Given the strained relations with Canada, I’m forwarding this opinion piece from The Globe and Mail in Ontario. I received it yesterday from George Shafer, a correspondent who lives in Almonte, Ontario, Canada. Mr. Shafer is a frequent contributor to these pages.

In a way, Donald Trump has taught us a valuable lesson.

His assault on American democracy has shown how fragile and precious democratic institutions are. His contempt for our system of alliances has shown us how vulnerable we would be if that shield were to fall away. His decision to use tariffs as a club reveals how much we rely on international trade and commerce for our prosperity. All three of those pillars – democracy, alliances, trade – were already under threat.

After advancing in many parts of the world in the latter part of the 20th century, democracy has been in retreat in the 21st. One recent report, by Sweden’s V-Dem Institute, said that for the first time in more than two decades the world has more autocracies than democracies.

Now, under Mr. Trump, democracy is at risk even in its citadel, the United States. His attacks on the media, on the universities, on the judiciary, on the legal profession – in fact, on just about every institution that could check his power – show that even in a country with a venerable, widely respected constitution and generations of democratic tradition, a determined person can do terrible damage.

Our system of alliances grew shaky after the end of the Cold War. Without the Soviet threat, the greatest of them, NATO, struggled to find a purpose. Defence spending stagnated in many countries, as Mr. Trump was only too willing to tell them when he first became president.

NATO began to recover with Vladimir Putin’sattack on Ukraine. Its response to the Russian threat was vigorous and united. Now that Mr. Trump is back for a second term, heaping disdain on Washington’s NATO partners when he is not ignoring them altogether, the need for a strong defence network becomes even clearer. Just look at what happens when a rogue president tries to freelance international diplomacy, as he is doing so clumsily over Ukraine.

Now consider trade. The chaos in the stock markets is just one sign of the damage the Trumpian trade wars could cause. The International Monetary Fund forecast this week that global economic growth would slow to 2.8 per cent in 2025, a drop from the 3.3 per cent it had predicted earlier. The reason: “Trade tensions and extremely high levels of policy uncertainty.” In other words, Mr. Trump.

The U.S. President has been like a dose of smelling salts for a slumbering world. Over recent decades, people in advanced democratic countries have become complacent and cynical. Many of us find modern democratic politics fake, dishonest and corrupt. Voter turnout has been dropping, distrust of the media rising, misinformation spreading.

Significant numbers of us find the economic system that has made Western countries so rich to be equally corrupt. Globalization became a dirty word, not to mention (gasp) capitalism. We grew blind to what we had gained through the advance of freer trade and more open markets.

The World Bank says that since 1990, “trade has increased incomes by 24 per cent globally and by 50 per cent for the poorest 40 per cent of the population,” lifting more than a billion people out of dire poverty. The Trump tariffs threaten those advances.

Many of us barely think about what it takes to safeguard our safety. Defence and security barely register in Canadian elections. We have been lounging under the American military umbrella for too long.

Perhaps the gods sent us Donald Trump as a warning. Like Dickens’s Ghost of Christmas Future, he is showing us just how bad things might be. As the song goes, you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.

Let’s not wait till that happens. Instead, Let’s renew our faith in the three pillars – democracy, alliances, trade – that he seems so perversely determined to destroy.