Western governments have spent the past several years building increasingly elaborate frameworks to combat foreign interference, illicit finance, and democratic destabilization. In Canada, public debate has focused overwhelmingly on a familiar set of adversaries: China, Russia and, more recently, India.
One country, however, often remains absent from these discussions: the United States. That omission says a great deal about how Western governments still understand foreign interference. The same practices that trigger alarm when associated with China or Russia are often normalized or linguistically softened when they originate from actors within the Western alliance system.
Institutions such as the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC), parliamentary committees, and public inquiries do not approach foreign interference and illicit finance through fully neutral frameworks. Their understanding of threats has been shaped by decades of Cold War and post-Cold War thinking, and those assumptions shape not only what gets prioritized, but also what is perceived as a threat in the first place.
Canada’s debates over Chinese interference have already demonstrated how unstable the boundary can become between legitimate political participation, diaspora mobilization, lobbying, transnational influence, and covert interference. But the difficulty becomes much greater when the actor in question is a longstanding ally embedded in Western political, economic, and cultural networks.
When China finances ideological organizations abroad, Western governments ask whether democratic systems are being manipulated. When Russia amplifies separatist narratives or supports extremist political actors, security agencies discuss hybrid warfare, malign influence, and democratic destabilization. Yet when similar practices are associated with the United States, they are more often framed as advocacy, public diplomacy, transnational networking, or soft power.
This asymmetry is not new. During the Cold War, American money flowed extensively into political parties, labor unions, civil society organizations, and media networks across Western Europe, particularly in countries such as Italy and France where fears of communist electoral victories shaped Western strategic thinking. These activities were rarely viewed in the West as foreign interference. They were presented instead as democratic stabilization, anti-communist containment, or alliance management.
Ultimately, Western states have never fully developed a coherent way of recognizing interference when it originates from within the Western alliance itself.
The problem has become harder to ignore as segments of the contemporary American political right increasingly cultivate and support illiberal movements abroad.
The Trump administration has openly aligned itself with illiberal leaders such as Viktor Orbán in Hungary. American conservative networks increasingly support or amplify far-right movements in Europe, including parties associated with xenophobic politics, hostility toward immigration, and attacks on LGBTQ+ rights and reproductive rights. In Canada, American media, political networks, and funding streams have also intersected visibly with the Trucker Convoy mobilizations and separatist discourse in Alberta.
Comparable behaviour linked to China or Russia would almost certainly attract much greater institutional scrutiny.
Part of the explanation lies in the persistence of categories inherited from a period when the United States was widely seen within Western security frameworks as a fundamentally stabilizing force. But alliance status does not preclude interference; if anything, it can make it easier. Influence operations are often most effective when they move through networks perceived as legitimate, familiar, or ideologically aligned. The cultural closeness between Canada and the United States, often viewed as evidence of mutual trust, can also normalize certain forms of political influence and make them harder to identify as interference.
Western security institutions have confronted similar conceptual blind spots before. After 9/11, counterterrorism frameworks became overwhelmingly oriented toward Islamist extremism. For years, Western governments remained comparatively slow to recognize the scale of the threat posed by far-right and white supremacist violence, despite mounting evidence. Some forms of violence fit more easily within established definitions of terrorism than others, even when the underlying behaviour was comparable.
A similar dynamic may now be emerging in debates over foreign interference. If democratic states are serious about combatting illicit finance and political interference, the focus cannot remain primarily on whether an actor is viewed as an ally or an adversary.
Activities such as financing extremist political movements, amplifying anti-democratic narratives, and supporting organizations hostile to minority rights and democratic norms should not be treated differently simply because they originate from allied countries.
As long as similar political behaviors continue to be treated differently depending on their source, foreign interference frameworks will remain constrained by inherited and increasingly outdated geopolitical assumptions.
