Donald Trump says Canada has asked to join the missile-defence program his administration is building, adding a new chapter to a long-running cross-border saga.

The U.S. president dropped that news in the Oval Office on Tuesday as he unveiled the initial plans for a three-year, $175 billion US project to build a multi-purpose missile shield he’s calling the Golden Dome.

“Canada has called us and they want to be a part of it,” Trump said. “They want to hook in and they want to be a part of it.”

Canada will pay its “fair share,” he added. “We’ll work with them on pricing.”

Ottawa confirmed it’s talking to the U.S. about this but added a caveat. In a statement, the federal government cast missile-defence discussions as unresolved and as part of the overall trade and security negotiations Prime Minister Mark Carney is having with Trump.

What this means is still extremely murky. It’s unclear what, exactly, Canada would contribute; what its responsibilities would include; what it would pay; and how different this arrangement would be from what Canada already does under the Canada-U.S. NORAD system.

Refused to join

Canada has long participated in tracking North American skies through NORAD, and feeds that data into the U.S. missile-defence program.

But Canada never officially joined the U.S. missile program, which was a source of controversy in Ottawa in the early 2000s when Prime Minister Paul Martin’s government refused to join.

That previous refusal means Canadians can monitor the skies but not participate in any decision about when to launch a hypothetical strike against incoming objects.

New developments have forced the long-dormant issue back onto the agenda.

For starters, the U.S. is creating a new system to track various types of missiles — one more sophisticated and multi-layered than Israel’s Iron Dome, intended to detect intercontinental, hypersonic and shorter-range cruise weapons.

And this happens to be occurring as Canada’s sensors in the Arctic are aging out of use. Canada has committed to refurbishing those sensors.

WATCH | Trump unveils missile-defence plan: Trump says Canada asked to join U.S. missile-defence program Duration 0:55 U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday unveiled the initial plans for a three-year, $175-billion US project to build a multi-purpose missile shield he’s calling the Golden Dome. He said Canada has asked to join the missile-defence program and that the country will pay its ‘fair share.’ There was no immediate comment from Ottawa.

Rumblings of Canada’s interest started months ago

The first public indication that these combined factors were fuelling a policy shift in Canada came in public comments made earlier this year in Washington.

One U.S. senator said, in February, that he’d heard interest in the missile program from a Canadian colleague, then-defence minister Bill Blair.

Blair publicly acknowledged the interest, saying that, given the upgrades being planned by both the U.S. and Canada, the partnership “makes sense.”

But the form of Canadian participation is, again, unclear. The U.S. commander for NORAD appeared recently to suggest that Canada’s participation will be limited to tracking threats.

One missile-defence analyst says it sounds like an extension of existing Canada-U.S. co-operation through NORAD. Still, says Wes Rumbaugh, it’s interesting that Trump chose to draw attention to it. Trump mentioned Canada’s role several times, unprompted, during his announcement Tuesday.

People watch as a missile is test-fired from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on May 30, 2017. (Lucy Nicholson/Reuters)

As for the president’s three-year timeframe, Rumbaugh calls it a long shot. He predicts that only part of the system could be built in that period, and that it will take more years, and more funding, to complete.

It could take much, much more funding. The Congressional Budget Office estimates this project could cost hundreds of billions more than the $175 billion US figure cited by the president.

“This is still a significant challenge,” said Rumbaugh, a fellow in the missile defence project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think-tank in Washington.

“We’re talking about sort of a next-generation and a widely enhanced missile-defence system. We’re talking about a step-change evolution in American air and missile defence systems that will require significant investment over potentially a long time period.”

Canada confirms Golden Dome discussions

Nearly three hours after Trump’s announcement, Ottawa confirmed the discussions are happening. An evening statement from Carney’s office said Canadians gave the prime minister an electoral mandate to negotiate a comprehensive new security and economic relationship with the U.S.

“To that end, the prime minister and his ministers are having wide-ranging and constructive discussions with their American counterparts,” said the statement.

“These discussions naturally include strengthening NORAD and related initiatives such as the Golden Dome.”

A Canadian cabinet minister involved in similar discussions in the early 2000s says it’s high time the conversation resumed.

“I see this as a positive,” said David Pratt, a Liberal defence minister in the first Martin cabinet.

He favoured Canada’s participation in a North American missile defence system back then but says the government blanched out of fear of political blowback, with its minority government fragile.

He said the refusal to join came with a cost. In part, NORAD lost part of its potential vocation, as missile interception became a U.S.-only activity, and related research and manufacturing opportunities flowed to the U.S., he said.

