Amid feverish tensions between the US and Canada following the G7 summit in June, Chrystia Freeland, Canada’s foreign minister, delivered a blunt warning from a luxury Washington hotel: authoritarianism was on the rise; liberal democracy was under threat, and it was unclear which path America would take.
“You may feel today that your size allows you to go mano a mano with your traditional adversaries and be guaranteed to win,” she said, in a rebuke of Donald Trump’s administration. “But if history tells us one thing, it is that no one nation’s pre-eminence is eternal.”
The speech cemented Ms Freeland’s status as a forceful and tireless defender of multilateralism and the rules-based international order in the age of Mr Trump and Russia’s Vladimir Putin.