几十年来，加拿大一直依赖美国生存。它就像一只寄生虫，享受着身为美国“第51个州”所带来的种种好处，却从不回报分毫。加拿大人心里明白，没有美国的保护他们根本无法生存，可他们那位忘恩负义的总理马克·卡尼却拒绝向边境那头这个伟大而美好的国家低头。
ENTITLED CANADA has been feeding off America for decades. Like a parasitic bug, it enjoys the benefits of being America’s cherished 51st state without giving anything back. Canadians know they couldn’t live without America’s protection, yet their ungrateful prime minister, Mark Carney, refuses to defer to the great and beautiful country over the border.
这就是唐纳德·特朗普眼中的加拿大——在这种认知下，这两个盟友之间根本不存在互利的可能。这位行事霸道的总统不断提高关税；他甚至将安大略湖的南半部分重新命名为“美国湖”。作为回应，加拿大民众纷纷吐掉嘴里的肯塔基波本威士忌，纷纷离开拉斯维加斯。上任仅18个月的卡尼依然态度强硬，成了这场旷日持久、充满戏剧性且引人入胜的对峙中的主角。
That is how Donald Trump sees Canada, and it leaves no room for mutual benefit between the two allies. The bullying president is ratcheting up tariffs. He has renamed the southern side of Lake Ontario Lake America. Canadian consumers, in response, are spitting out their Kentucky bourbon and leaving Las Vegas. Mr Carney, in office for 18 months, remains defiant, the star of an extended, dramatic and riveting stand-off.
接下来请继续阅读我们的专题报道。到现在，或许你会觉得卡尼早该屈服了——毕竟加拿大只是个中等规模的国家，经济表现平平，军事实力也相当薄弱，自身弱点数不胜数。10月19日，阿尔伯塔省将举行公投，决定是否未来脱离加拿大独立；届时人们会清楚地看到加拿大的脆弱之处——要知道，该省拥有的石油储量甚至超过了整个美国。
Read the rest of our cover package By now you might have expected Mr Carney to have caved in. Canada is only a mid-size power with a so-so economy and puny armed forces. It has vulnerabilities aplenty. One will be evident on October 19th, when the province of Alberta holds a referendum asking if it may one day secede, taking with it more oil in the ground than in the entire United States.
事实上，卡尼目前声望颇高。民意调查显示，阿尔伯塔省的民众很可能选择留在加拿大。在他的领导下，加拿大的表现也超出了预期。今年1月，在达沃斯年度论坛上，正是卡尼提出所谓“中等规模国家”必须设法应对那些具有威胁性的大国。九个月后的今天，他的国家为这些中等规模国家在面对霸权大国施压时该如何应对提供了宝贵经验。
In fact Mr Carney is riding high. Polls suggest that those Albertans will probably vote to stay. And under him, Canada is doing better than you might expect. In January it was Mr Carney, at the annual jamboree in Davos, who argued that what he called the “middle powers” must find ways to take on threatening ones. Nine months on, his country offers lessons for what these middle powers should do when the hegemonic giant pulls the mat from under them.
这些教训始于一剂令人振奋的现实主义。正如我们所指出的，中等国家永远无法取代霸权国家，成为维持联合国等强大永久性机构的力量。由于美国和中国都在利用或破坏权力共享的安排和规范，世界变得更加危险。大胆行事的破坏者如俄罗斯和伊朗正变得更具掠夺性。协调更为温和的中等国家往往太难，难以取得显著成果——正如即使是最发达的中等国家俱乐部欧盟所显示的那样。
Those lessons start with a bracing dose of realism. As we set out, middle powers will never replace the hegemons as the force that sustains powerful permanent institutions such as the UN. The world has grown more dangerous because both America and China are exploiting or undermining arrangements and norms in which power was shared. Emboldened, wreckers like Russia and Iran are becoming even more predatory. Co-ordinating the more herbivorous middle powers is often too hard to get much done—as you can see in even the most developed middle-power club, the European Union.
然而，中等国家仍能减轻部分损害，正如加拿大及其盟友所展示的那样。卡尼先生一直在世界各地奔走，不仅达成新的贸易协议，还推动象征性协议，例如讨论欧盟准成员国身份。同样，在美国在特朗普第一任期内退出被称为TPP的大型跨太平洋贸易协议后，日本挺身而出，使其得以复苏。在国防领域，加拿大正在削减对美国的旧有依赖，并考虑订购瑞典“鹰狮”战斗机——正如挪威正在购买英国护卫舰，阿拉伯联合酋长国正在采购乌克兰的尖端无人机。
Yet middle powers can still mitigate some of the damage, as Canada and its allies show. Mr Carney has zipped around the world making new trade deals as well as drumming up symbolic agreements, such as talk of associate EU membership. In the same way, after the United States backed out of a big trans-Pacific trade deal known as TPP during Mr Trump’s first term, Japan stepped in to revive it. In the realm of defence, Canada is trimming its old reliance on America, and is considering placing an order for Swedish Gripen fighter jets—just as Norway is buying British frigates and the United Arab Emirates is purchasing Ukraine’s cutting-edge drones.
