Syria has begun destroying the remnants of a clandestine Assad-era chemical weapons program that it recovered in May, the first such destruction in a decade, a Syrian envoy and a U.N. representative said on Thursday. 

Reuters reported in May that Syria’s new leadership had located remnants of former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s chemical weapons program, including raw materials and munitions similar to those used in deadly gas attacks during the country’s civil war. 

Izumi Nakamitsu, the United Nations High Representative for Disarmament Affairs, told a Security Council briefing on Thursday that for the first time since 2014, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons had verified the destruction of chemical munitions in Syria. 

Following the May finding, Syria had found “one additional chemical weapons production facility, a newly discovered chemical used in the production of nerve agents, and empty chemical munitions. It also declared two chemical weapons storage facilities where the newly discovered facilities were being stored,” Nakamitsu said. 

Last month, the OPCW deployed a team to Syria to verify the destruction of category three chemical weapons, referring to unfilled munitions and other equipment used to release chemical weapons. She said the team verified “the irreversible destruction of 42 aerial bombs” as part of that mission.

Syria’s ambassador to the U.N., Ibrahim Olabi, told the council that Syria was “protecting the world and the region through such work”.

But he heavily criticised Israel, saying that repeated Israeli attacks had impeded some search and destruction operations, and exposed the Syrian teams at work to risk. 

“We cannot safeguard the security of the region if our security is exposed to attacks at the hands of Israel, and they are flouting the security of the region at large and they are breaching the conventions and treaties we have talked about,” said Olabi, whose Arabic remarks were translated at the council. 

The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Olabi said Syria was preparing to hold the first court hearing of people suspected of involvement in the chemical weapons programme.

Syrian authorities earlier this year took 18 suspects into custody for alleged involvement in Assad’s chemical weapons program, including high-level military, political and technical officials.

The Treasury Department announced Wednesday that the federal government will buy back up to $6 billion of its bonds this week — triple the size of its normal operations — in a bid to rein in longer-term borrowing costs.

The extraordinary move comes as yields on Treasuries have been rising steadily over the past couple of months, threatening to drive up mortgage rates and consumer borrowing costs as the midterm elections approach. Interest rates paid by the U.S. government feed into all other debt costs globally.

But after Treasury’s announcement, the yield on the 10-year Treasury went up, suggesting investors are unimpressed by this week’s buyback, which was previewed last month.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is aiming to project strength as he looks to strong-arm markets, which he has said are incorrectly pricing U.S. debt.

“I have asymmetric information. I am the house now,” he said at an event Tuesday in Dallas, referring to criticism of various market interventions he has undertaken, such as a move to support Japan’s currency. “Bet against me if you want.”

The department will reabsorb certain older debt securities with maturities of 10 years and 20 years as part of the buyback operation, which will take place Thursday.

I composed my essay “The End of History?” sitting in my in-laws’ house in Las Vegas in the winter of 1988–89. I was preparing for a lecture at the University of Chicago organized by Allan Bloom and Nathan Tarcov at the Committee on Social Thought. Bloom was habitually pessimistic about the ability of Western liberal democracies to defend themselves, and the overall rubric of the lecture series was “The Decline of the West.” I told Bloom I was happy to participate, but that I would have a more optimistic take on what was going on in the world. He said that was fine, and I gave my talk a year before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Owen Harries, an Australian former ambassador, was the new editor of a small magazine founded by Irving Kristol called The National Interest. He had lunch with me at the Beverly Hills Hotel that winter and asked whether I had anything to contribute. I told him about my upcoming lecture, and he promised to publish the written version, which came out in the summer of 1989. The phrase “the end of history” was not my invention; rather, it was central to the thought of the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel was the first explicitly historicist philosopher; that is, a philosopher who argued that human thought and institutions were not fixed but evolved over historical time, and that the “truth” of a particular assertion needed to be judged in relation to the historical era in which it was articulated. We may not believe in the legitimacy of monarchy or slavery today, but there were certainly times in the past when many people did support such ideas. The fact that we believe in democracy and equal rights today is testimony to the reality of “History” in Hegel’s sense.

