Quick question: what do the Strait of Hormuz and the U.S. dollar have in common?
Both are chokepoints. One’s a shipping lane — squeeze it, and oil prices spike overnight. The other is a currency — squeeze it, and a country can go broke without a shot being fired.
That’s the idea behind a new book called Chokepoints, by former U.S. Treasury official Edward Fishman. His argument is this: America doesn’t need warships to run the world anymore. It controls the banking systems, tech exports, and the dollar itself. Use any one of these chokepoints and you can bring a country to its knees.
Canada doesn’t have to imagine what that feels like. We’re already squeezed, through our data, our military hardware, our trade, even our asylum system.
Former foreign minister Lloyd Axworthy said as much in a blunt Toronto Star column this week: Canada has “sleepwalked into a deep, systemic dependency on the United States.”
Read “I’m a former foreign minister. This is how Canada can disentangle itself from the U.S.,” by Lloyd Axworthy in the Toronto Star, September 1, 2026
So what does waking up actually look like? Here’s what I pulled out of Axworthy’s piece — eight real places for Canada to start.
8 ways to disentangle from the U.S.
1. Get our data out of America’s reach. Data stored in a “Canadian” cloud can still be pulled by U.S. law, thanks to something called the CLOUD Act — Treasury Board has confirmed it. Real sovereignty means owning our digital infrastructure, not just renting space inside someone else’s.
2. Make sure our military hardware actually answers to us. Axworthy’s sharpest example: our F-35 jets run on software wired straight into the Pentagon. If Canada ever needed to act alone — say, to defend the Arctic — would Washington’s black boxes even allow it? That question needs an answer before we buy more.
3. Bring back peacekeeping. In the 1990s, Canada had 3,000 peacekeepers deployed around the world. Today we have 27. It’s an entire tradition we traded away for an imported “warrior” military culture from the United States.
4. Rethink the Safe Third Country Agreement. Canada’s asylum system runs on the idea that anyone arriving from the U.S. already faced a fair process there. Axworthy calls that a fiction, especially with ICE deporting people by the thousands. Canada used to lead the world on refugee policy. We shouldn’t be outsourcing it to Washington.
5. Set real limits on U.S. ownership of Canadian companies. Decades of American buyouts have hollowed out our media, publishing, and resource sectors, Axworthy writes. Owning our own airwaves and land starts with owning the companies behind them.
6. Diversify our trade instead of digging in deeper. The more our supply chains tangle up with America’s, the harder they get to untangle later. Every year we wait makes the eventual split messier — which is the best argument for starting now, on our own terms.
7. Fix the politics that make us easy to squeeze. Axworthy ties all of this to domestic reform too: pushing back on separatist movements and foreign meddling, and putting real limits on corporate lobbying. An independent foreign policy needs independent domestic politics to back it up.
8. Rebuild our diplomatic corps — and use it. Canada’s diplomatic corps has been hollowed out for years. Axworthy wants it rebuilt so Canada can lead on nuclear disarmament, climate change, and regulating AI, instead of just reacting to whatever Washington decides.
Where do we start?
None of this is quick or cheap. Cutting ties with your biggest trading partner and closest ally never is. But Fishman and Axworthy are making the same point from two different angles: dependency is a chokepoint, and we’ve just watched the United States decide it’s willing to squeeze.
So, where do you think Canada should start?
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Chrétien’s “No” to Iraq lauded by readers
Last week we looked at the history of Prime Ministers, both Liberal and Conservative, saying No to the United States. I asked you to choose which decision you thought mattered most.
Prime Minister Jean Chrétien’s keeping Canada out of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 was chosen by most people (33%), followed by Prime Minister Mark Carney’s walking away from the U.S. trade talks last month (28%). The remaining choices were Prime Minister John Diefenbaker refusing nuclear warheads for the Bomarc missiles (18%), Prime Minister Lester Pearson not committing Canadians to the war in Vietnam (16%), and Prime Ministers Brian Mulroney and Paul Martin refusing to join U.S. missile defence programs (5%).
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