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And unlike those first two battles, a win won’t come in a day. A swift reversal in all the tariffs would be a miracle, so the best outcome from Tuesday’s meetings in Washington, most Canada-U.S. watchers acknowledge, is to establish a working relationship with the mercurial Trump.

Leaders the world over are struggling with what defines a relationship with Trump. Carney’s turn comes Tuesday to try it out under the spotlight.

There are some hopeful signs. The president has been repeatedly saying positive things about Carney — “a very nice gentleman,� and so on. But Carney can’t afford to be simply nice in the eyes of Trump, for his own sake or for Canada’s. Not one political leader campaigned in the recent election on the promise to be nice to Trump.

That leaves Carney needing to walk away from Tuesday’s meetings with respect, as the prime minister has said he’s seeking as a minimum.

This is where things get extremely tricky. Beyond the surface talk from Trump about what a nice man Carney is, the president keeps casting Canada as weak and dependent on the United States. Just last week, Trump initially characterized his brief, congratulatory call with Carney as one that put the prime minister on bended knee.

“I think we’re going to have a great relationship,â€� Trump said. “He called me up yesterday. He said, ‘Let’s make a deal.’â€� In other words, no matter how much Carney is trying to frame this week’s meetings as talk of a partnership between our two sovereign nations, Trump clearly thinks Canada needs something from him — which is exactly where he wants this country.

Then, over the weekend, Trump was at it again, listing all the ways in which he sees himself holding all the cards in the Canada-U.S. relationship. He flatly told his interviewer on that he wasn’t going to stop seeing Canada as a 51st state.

“I’ll always talk about that. You know why? We subsidize Canada to the tune of $200 billion a year. We don’t need their cars. In fact, we don’t want their cars. We don’t need their energy. We don’t even want their energy. We have more than they do. We don’t want their lumber,� Trump said.

The $200-billion figure is totally inaccurate. Back in February, the Washington Post did a on this claim and awarded Trump four “Pinocchios� — the highest score it doles out for inaccuracies, or “whoppers,� as the newspaper describes its ranking system.

Most Canadian prime ministers have walked into their meetings with U.S. presidents hoping to get them saying the right thing. Carney has a bigger challenge: he has to stop Trump from saying blatantly wrong things. Reversals of rhetoric aren’t exactly Trump’s style, though, and the words “I stand corrected� are alien to him.

It’s likely that Carney will have decided not to try to correct Trump in public on Tuesday, but it could leave him in an awkward position, to say the least, if the president goes down the path of inaccuracy before the cameras again. Not only will that fail Carney’s respect condition, but it will crush Canadians’ expectations that this prime minister will stand up to Trump.

Peter Donolo, a former communications director for prime minister Jean Chretien, has expressed extreme skepticism about whether Carney is right to walk into this meeting so quickly, saying it runs the high risk of looking like capitulation.

“Trump’s M.O. is to dominate and humiliate his guests in the Oval Office,” Donolo said in an interview Friday on CBC. “Maybe (Carney) will prove me wrong and he’ll come out of there looking like a hero and put Trump in his place, but nobody’s managed that so far.â€�

But Carney promised in his first phone call with Trump weeks ago that he would start talks immediately to review Canada’s trade and security relationship with the U.S. if he won the election. To postpone that rendezvous could also look like fear.

Confidence will be key on Tuesday, but not overconfidence. That’s a lesson many Liberals learned last week when they thought they could emerge with a majority victory and mustered only a minority government.

So Carney and his team may be advised not to go looking for a third win this week — simply not losing might be the more realistic option when dealing with Trump.