America tells the world (and Canada) the new rules of the game

In the latest episode of The Line Podcast, recorded on December 5th, 2025, hosts Matt Gurney and Jen Gerson open with the newly released U.S. foreign policy document, and they’re not exactly thrilled. 

They agree it’s an accurate  reflection of how the White House sees the world — uncomfortably accurate, in fact. They’ve been flagging many of these issues for months, hoping Canadians and Canadian policymakers would start paying attention. Now the White House has packaged all of it into one tidy, unsettling summary.

Some of what the document lays out is simply true, and Canadian and other allied politicians, especially on the left, have ignored those realities at their peril. Some of it is debatable, or at least worth taking seriously. And some of it is outright nuts, pulled straight from the conspiratorial anxieties of America’s far-right social media ecosystem. But whether reasonable, arguable, or deranged, it is now official White House policy — and the rest of us are going to have to learn to live with it.

From there, the conversation turns to how Canadians are, or aren’t, learning to live with it. There is still very little evidence that anyone here grasps the scale of the threat or the urgency involved. Jen introduces a new theory: Canada as a nation is increasingly resembling the federal New Democrats — and that’s not good news for anyone. She also says that at a moment we desperately need to be pulling together, we're instead getting set to fight another series of sovereignty referendums and a fresh pipeline war. She has concerns, is all. 

Oh, and also. Katy Perry!

All that and more in the latest episode of The Line Podcast. Visit our main site at ReadTheLine.ca.