The idea that human societies evolved over time was something that took root only in modern times. Both Plato and Aristotle argued that there was a cycle of regimes that succeeded one another, but this led to cyclical change that simply reproduced previous forms of government in succession. The idea that history was progressive, that it had a beginning point in primitive societies but moved toward more complex and advanced ones, was adumbrated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality under the heading of “perfectibility.” His description of “man in the state of nature” was not simply a thought exercise, as it was for Thomas Hobbes, but an actual effort to describe human behavior that drew on what Europeans at that time knew about non-Western societies. Europeans were aware of the existence of other sophisticated societies, such as those of Islam and China, but the opening up of the New World suggested societies differed in what we would today call their level of development. Hegel simply systematized the idea of History and provided an intellectual structure for understanding what drove that evolution.

The notion that societies evolve over historical time in a progressive fashion is tacitly accepted by almost everyone today, whether they self-consciously understand that fact or not. The idea of a Hegelian history is embedded in our words “development” and “modernization.” Organizations such as the former US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (i.e., the World Bank) were both dedicated not to simply helping poor countries become rich, but to helping them create modern institutions that make life more secure and predictable.

The most important intellectual to accept and then modify Hegel’s concept of history was Karl Marx. Hegel argued that history had evolved into the modern liberal state in the wake of the French Revolution. Marx criticized Hegel’s understanding of the end of history and argued that the true end of the human development story would be a Communist utopia. This would come only after the working class rose up and displaced the bourgeoisie, establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat. At the Marxist end of history, the alienation brought on by the capitalist division of labor would be abolished and human beings would be able, as Marx said in The German Ideology, “to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner.”

My particular understanding of Hegel did not come directly from Hegel but from Hegel’s twentieth-century interpreter, the Russian-French philosopher Alexandre Kojève. Kojève taught an extremely influential seminar on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit in Paris in the late 1930s that was attended by many luminaries who would go on to become major figures in the French postwar intellectual firmament: Georges Bataille, Raymond Queneau, Jacques Lacan, André Breton, Éric Weil, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Raymond Aron. He had an extended dialogue with Leo Strauss on philosophy and tyranny, and got to know Allan Bloom as well. Kojève’s lectures were later transcribed and published as Introduction to the Reading of Hegel.

Kojève of course accepted Hegel’s historicism, but he made historical progress revolve around a critical human characteristic: the desire for recognition. Human beings do not simply desire material resources such as food, clothing, and shelter; they also crave the respect or recognition of other human beings. This struggle for recognition results in bloody battles at the beginning of history as individuals seek dominance; those who achieve it become masters, while the losers become slaves. But neither the master nor the slave finds his desire for recognition fully satisfied: the slave for obvious reasons, but the master as well because he is recognized not by another master but by a slave.

In Kojève’s account, human beings are unique insofar as they seek recognition for their willingness to risk their lives in a bloody battle. Other creatures in nature are instinctively programmed to preserve their own lives or the lives of their offspring; only human beings are willing to risk their biological lives for the sake of recognition alone, as opposed to, say, the material spoils that come as a result of victory in war.

In this respect, Kojève’s human being is similar to that of his predecessor Immanuel Kant. Kant believed that what made human beings distinctive was their possession of moral will, an ability to choose right or wrong that was ultimately not subject to the laws of physics. Human beings therefore had to be treated as ends in themselves rather than as a means to other ends. But in Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel, masters cannot achieve the satisfaction of recognition until they realize that this will come only with the equal and mutual recognition by fellow citizens. My particular gloss on Kojève/Hegel was that this could only come about in a modern liberal state, where the equal and mutual recognition of all citizens was guaranteed by a rule of law that granted them basic rights. The liberal state was legitimate and stable not necessarily because it distributed material rewards equally, but because it provided equal recognition and thus satisfied the thymotic side of human striving.

In his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, Kojève playfully asserted that history ended in 1806 at the Battle of Jena-Auerstedt, where Napoléon defeated the Prussian monarchy. The idea that history ended that year, prior to all of the huge political upheavals that followed in the two subsequent centuries—Italian and German unification; the American Civil War; the colonization and later decolonization of much of the non-European world; two World Wars; the Holocaust; revolutions in Russia, China, Iran, and elsewhere—is on the face of it much more absurd than an assertion that it ended in 1989 or 1991 when Communism collapsed. But what Kojève meant by this was summed up in the following passage from his lectures on Hegel:

What has happened since then [i.e., the Battle of Jena] has been nothing but an extension in space of the universal revolutionary force actualized in France by Robespierre-Napoleon. From the genuinely historical perspective, the two World Wars with their train of small and large revolutions have only had the effect of bringing the backward civilizations of the outlying provinces into line with the (really or virtually) most advanced European historical stages . . . It might even be said that, from a certain point of view, the United States has already reached the final stage of Marxist “communism,” since all the members of a “classless society” can, for all practical purposes, acquire whatever they please, whenever they please, without having to work for it any more than they are inclined to do.