The specific U.S. ask of Canada was never fully defined back then, he said. Pratt recalls negotiations having just gotten underway about what role Canada would play and whether it would merely host sensors or also interceptors on its soil.

“I’m hoping we’ll see NORAD assume what should have been its rightful role,” he told CBC News.

Another option would be to seek to close the Strait of Hormuz, fully or partly, by attacking shipping or by laying mines. That could be a blow to the world economy, for one-quarter of the world’s oil passes through the strait. Experts have told me that they believe the United States could, over time, reopen the strait, but there might be economic and other costs. When Iran mined the strait in 1988, a mine crippled a U.S. Navy frigate, the Samuel B. Roberts.

When the United States assassinated Qassim Suleimani, a top Iranian general, in 2020, Iran launched a missile barrage at American bases in Iraq. A Ukrainian passenger jet was hit by accident, killing all 176 people aboard.

My guess is that Iran may want to strike back harder this time, partly to try to re-establish deterrence, but its capacity to do so may be more limited. Israeli strikes might have impaired its ability to mine the strait, for example, and doing so would also impede Iran’s oil shipments to China, annoying its friends in Beijing.

But it’s worth remembering something James Mattis, a defense secretary in Trump’s first term, once said: “No war is over until the enemy says it’s over. We may think it over, but in fact, the enemy gets a vote.”

The second uncertainty is whether the Israeli and American strikes have ended Iran’s nuclear efforts or perhaps even accelerated them. That depends, in part, on whether the bombing of Fordo and other sites was as successful as Trump claimed, and that may take time to figure out.

Trump is no stranger to setting 2-week deadlines. Here’s how others have played out

toggle caption Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

President Trump said Thursday that he will decide whether the U.S. will take military action in the growing Israel-Iran conflict “within two weeks.”

It’s a timeline he’s used many times before, dating back to his first term.

Over the years, Trump has promised action on policy issues from tax legislation to minimum wage increases to health care within two weeks. He’s hinted at conspiracy theories to be resolved and policy decisions to be revealed within a fortnight — only for his announcements to materialize months later or not at all.

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Trump has used the timeframe several times in recent weeks alone, priming reporters for updates that have yet to materialize on geopolitical conflicts and global tariffs.

Take Russia’s war in Ukraine. In his 2024 presidential campaign, Trump repeatedly promised he could end the war in one day — but it has since stretched into its third year. Over the last two months, Trump has said repeatedly that various answers to questions about the war, including U.S. assistance to Ukraine, would be just two weeks away.

On April 24, he told a reporter who asked about continued military assistance for Ukraine: “You can ask that question in two weeks, and we’ll see.” He gave a similar answer days later when asked if he trusted Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom he had publicly criticized in recent months.

Those weeks came and went. And on May 19, when asked if Ukraine was doing enough to support U.S.-led cease-fire negotiations, Trump replied, “I’d rather tell you in about two weeks from now because I can’t say yes or no.”

Over a month ago, on May 28, Trump gave Putin another two-week deadline when a reporter asked whether he believed the Russian leader truly wants the war to end.

“I can’t tell you that, but I’ll let you know within two weeks,” Trump said. “We’re going to find out whether or not he’s tapping us along or not. And if he is, we’ll respond a bit differently, but it will take about a week and a half, two weeks.”

On Thursday, after Trump postponed his decision on Iran strikes, a reporter in the briefing room pointed out the pattern of delayed two-week deadlines and asked White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt “how we can be sure that he’s going to stick to this one.”

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Leavitt acknowledged the deadlines but said the fighting in Ukraine and the Middle East “are two very different, complicated global conflicts” that Trump inherited from the previous administration and has spent “a tremendous amount of time and effort cleaning up.”

Meanwhile, the world has also been waiting on Trump’s decisions about tariffs on most U.S. trading partners — which he unveiled in April before abruptly pausing many of them to allow for negotiations, with a deadline of July 9.

Trump told reporters on May 5 that he would make a determination about pharmaceutical tariff rates “in the next two weeks,” though he didn’t comment publicly on the topic again until earlier this week, when he said tariffs on pharmaceutical imports would be coming “very soon.”

And he said on June 12 that he would notify trading partners about unilateral tariff rates within — you guessed it.

“We’re going to be sending letters out in about a week and a half, two weeks, to countries, telling them what the deal is,” Trump said.

It’s been a pattern since at least 2017

Jen Psaki, a former White House press secretary for President Joe Biden, called the two-week deadline “one of Donald Trump’s absolute favorite tactics” in her MSNBC show on Thursday.

