“Many of the voters in last year’s presidential election cast their ballots, animated in part by a desire to shrug off the burden of world leadership,” Ms. Freeland told a silent House of Commons.

“The fact that our friend and ally has come to question the very worth of its mantle of global leadership puts into sharper focus the need for the rest of us to set our own clear and sovereign course,” Ms. Freeland said. “For Canada, that course must be the renewal, indeed the strengthening, of the postwar multilateral order.”

Welcome to the Trudeau Doctrine: Canadian foreign policy seeks to preserve multilateral institutions and the Western alliance in the wake of America First.

This will not go down well with the prickly – and, it seems, at times paranoid – American President. And it contradicts earlier efforts to preserve good relations with the Trump administration in the lead-up to renegotiating the North American free-trade agreement.