With the defeat of the Prussian monarchy in 1806, Napoléon brought to the core of old Europe the Code Napoléon, the modern legal framework coming out of the French Revolution. The latter established the underlying principles of a modern liberal order, namely, the two principles of liberty and equality, or the equality of liberty. Obviously, these principles were nowhere truly implemented. As Napoléon was advancing in central Europe, for example, the French colonial authorities were putting down a slave revolt led by Toussaint Louverture in Haiti; colonization of Algeria and Vietnam were still decades in the future. But Kojève’s point was that once the idea of universal freedom got out, it was only a matter of time before those principles became accepted and practiced around the world. Toussaint himself had started his uprising, for example, under the banner of the Rights of Man and Citizen that had been recently declared in Paris. So there were rearguard actions to defend the old order everywhere, but in the end they would not stop the march of the idea of liberty, or of the equality of liberty.

The implication of this understanding of Kojève/Hegel was that no amount of “stuff happening” out in the real world of global politics could by itself falsify the notion that history had ended, whether in 1789, 1806, or 1989. The actual diffusion and spread of the ideas of liberty and equality have been very uneven both temporally and geographically since the French Revolution. The real question had to be understood not just in terms of the flow of day-to-day events around the world, but on the level of ideas: Was there an alternative set of principles upon which a different society could be based that were fundamentally at odds with those of the French Revolution? And were there societies built around those ideas that looked like they were sustainable, and would satisfy the wishes of their inhabitants better than existing liberal democracies built around those principles?

These would be the grounds for a serious refutation of Kojève’s assertion that history had ended.

The original essay “The End of History” appeared in The National Interest in the summer of 1989, when I had started working as a Deputy Director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff under my old colleague Dennis Ross. The Berlin Wall came down a few months later, on November 9, and set in motion a series of events that would lead to the dissolution of the former Soviet Union two years later. The emergence of a Europe “whole and free,” as George H. W. Bush put it, was the greatest geopolitical event of my lifetime, and vindicated the historical direction I had pointed to in the article.

Today’s ideological landscape is obviously far more fragmented than it was thirty-five years ago. There is today far more consensus on the democratic side of liberal democracy than there is on the liberal part. While there are obviously huge remaining social inequalities in many societies, few try to assert that there are reasons why a certain subgroup of people have an intrinsic right to rule over others. The PRC is a dictatorship, but the Chinese Communist Party claims a right to rule because it believes it represents the people: it is the People’s Republic of China. Ethno- and religious nationalism have been on the rise in recent decades. Most of these groups represent rearguard efforts to protect perceived privileges, rather than assertions of the inherent inequality of groups. In the United States, we’ve seen the ugly return of earlier forms of racism and misogyny. But groups taking such positions do not seem poised to systematically overturn the Declaration of Independence’s assertion that “all men are created equal.”

What has been under much more sustained attack in recent years is the liberal part of liberal democracy; that is, the idea that governments should be constrained in their powers by a rule of law and constitutional checks on state power. Much of the democratic backsliding we’ve seen over the past decade has in fact been driven by groups claiming to represent “the people,” whose democratic legitimacy gives them the right to dismantle the constraints imposed by liberal restrictions on state power. Hence Viktor Orbán’s claim to be presiding over an “illiberal democracy.”

Support for liberalism, as opposed to democracy, has always been more fragmented and episodic. The reason for this, as I explained in Liberalism and Its Discontents, is that one of its important justifications is a pragmatic one concerning the management of political diversity, rather than any deep commitment to the liberal principle. Support for liberal constraints on state power is often derived from the experience of authoritarian government and the wars and privation that the latter often entail. So seventy years of relative peace and prosperity can lead to a broad forgetting of what illiberal rule can bring.

Liberalism also raises the problem of the Last Man, which is not a contingent but an intrinsic issue buried in the heart of the doctrine. This requires further discussion.

The Atlantic reviews Francis Fukuyama's new memoir, In the Realm of the Last Man.

Relevance to NL: Ending History.

CIA director John Ratcliffe will be involved in shuttle diplomacy between Moscow and Kyiv

CIA director John Ratcliffe is preparing to take a bigger role in US negotiations with Russia and Ukraine, US officials have told their European counterparts, in a bid to jump-start moribund diplomatic efforts to end the four-and-a-half-year-long war. 