当中等国家面临特定威胁时，它们可以施加一些影响力，正如欧洲曾驳回特朗普对格陵兰的意图。这种方法的优势和局限在乌克兰问题上表现得十分明显。欧洲和加拿大对乌克兰的财政和军事支持，在美方撤回后有所加强，这表明中等国家可以协同行动。弗拉基米尔·普京的军队在顿巴斯地区付出了惨痛的代价，只换来微小的收益。局限性同样明显，正如特朗普本周通过其“柴油外交”所展示的那样。
When middle powers face a particular threat, they can throw around some weight, as when Europe rebuffed Mr Trump’s designs on Greenland. The strengths and limits of this approach are clear in Ukraine. Financial and military support for Ukraine from Europe and Canada, stepping up after America pulled back, shows how middle powers can act in concert. Vladimir Putin’s army pays a dreadful blood price for its small gains in the Donbas. The limits are clear, too, as Mr Trump showed with this week’s diesel diplomacy.
然而，加拿大最重要的教训，来自务实的卡尼在国内所做的一切。几年前，该国糟糕的政治和衰败的政府似乎已陷入瘫痪。人均收入已从1980年代美国的90%下滑至2022年的仅71%，其中大部分下滑发生在近期一波低技能移民潮之后。如今，卡尼正在推行迟来已久的举措，以提振生产率、开放经济，并将国防开支从微不足道的GDP的1.3%提高到2%。
Canada’s most important lesson, however, emerges from what the pragmatic Mr Carney is doing at home. A few years ago the country’s woeful politics and ailing government seemed broken. Income per person had drifted from 90% of America’s in the 1980s to just 71% in 2022, much of it following a recent burst of low-skilled immigration. Today Mr Carney is pushing through overdue measures to boost productivity, open the economy and lift defence spending from a pitifully low 1.3% of GDP to 2%.
在他的首批举措中，他取消了一项不得人心的消费者碳税，并誓言修建一条输油管道，将阿尔伯塔省的石油输往西海岸。他已着手削减内部贸易壁垒，叫停了大幅上调资本利得税的计划，降低了最低档个人所得税税率，并制定了削减联邦开支的计划。在与美国的贸易争端中，加拿大也展示了其维护自身利益的能力，在中期选举前夕，针对来自摇摆州的美国进口商品征收对等关税，并争分夺秒地削减对邻国的长期依赖。
Among his first steps, he scrapped an unpopular consumer carbon tax and vowed to build a pipeline to carry oil from Alberta to the west coast. He has started to cut internal barriers to trade, called off a hefty rise in capital-gains tax, cut the lowest rate of income tax and set out plans to trim federal spending. In that trade dispute with America, Canada has also shown that it can stand up for itself, targeting reciprocal tariffs on American imports from swing states in the run-up to the midterm elections and scrambling to cut its long-term dependence on its neighbour.
卡尼迄今成功抵御了所谓的“容克诅咒”，该诅咒以欧洲委员会前主席让-克洛德·容克命名。谈及改革，容克曾说：“我们都知道该做什么，只是不知道做完后如何才能连任。”然而，卡尼在推行改革的同时，声望却节节攀升。两年前，超过十分之九的加拿大人认不出他的照片。如今，一场“枫叶大狂欢”正在上演：民调显示，总理的支持率接近70%。在国际上，他已取代深陷困境的法国总统马克龙，成为中间派的新宠。与深受自己选民厌恶的特朗普形成了鲜明对比。
Mr Carney has so far managed to resist what is known as the “Juncker curse”, named after a president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker. Speaking of reform, Mr Juncker once said: “We all know what to do, we just don’t know how to get re-elected after we’ve done it.”Yet Mr Carney’s popularity has been surging even as he reforms. Two years ago, more than nine in ten Canadians could not recognise his photograph. Today a maple-leaf love-in is under way: polls show the prime minister’s approval rating nearing 70%. Internationally, he has replaced France’s beleaguered Emmanuel Macron as the centrists’ pin-up. The contrast with Mr Trump, unloved by his own voters, is stark.
的确，加拿大必须在自由化改革上走得更远、更快。2029年特朗普离任时，美加关系改善的可能性很大，但尚不确定。因此，加拿大应致力于保持其选择的开放性。
True, Canada must go further and faster with its liberalising changes. There is every chance that relations with America will improve when Mr Trump leaves office in 2029, but it is not certain. It should therefore work on keeping its options open.
其他中等国家可以从加拿大身上汲取经验。当然，加拿大拥有一些其他国家无法复制的优势，例如其广阔的能源和矿产资源，以及远离最尖锐地缘政治冲突点的有利地理位置。然而，这些国家完全可以在具有具体且有限目标的一次性项目上开展合作。
Other middle powers can learn from Canada. Naturally, it has some strengths they cannot copy, such as its vast energy and mineral reserves and its lucky geography, far from the nastiest geopolitical flashpoints. Yet there is room for them to co-operate on one-off projects with tangible and limited aims.
此外，它们可以通过利用国内变革的需求来在国际上增强自身实力。某种程度上，特朗普为所有民主国家做了一件好事，因为他给了它们一个理由来应对那些曾被认为过于艰巨的长期问题。中等国家需要为一个危险的世界做好准备。它们应参考卡尼和加拿大的做法，以寻找应对之策。■ 仅供参考：如需了解我们每周 的设计过程，请订阅我们的每周 故事通讯。
And they can fortify themselves abroad by harnessing the need for change at home. In a way, Mr Trump has done all democracies a favour, by giving them a reason to tackle long-standing problems that seemed too hard. The middle powers need to prepare for a dangerous world. They should look to Mr Carney and Canada for an answer on what to do. ■ Forrs only: to see how we design each week’s cover, sign up to our weekly Cover Story newsletter.