In the early hours of Monday, Canada became one of the rare nations willing to openly defy the Trump administration's trade demands, as Prime Minister Mark Carney's $28 billion in retaliatory tariffs took effect against American goods. Negotiations had collapsed not over core trade disputes, but over last-minute demands — the erasure of French language protections, exclusive mineral rights, and limits on Canada's sovereign right to trade with the world — that Carney judged too costly to sovereignty to accept. The confrontation illuminates a deeper tension in the international order: whether ec