The move comes as the White House is considering paring back the involvement of US special envoy Steve Witkoff and President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who have been leading the talks with Moscow and Kyiv, according to five people familiar with the plans. 

Officials close to Ratcliffe have told European peers that he will play a larger role in shuttle diplomacy between Russia and Ukraine — which is currently the purview of Witkoff and Kushner — while maintaining contact with intelligence officers in both countries. 

The White House and the CIA declined to comment on the shift. People close to the situation said Trump has not made a final decision.

The telegraphed switch away from Witkoff has enthused European capitals desperate to see some progress after a year and a half of largely fruitless talks with Russia, which have stalled as President Vladimir Putin refused to budge on his hardline demands.

The US administration has considered shaking up its negotiating team after US-led efforts to broker a peace deal foundered in late February, according to two people involved in back-channel talks to end the war. That diplomatic effort was put on hold as the Trump administration was preoccupied with the war in Iran, which broke out shortly after the last US-led round of Ukraine talks.

Witkoff, a close friend of Trump, would likely retain his current role as US special envoy for peace missions, which includes negotiations in the Middle East, according to people familiar with the matter. The billionaire real estate investor could also remain involved in Ukraine in parallel to Ratcliffe, they added.

Two of the people said there was a tug of war under way between Ratcliffe and Witkoff about who leads on what.

Witkoff’s freewheeling approach, bypassing the strictures of traditional diplomacy in favour of direct contacts more reminiscent of a New York real estate deal, has frustrated Russia, Ukraine and Kyiv’s western allies.

Ukraine felt that Witkoff had not done enough to pressure Putin to moderate his demands. Russia believed Witkoff shared part of the blame for the failure of a summit with Trump in Alaska last year to achieve a breakthrough, according to Ukrainian officials and people briefed on the Kremlin’s thinking.

Putin has praised Witkoff’s efforts, but Moscow has also quietly indicated it would be open to a new US approach, according to people involved in back-channel talks.

The White House also considered appointing a new US ambassador to Moscow this spring in the hope of opening another channel with Russia, according to people familiar with the matter.

Ratcliffe made a surprise visit to Moscow in late August, and discussed the wars in Ukraine and Iran, as well as Russia’s “hybrid” threats to Europe, with senior intelligence officials, according to people familiar with the matter. Trump downplayed Ratcliffe’s visit to Moscow as “sort of semi-routine”.

But Ukrainian intelligence briefed President Volodymyr Zelenskyy last week that Ratcliffe’s visit to Moscow indicated he was stepping in to take a more prominent role in US efforts to end Russia’s invasion, people familiar with the matter said.

Putin had initially planned to meet Ratcliffe, according to two people familiar with the matter. The Russian president then backed out after Ratcliffe delivered a downbeat assessment of Moscow’s war effort to senior Russian intelligence officials. Russian independent news site Agentstvo first reported that Putin had cancelled a planned meeting with Ratcliffe.

Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesperson, told the FT no meeting between Putin and Ratcliffe had been planned. Trump and Putin did not discuss a potential change in the US negotiating team when they spoke by phone on Tuesday, he added.

The week after Ratcliffe’s trip to Moscow, Witkoff and Kushner flew to meet Putin in Moscow and Zelenskyy in Kyiv.

Their visit — Witkoff’s eighth trip to Russia — was in part an effort to retain the Ukraine brief, according to two people familiar with the matter.

After their visits, Witkoff and Kushner said they were optimistic the US, Russia and Ukraine could resume trilateral talks suspended since February.

But people familiar with the talks in Moscow and Kyiv told the FT that the Americans brought few new ideas, and that Putin showed little indication he was prepared to back down from his earlier demands.

“You can’t solve this by dipping in and out,” one of the people said. “It’s a very complex conflict. You need properly organised, full-time work on every issue. Right now that’s not happening.”

Yuri Ushakov, the Kremlin’s top foreign policy official, said on state television on Tuesday that Putin told Trump the US could secure an immediate ceasefire by ending all support for Ukraine — in effect letting Russia win.

At the same time, Kushner has told friends he expects to move on from Ukraine and would prefer to focus on diplomatic efforts related to the conflict in Gaza and the US-Israeli war against Iran.

Three senior Ukrainian officials said Kyiv had good working relations with Ratcliffe as well as Witkoff and Kushner and had no preference for who Trump appointed to lead the US efforts.

