away.
in response, china arrested two canadians for spying and held them until she was bailed out; when the canadians got back, one of them accused the other (who worked for the canadian foreign service, in an office that the canadian government itself warned in 2020 does a bad job of protecting its sources and teaching its officers about the limits of diplomatic immunity) of using him as an intelligence asset without his knowledge, threatened to sue the government over it, and the government agreed to pay him out "in acknowledgement of [his] ordeal and the suffering caused by [his] arbitrary detention by China."
this happened on freeland's watch as deputy PM, though, so I can understand her selective memory.↩