“And most of the time, in fact almost every time, when two weeks rolls around, Trump has either completely forgotten about whatever it was he promised in the first place, or … he’s hoping people have just moved on,” Psaki said.

Here’s how some of Trump’s other two-week deadlines have played out over the years:

Tax plan

On Feb. 9, 2017, Trump said a “phenomenal” tax plan would be announced “over the next two or three weeks.”

His administration unveiled its massive tax overhaul over two months later on April 26, and Trump signed it into law after Congress passed it in late December.

Trump has since promised to extend those tax cuts — the majority of which are due to expire at the end of 2025 — through a bill that passed the House in late May and is under close scrutiny in the Senate.

Paris Agreement

During his first presidential campaign, Trump said he would remove the U.S. from the climate accord. And after he took office, he said at an April 2017 rally that he would decide its fate during the following two weeks.

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On June 1 of that year, he announced that the U.S. would withdraw — which, under the terms of the agreement, didn’t take effect until early November 2020.

One of Biden’s first acts after taking office in 2021 was to re-enroll the U.S. in the agreement, a move Trump reversed by executive order at the start of his second term.

Health care

The first Trump administration unsuccessfully tried to end the Affordable Care Act, even asking the Supreme Court to overturn it in late 2020. (It rejected the lawsuit in 2021.)

Trump told Fox News in July 2020 that he would be replacing Obamacare and “signing a health care plan within two weeks,” which did not happen.

According to the health policy nonprofit KFF, while Trump did propose the idea of an Affordable Care Act replacement in his 2020 budget, it didn’t get much attention. And when Trump was asked about his Obamacare replacement plan at a September debate during the 2024 presidential campaign, he infamously replied that he had “concepts of a plan.”

Infrastructure

As president-elect in 2016, Trump promised a $1 trillion infrastructure spending program — which took years to become a reality.

He told CBS News on May 1, 2017 that his administration’s infrastructure plan would be coming in “the next two or three weeks, maybe sooner.”

But he didn’t unveil the $1.5 trillion plan until February 2018, after a series of false starts that turned “Infrastructure Week” into a long-running beltway joke.

While Trump and Democrats tentatively reached an agreement in the spring of 2019, the bill ultimately failed due to disagreements over how to fund it and a number of competing crises, from Trump’s impeachment to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Conspiracy theories

More than once, Trump has said that evidence to back up his various claims would appear in exactly a fortnight.

In March 2017, after baselessly alleging that former President Barack Obama had wiretapped his Trump Tower phone ahead of the 2016 election, Trump told Fox News: “I think you’re going to find some very interesting items coming to the forefront over the next two weeks.”

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Within days, congressional leaders from both parties said there was no evidence to support Trump’s claim. Years later, in a 2019 Fox interview, Trump admitted he had made the accusations based only on “a little bit of a hunch.”

Separately, days after losing the 2020 election to Biden, Trump alleged election fraud, and immediately challenged the results in several key states. He told the Washington Examiner that he expected to succeed in “probably two weeks, three weeks.” Numerous lawsuits, investigations and audits — including ones led by Republicans — found no evidence of the widespread fraud that Trump alleged.

The world and America have changed irreversibly under Trump

By Dominic Waghorn, international affairs editor

One hundred days ago, America presided over a world order it had itself crafted.

That order was designed to ensure US dominance in a global system that had offered growing prosperity, stability and security for decades.

The US economy had rebounded from the ravages of COVID-19 more effectively than any other, even if enough Americans did not yet feel the benefits to save the outgoing administration from electoral defeat.

But the US was leading the world’s economy in a tentative recovery.

Now all that is in doubt.

To his supporters, Donald Trump has used those 100 days wisely. To their minds, that much-vaunted world order ripped off America and he is rightly seeking corrective retribution.

He has declared a trade war on much of the world. In his eccentric reading of economics, allies that America has traded with most closely have been screwing the US and must make amends.

The result of his tariff policy was a precipitous collapse in faith in America’s once all-powerful currency and the competence of its stewards.

Only an embarrassing partial volte-face averted a truly catastrophic rout on the bond markets and all that might have followed for the dollar.

President’s unorthodox approach

Taking aim at phantom threats, say his critics, this president has instead holed both feet with a barrage of bullets.

Trump’s diplomacy and use of American power have been equally unorthodox.

He seems to believe in a natural order of things. The strong dominate. The weak accept their fate. He has talked of taking control of Greenland and Panama as if it were US destiny and absorbing Canada as America’s 51st state.