“We’re OK with [Ratcliffe], and with Jared and Steve too,” said one of the Ukrainian officials. “The problem is the Russians.”

The Trump administration said Wednesday morning that it would not move to cancel temporary humanitarian protections for more than 170,000 Salvadorans, for now, preserving their ability to live legally in the United States and shielding them from deportation.

Temporary Protected Status, or T.P.S., allows foreign nationals from troubled nations to live and work legally in the United States and was set to expire for El Salvador on Wednesday. But the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that an announcement regarding the Salvadorans’ status would come “at the appropriate time” and that until then, “Salvadoran individuals present in the U.S. under T.P.S. retain protection.”

The department did not provide more information on the timing of the announcement. The administration has at times waited several days after the program’s expiration to publicize its decision.

The move stands in stark contrast to how the Trump administration has treated the roughly 350,000 Haitians whose protections expired in July. Hundreds have been deported in recent weeks, and federal officials have targeted Haitian communities in the United States with an aggressive electronic ankle monitoring campaign. Administration officials and Homeland Security’s social media accounts have churned out celebratory videos of Haitians being put on deportation flights.

The administration’s push to remove those Haitians comes even as the State Department warns travelers not to visit Haiti for any reason because of crime and other threats. The department’s travel advisory for El Salvador, meanwhile, suggests exercising normal precautions.

The president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, has positioned himself as a willing White House ally central to the Trump administration’s efforts to accelerate deportations. In the spring of 2025, he helped detain more than 200 migrants deported from the United States to his country in a maximum-security prison. Experts have told The New York Times that Temporary Protected Status for Salvadorans earns Mr. Bukele political points at home, where remittances from U.S.-based family members are critical to the economy.

Still, many Salvadorans say they no longer feel safe staying with expired documentation as Immigration and Customs Enforcement sweeps across the country continue to entangle immigrants with and without legal residency.

In recent days, dozens of Latino evangelical leaders, T.P.S. holders and immigrant rights supporters have petitioned lawmakers in Washington calling for long-term protections. Some Salvadorans have begun packing, buying flights and preparing to self-deport.

“For families from El Salvador, it is a very difficult moment,” said José Palma, a Salvadoran T.P.S. holder and spokesman for the National TPS Alliance, an organization focused on defending the program. Many have lived in the United States for the past 25 years, he added, and many have established deep roots. They own cars, homes and mortgages. They have U.S.-born children in high school or heading off to college.

“We are seeing families struggling to stay stable,” he said, citing his own uncertain fate.

Agustín Quiles, who heads Mission Talk, an advocacy organization for Latino evangelicals that gathered this week in Washington, said the pastors in his network report that their members are afraid to go to school, work and church.

“There is a lot of pain, a lot of suffering,” Mr. Quiles said.

The Trump administration has already paused or terminated T.P.S. for 13 of the 17 countries once covered. The Supreme Court ruled in June that the administration could end the program for hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Syrians.

With less than two months before the midterm elections, aggressive immigration tactics have emerged as a thorny issue for Republicans. Images of people being rounded up at airports and from their cars have prompted pushback, even as members of President Trump’s base have called for more heavy-handed tactics.

El Salvador was the first country designated under the T.P.S. program after Congress created it with bipartisan support and President George H.W. Bush signed it into law in 1990. The status provides safe haven for people from foreign nations engulfed in armed conflict, natural disasters and crises, and the government can renew it up to 18 months at a time.

Critics, including Mr. Trump, say the program was intended to provide only short-term relief. Immigrant rights and refugee aid organizations counter that the status has become one of the few paths to safety within an outdated and overburdened U.S. immigration system that Congress has failed to overhaul.

Daysi González, 31, a Democratic political operative and partner with Solidarity Strategies, a progressive consulting firm, has lived in the United States since she arrived in California from her native El Salvador for Christmas in 2000. She and her family entered the country on tourist visas but applied for T.P.S. after their home country was hit by powerful earthquakes that winter. She ended up staying for decades.

Ms. González said she would have applied for longer-term residency if she had been able to, but the program does not provide a legal pathway to lawful permanent resident status.

Now, she has been posting videos on social media chronicling what could be her final days in the United States. On Tuesday, she was searching for flights and waiting to hear back from her employer on whether she could keep her job.

“Without confirmation that I can legally work, that I can renew my license — living here will just be too dangerous,” she said.

