The U.S. Threat Looming Over Canada | The consequences if Trump followed through on his belligerent rhetoric about a “51st state” would be catastrophic

5 comments

1. Anyone who believes Trump will make Canada the 51st state of the US is stupid. Canada shares the same values as the USA, it’s one of the biggest trading partners and it is not a threat.

   Trump uses this kind of threat to get better trade deals. After he put tariffs on almost all countries on this planet, many did not put any retaliatory tariffs and instead offered better trade deals.

2. Submission:

   The rhetoric by the sitting American president regarding Canada and its subjugation or annexation, along with various related actions such as the trade war appears to be a prelude to creating an adversary out of an ally. Whether this results in a physical conflict or not remains up in the air, but the possibility of such a conflict remains. A look at similar conflicts from the past century has shown that this could result in a brutal insurgency that might last for generations, and would result in dramatic reshapings of not just domestic politics but also global alliances as well.

3. I wouldn’t be surprised if I’m proven wrong in about two weeks but I really do think the “51st state” and “governor” rhetoric was specific to Trudeau and because Trump really disliked him. Probably because he was built like Canada’s Obama–with all the good looks and charisma Trump himself *wishes* he had.

4. Ideas to consider from this article:

   >The idea of a war between Canada and the United States was inconceivable even a few months ago. Most Americans still don’t believe it’s a possibility, or simply haven’t noticed their president’s occupationist rhetoric, or can’t imagine a world in which a neighbor they have been at peace with for 150 years is suddenly an enemy. The very idea seems completely absurd.
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   >But Canada does not have the luxury of dismissing White House rhetoric as trolling. Canadians are imagining the unimaginable because they have to.
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   >What would a continental conflict look like? Conventional war between the United States and Canada would be highly asymmetric, to say the least. The U.S. possesses an enormous military, comprising more than a million men and women under arms. Canada’s armed forces have 72,000 active members. Even worse, because of its deep-seated trust in the United States, Canada has built its forces around interoperability with U.S. forces, both for mutual continental protection, in binational projects such as the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), and for expeditionary forces such as the NATO mission to Afghanistan.
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   >Aisha Ahmad, a political-science professor at the University of Toronto, told me she does not think Canada’s reputation for gentleness would make it any less brutal as an opponent. “There’s no such thing as a warrior race,” said Ahmad, who is an expert on insurgency who has conducted field work in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Lebanon, Mali, and Kenya. “Nobody is born an insurgent. Insurgency is what happens when someone kills your mom.” Just one soldier firing on a protester at a rally could be the spark. “All of these cute, latte-drinking TikToker students,” she said. “You look at them and you don’t see insurgents. But if you kill their moms, the Geneva Convention will not save you.”
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   >An occupying military force has three strategies for dealing with insurgent conflicts, none of which work. The first we could call “Groznification”: complete suppression, as the Russian army did in Chechnya at the turn of the century. Even the destruction of any means of resistance works only temporarily, as Colonel Gaddafi learned in Libya. “Hearts and minds,” the strategy applied in Iraq and Afghanistan, is also ineffective: If you build hospitals and then fill them with corpses, you just generate more insurgents. The third option is “decapitation,” but the systematic targeting of insurgent networks’ leaders—the idea behind the recent U.S. air strikes on the Houthis in Yemen—can easily be countered by detailed succession plans. And killing leadership has the unintended consequence of fragmenting the insurgency’s power structures, so that, if you ever do want to negotiate a peaceful settlement, you have dozens of mini-insurgencies to deal with, rather than a single contained force.
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   >The Canadian population would present particular challenges to any counterinsurgency strategy. “The Taliban would look lightweight,” Ahmad told me. “Canada has all of the attributes to have an even fiercer insurgency than the other places in the world where I study these problems.” Canada has the most educated population in the Group of Seven advanced industrial nations, which for a resistance movement would be “an asset in being able to identify pressure points, in being able to know what critical infrastructure is, in being able to develop technology and weapons that can be highly disruptive,” Ahmad said. “The scale and the capacity would be so much higher.” If only one in 100 Canadians took up arms against an American occupation, that force would be 10 times the estimated size of the Taliban at the outset of the Afghan War. And that force would consist of machine-learning specialists and petroleum engineers rather than shepherds and subsistence farmers.
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   >Already, the once-unthinkable idea of a war between Canada and the United States is growing less unthinkable. Before the 2024 U.S. election, 12 percent of Republicans viewed Canadians as “unfriendly” or “an enemy.” Now that number is 27 percent. Persuading the military to carry out an attack on Canada would probably be more difficult than convincing the population to support such an attack. The American officer class is trained, from the beginning, in “the duty not to follow orders,” and combat operations against Canada would involve fighting against fellow soldiers who shed blood beside them in Afghanistan and other theaters. Canadian and American soldiers have attended a great number of one another’s funerals.
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   >But turning the U.S. military is far from impossible. The Trump administration fired the commander of a Space Force base in Greenland the moment she expressed a position wavering from his annexationist aims there. The Naval Academy has already purged its library and canceled various speakers. At least some of the U.S. military’s leaders are on board with the ideological purification of their institutions.
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   >The conditions required for the occupation of Canada would also mean the end of American democracy. That, too, is not an impossible outcome—and a U.S. military adventure might even have both objectives in view. “The orchestration of a security crisis allows the incumbent government to declare emergency powers and bypass ordinary politics,” Ahmad said. “The Trump administration has already signaled that it wants a third term.” The 2028 election will be a watershed. If Trump decides to run again, a manufactured emergency over Canada would be a convenient excuse for overturning the constitutional barriers.

   An attack is likely to be catastrophic for both nations and their allies, and will likely last far longer than a few months or years despite the vastly asymmetric capacities of each country’s military forces. It would be foolhardy to discount the ongoing rhetoric and the current machinations of the American president as mere words, but rather a prelude to something worse. It’s also worth considering who else gains from this conflict between neighbours and allies, and whether they are stoking the embers as well in the hopes that this fragmentation of a traditional alliance can provide them with further opportunities to advance their own agendas.

5. STOP STOP STOP! He talks sh*t so that he can distract you. Why allow him to do that?

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