Canada as a bargaining chip
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Canada as a bargaining chip is the frame John Kiriakou used on 26 January 2026 to explain why a Canadian prime minister would deliver an uncharacteristically blunt speech about the United States at Davos, and why he expected the shift behind it to outlast the current administration.

Not about one president

Asked what he made of the speech, Kiriakou called it "sharp" and then rejected the obvious reading. "I don't think it was just to drill Donald Trump. I think that Carney really is laying out a separate path."

The message underneath, in his account: "the United States cannot be trusted as a long-term partner anymore. And so it's time for Canada to start looking out for Canada. And if that means closer trade ties with China, then there will be closer trade ties with China."

The bipartisan pressure

Kiriakou's explanation for the exhaustion is a pattern he attributes to both American parties. "Regardless of who happens to be in the White House, whether it's a Democrat or a Republican, we have been putting this pressure on the Canadians to wreck their relations with China, because it's good for US policy."

He gives one case in particular, and describes it as an errand run on Washington's behalf. "We want the Canadians, for example, to grab the CFO of Huawei and charge her with some kind of stupid computer hacking charge or whatever it happened to be, and then keep her in house arrest for three years, and then say: okay, you can trade her for something else."

The verb is doing the work. In Kiriakou's telling Canada was not asked to prosecute a crime; it was asked to hold an asset until the asset was useful.

The swing

His conclusion follows from that. "The Canadians are tired of being used as a bargaining chip for US-China relations." Told the speech might have been aimed at Europe as much as at Washington, he agreed and went further: "Absolutely. This was a slap at the Americans, and it's about time that Canada took that swing."

The passage is one of the clearest statements of a position Kiriakou returns to across many subjects, that American allies are managed rather than consulted, that the management is invisible to American audiences because it is done through friendly governments, and that the resulting resentment is real, cumulative and eventually spoken aloud.

See also

- China as economic threat
- China as mediator
- John Kiriakou
