In the penultimate chapter of The Prince, Machiavelli warns that fortuna 

demonstrates her power where virtue has not been put in order to resist her and therefore turns her impetus where she knows that dams and dikes have not been made to contain her.

Put differently, the failure to prepare for misfortune is not inevitable. The best rulers or princes make plans that insulate their regimes from unexpected bad luck. They understand, as Machiavelli argues throughout The Prince, that good luck is not something one can count on, nor is it an achievement about which one should brag. Luck, good or bad, is something that simply happens, a reality that requires a realistic response, free of illusions about the resiliency of one’s political order.

On Jan. 6 this year, Justin Trudeau announced his resignation as prime minister of Canada. After serving nine years in this office and 11 years as leader of the Liberal Party, his good luck had finally run out. The official explanation for this departure shifted the blame to Donald Trump’s unexpected reelection that November and his threat of imposing 25 percent tariffs on Canadian exports bound for the U.S. market. 

Chrystia Freeland, Trudeau’s finance minister, had resigned in mid-December just before she was supposed to deliver a statement about the sorry state of Canada’s economy, amid rumors that she had zero confidence in her boss’s ability to address the tariff threat posed by the Trump White House. Instead of building up cash reserves that could mitigate the effects of these tariffs, Trudeau, in Freeland’s scorching words, had indulged in “costly political gimmicks” that would imperil the country’s shaky finances at the worst possible time. Those included a freeze on the national sales tax and sending out $250 checks to working Canadians. Trump’s recent musings about Canada becoming the 51^st state have only heated up the temperature among Canada’s already anxious chattering classes.