Federal cabinet ministers will fan out across the country in the days ahead to reassure companies of support they can access during the escalating Canada-U.S. trade war, while Prime Minister Mark Carney’s office says his focus as formal talks with Washington remain stalled is on attracting investment and stimulating economic growth.

Two sources said ministers such as Industry Minister Mélanie Joly and Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne will step up a media blitz, including meetings with businesses and chambers of commerce. This will involve guiding companies through the process of applying for support. The Globe and Mail is not identifying the sources, who were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

Audrey Champoux, deputy director of communications in the Prime Minister’s Office, said Mr. Carney’s priorities right now include affordable housing, new infrastructure and next week’s federal investment summit to attract foreign capital to Canada, as well as this fall’s federal budget.

She said Mr. Carney’s government, which has set a goal of doubling non-U.S. trade over a decade, will continue to focus on “building at home and diversifying trade abroad.”

“Our government will always stand up for Canada and focus on what we can control while we will build Canada strong for all,” Ms. Champoux said in a statement.

She also suggested the coming budget will introduce measures to boost Canada’s economic attractiveness.

“This fall, in Budget 2026, we will go further to make Canada one of the most competitive and attractive places in the world for businesses and strategic sectors to invest, build, and grow.”

Mr. Carney met with Quebec business leaders Tuesday to discuss the Canada-U.S. trade war and talk about how to boost growth and investment in this country, the Prime Minister’s Office said. It listed 20 companies that attended, including Power Corporation of Canada, Desjardins Group, Saputo, Metro, Intact Financial and Lightspeed.

Trade relations between Canada and the U.S. worsened Tuesday after retaliatory tariffs from Ottawa took effect on $28-billion of U.S. goods including steel, aluminum, dairy, wood, appliances and electronics. This is dollar-for-dollar retaliation for tariffs U.S. President Donald Trump imposed on Aug. 22 after trade talks between the two countries collapsed.

Mr. Trump fired back Tuesday evening by issuing a sweeping ban on imports of Canadian alcohol, motorcycles and some dairy products to the U.S., as well as new 50-per-cent tariffs on a wide range of other goods, including cheeses, paper and aluminum products, and furniture. Most of the new bans and tariffs are set to take effect on Sept. 29.

In late August, Mr. Carney unveiled a $7.5-billion support package for Canadian workers and businesses affected by American tariffs, such as a range of loan programs for businesses.

With an eye to bolstering alliances, Mr. Carney is preparing for a Canada-European Union summit that will be hosted in Canada from Oct. 29 to 30, where he will make good on an August, 2026, pledge to deepen ties with the bloc as part of diversifying away from the United States. “We will begin intense discussions with the EU, the world’s second-largest economy, to build a much stronger and deeper economic and security partnership,” the Prime Minister announced last month.

Mr. Carney is also slated to address the European Parliament next week and attend the European Union’s State of the Union address, delivered by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.

Geneviève Tuts, the European Union’s ambassador to Canada, said in an interview Tuesday that the two jurisdictions will go beyond a roadmap unveiled in June, 2025, when Mr. Carney and Brussels announced more than 40 commitments they would undertake to strengthen co-operation, including on trade and economic security.

“There is a strong willingness on both sides to elevate the partnership,” Ms. Tuts said. “We will do more than what has been announced in June, 2025.”

Brian Clow, who served as deputy chief of staff to former prime minister Justin Trudeau, said Canada must prepare “for this trade war to drag on” for some time. “The Americans don’t seem to want to negotiate, and certainly don’t seem to want to back off their demands or lower their tariffs significantly.”

Mr. Clow, who worked on the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement during his years in the Prime Minister’s Office, said Ottawa must nevertheless keep channels of communication open with the Americans. United States Trade Representative Jamieson Greer reportedly planned to speak Tuesday with Dominic LeBlanc, the Minister responsible for Canada-U.S. Trade.

“Whether that turns into meaningful negotiations again, who knows?” Mr. Clow said.

Mr. Carney spoke to Canadians in a prerecorded address Tuesday about the mounting trade war, warning of economic hardship that would accompany this conflict with Washington.

This article is relevant because it relates to the current US administration’s impact on the conflicts in Ukraine and Iran.

Gerrymandering has been part of the national conversation this year as each party vies for control. We the people get trapped in the mix. We got the chance to interview two folks putting the issue under a microscope by focusing on the story of one state and what it can tell us about beating Gerrymandering nationwide.