He has embraced Russian strongman Vladimir Putin’s narrative for invading Ukraine and blamed the war instead on President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Trump has horrified allies

He has ordered his diplomats to vote with Moscow at the UN and horrified allies by publicly bullying the Ukrainian leader in the Oval Office, aided and abetted by his vice president JD Vance.

The peace plan he has offered is so one-sided it could have been written in the Kremlin. Ukrainians say it proposes extorting much of their mineral wealth and demands the surrender of much of the land taken in the most egregious act of aggression on European soil since the Second World War.

More broadly, allies have been put on notice that the US will be retreating from its decades-long role as guarantor of international security and prosperity in Europe at least.

As America puts itself first, so other nations are being urged to do the same.

Critics say this will lead to a world of fortress nations erecting defences in place of decades of cooperation promoting peace and prosperity. That will only increase the risk of discord and conflict.

Ironically, America has been enriched and empowered by decades of a world order they call the Pax Americana, not impoverished by it, but Trump’s radical prescription is already threatening Americans with rising prices and empty shelves.

Tool of soft power discarded

America under Trump is also discarding one of its greatest tools of soft power abroad. It has dismantled US aid, leaving the health of tens of millions in jeopardy and a vacuum that China is only too eager to fill.

Also damaging America’s prestige and standing in the world is its president’s very un-American assault on democracy and freedom at home: his attacks on judges, use of executive power to target rivals and critics wherever he finds them, in academia, in the media and in corporations and law firms.

And then there is his extrajudicial deportation of US citizens, or “homegrowns” as he calls them, to a central American gulag run by a government with an appalling human rights record.

US ‘no longer reliable partner’

America’s claim to offer moral leadership has been tarnished by this administration.

It is no longer seen as a reliable partner by allies and they are stating so more and more publicly.

Some hope Trump will soften his approach as his policies encounter controversy and threaten his popularity as he has already with tariffs.

However, he has shown a greater determination and radicalism than in his first term in office.

Allies will remain engaged, hoping to moderate and influence this president’s foreign policy, but in 100 days, the world and America has changed under Donald Trump and in many ways irreversibly.

The U.S. can’t negotiate with all the countries that were hit with tariffs, so some trading partners will soon find out in a letter what rate they will face, President Donald Trump said.

During a business roundtable in Abu Dhabi on Friday, he suggested his administration will impose tariffs on certain countries unilaterally, led by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

“We have, at the same time, 150 countries that want to make a deal, but you’re not able to see that many countries,” Trump said. “So at a certain point, over the next two to three weeks, I think Scott and Howard will be sending letters out, essentially telling people—we’ll be very fair—but we’ll be telling people what they’ll be paying to do business in the United States.”

That comes after he hit U.S. trading partners around the world last month with “reciprocal” duties, then put the steepest ones on a 90-day pause a week later for most countries, allowing time to negotiate.

After the pause was announced, Bessent said Trump would be “personally involved” in tariff discussions to extract concessions, adding “no one creates leverage for himself like President Trump.”

Meanwhile, the U.S. reached a trade deal last week with the United Kingdom and agreed with China over the weekend to temporarily slash their respective duties, which topped 100% on both sides.

The administration has also been saying that the U.S. is close to a deal with about two dozen countries, including India, Japan, and South Korea, and officials have maintained that a 10% rate is a baseline. U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer was in South Korea this week for an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation ministerial meeting.

Trump’s indication that other countries not currently in talks will instead have a new rate imposed on them in two to three weeks means it will come before the 90-day pause expires in July.

“I guess you could say they could appeal it, but for the most part I think we’re going to be very fair, but it’s not possible to meet the number of people that want to see us,” Trump said Friday.

In a statement to Fortune, White House spokesman Kush Desai said, “President Trump is focused on reducing our historic trade deficit and leveling the playing field for American industries and workers. Quick action on the President’s agenda is critical to restore American Greatness.”

U.S. stocks were little changed on Friday after rallying earlier this week on hopes that de-escalation with China signals a lighter touch on trade.

It’s unclear how solid Trump’s timeline of two or three weeks will be. On April 23, just over three weeks ago, he made a similar statement about imposing new tariff rates.

“In the end, I think what’s going to happen is we’re going to have great deals, and by the way, if we don’t have a deal with a company or a country, we’re going to set the tariff,” he said during an Oval Office ceremony. “I’d say over the next couple of weeks, wouldn’t you say? I think so. Over the next two, three weeks. We’ll be setting the number.”