Betrayal triggers the strongest emotions in all of us: rage, despair and the longing for revenge. Betrayals in high politics trigger much the same emotions as in private life. The resentment and bitterness that whole peoples can feel when they are betrayed decide what they are determined to avenge and what they are willing to forgive and forget.

When we are betrayed in our private lives, we break with lovers and friends and we confront the naïve soul—ourselves—who failed to see the betrayal coming in time. In politics, betrayal unleashes the same explosive effects, turning allies into adversaries, friends into enemies and forcing countries and peoples to awaken from comfortable illusions.

These dynamics of betrayal are transforming global politics. In Ukraine, soldiers manning the anti-missile batteries that shoot down Russian drones and missiles are having to struggle to down their targets because the Americans have turned off satellite intelligence. By turning off the technology that lights up the skies for the Ukrainians, an American President has decided, in effect, to blind an ally, in the middle of their battle to survive.

There has been perfidy aplenty in the long history of America’s relations to its allies, but this betrayal is in a class of its own.
With trust in the Americans ruptured, Ukrainians ask themselves what the peace that the Americans want to impose will be worth. Canadians are learning, too, what it means when betrayal destroys trust, in our case, one hundred- and fifty-years’ worth.

We had long since got used to American condescension and ignorance. Now we are now discovering that there is a lot worse: betrayal of agreements signed and ratified by both countries; ripping up partnerships across the border that enriched both sides, and the most basic betrayal of all, a President questioning why Canada should exist at all.

Americans of a Democratic persuasion are ashamed of their Administration’s betrayal of its friends. They beg her former allies to remember that this nefarious regime is not America. They will ask us to hang on for a day when an administration returns that understands how alliances, built on trust and fidelity, serve all our interests. The trouble is that the current regime is not an aberration, but a new iteration of a nativist, nationalist, isolationist strand in American public life that has been a robust competitor of the liberal internationalist strand throughout the 20^th century. The liberal internationalist Americans won’t return to power unless they can win the battle with authoritarian nationalism in heartland America. They will have their work cut out for them. Tariffs are popular there. Suspicion of alliances and European entanglements go back as far as George Washington’s farewell address. Suspicion of the liberal internationalist elite is visceral in the heartlands. Hopeful talk that the pendulum will swing back from nativist authoritarianism to international engagement is just hopeful talk.

It also ignores the dynamic of betrayal. Once it happens, those betrayed never forgive and never forget. In private life, we sometimes find it possible, for the sake of old times, for the sake of a marriage, for the sake of all we have shared, to forgive. Forgiveness between states is altogether more difficult.

Ukraine will never trust the United States again. America’s Canadian and European allies will neither forget nor forgive. The sting of betrayal makes this moment the starting point of a new dispensation, in which Europe looks to itself for its survival and Canada looks to its own resources, capacity for cohesion and history of endurance to survive as a free people.

Whoever is in charge of Canada’s government after the next election, the country will never return to a trusting relationship with its neighbor. Once your right to exist has been questioned, there is no way back. No agreement can be counted on to last, no understanding can return to the friendly domain of the tacit and taken for granted, no sharing of intelligence can be fully trusted. When Canadians go to Washington, even in a Democratic administration, sometime in the future, it will all be strictly business, deal by contingent deal, cash on the nail, time-limited, trust-free.

Betrayal, it needs to be remembered, is a great teacher. It is one of those blows that awakens you to harsh reality. You realize you never knew the person you once trusted. You face up to your own dependence, and you come face to face with your weakness. Betrayal is a coming awake.

Betrayal leaves you alone, confronting your solitude, forcing you to recognize that if you don’t get over it, you’ll become a prisoner of your victimhood. Betrayal teaches you to get up off the floor and stand on your own. It is the shock that forces you to reclaim your sovereignty, your pride and your independence. As with our private lives, so with the lives of nations and peoples. The American regime will have to reckon with the fact that the world it is creating will be decisively shaped by the newfound determination of those it has betrayed.

Michael Grant Ignatieff is a Canadian author, academic and former politician who served as leader of the Liberal Party and leader of the Opposition from 2008 to 2011. Known for his work as a historian, Ignatieff has held senior academic posts at the universities of Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard, and Toronto. Most recently he was rector and President of Central European University in Budapest, a position he held from 2016 until July 2021. His Substack column can be found at @michaelignatieff518703.