Our Coming War with Canada?

Trump’s Crazy Musings Can No Longer Be Dismissed

An online meme half-jokingly describes Canada as a luxury second-floor apartment on top of a meth lab. The way the United States has behaved under President Donald Trump, meth dealers might consider suing for defamation.

Earlier today, Mark Carney was sworn in as Canada’s 24^th Prime Minister. When asked about Trump’s fixation with coercing Canada into becoming America’s 51 state, Carney responded that it was “crazy.” Sure, Trump’s idea is certainly loco, but it makes perfect sense considering Trump is, to quote a song by Cypress Hill, “insane in the membrane.”

What seemingly started out as a dumb joke is no longer funny. As the unhinged Trump continues to beat the drum of annexation, the sane majority on both sides of the border must consider the possibility that Trump is deadly serious about his imperialistic aims.

Two weeks before the election, I wrote a column comparing Trump to the Haitian dictator Papa Doc. With each passing week, the similarity is becoming more apparent:

Francois Duvalier, known as Papa Doc, ruled Haiti with an iron fist from 1957 until his death in 1971. Upon taking office, Papa Doc purged the military and government and replaced public servants with loyalists…

Duvalier’s second term in office was much worse than his first. In 1959, the diabetic Haitian dictator fell into a coma. When he woke up, the already violent autocrat lost all inhibition to carry out bloody purges.

Similarly, Donald Trump has unambiguously suffered from severe mental decline… Trump’s glaring and growing mental illness, combined with his advanced age, make him significantly more dangerous.

It’s too soon to know what Trump is truly capable of and it’s unfair to directly compare him to a man who committed mass murder. However, it is fair to say they have a similar playbook, in terms of demanding complete loyalty, and that Trump’s mental decline is causing escalating cycles of chaos at home and instability abroad.

Given the president’s cognitive state, combined with repeatedly deranged threats against Canada, Panama and Greenland, it’s not unimaginable that Trump is contemplating the unthinkable: Military action against our allies.

A fatal mistake one can make during the Trump era is using phrases like, “it can’t happen”, “it would never occur”, “it’s never happened” and “it’s not in the interest of the US, so Trump won’t do it.”

We must come to grips with the terrifying reality that a megalomaniacal lunatic, and his merry band of quislings, are now running the asylum. All previously held assumptions must be jettisoned. When the irrational rule, rational thought is a liability when figuring out their next move.

Trump’s anti-Canada tantrums are quickly turning friends into foes. “Everything Trump has said and done has led to a level of rage and defiance that I think very few Americans fully appreciate”, said Vox’s Zack Beauchamp, who resides in Canada. “People hear that 51st state stuff, and say, ‘America is literally attempting to annex us. They’re trying to coerce us into becoming Americans. And we hate that.’”

Calgary Herald columnist, Don Braid, even gamed out a hot war between the United States and Canada. He remarked of Trump’s moves, “This is the Putin playbook. Claim that you own territory, then take it. It’s hard to imagine anything like this coming to our soil. But now there’s a crazed commander-in-chief down south who says it’s not our soil at all.”

Dr. Aisha Ahmad, an associate professor at the University of Toronto, recently wrote a provocative article, “Why Annexing Canada Would Destroy the United States.” Dr. Ahmad argues that while a superior US military could initially conquer Canada, it would have great difficulty ultimately controlling it:

“Looking at the sheer size of the American military, many people might believe that Trump would enjoy an easy victory. Rather, a military invasion of Canada would trigger a decades-long violent resistance, which would ultimately destroy the United States.

Trump is delusional if he believes that 40 million Canadians will passively accept conquest without resistance. That decision would set in motion an unstoppable cycle of violence.

Even if one per cent of all resisting Canadians engaged in armed insurrection, that would constitute a 400,000-person insurgency, nearly 10 times the size of the Taliban at the start of the Afghan war.”

I would add that hundreds of thousands of Americans would join the Canadian side in battle. Today, Canada represents the values of fairness, liberty and equality far more than MAGA’s distorted version of America. I also suspect that the political leadership in blue states would urge service members to lay down their guns and refuse orders to invade our neighbor.

Additionally, if we made a move on Canada or Greenland, the U.S. would immediately become a global pariah. Europe and other regions would likely cut off all non-essential trade and boot us out of institutions. As a result, international corporations would collapse, and financial markets would crash.

Despite the likelihood of such catastrophic results, Trump has created a roadmap for war, if he chooses to take it. He imparted to former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who Trump disrespectfully calls “governor”, that the U.S. considers the 1908 treaty that set our common borders invalid.

I suspect Trump might literally test the waters of Canadian sovereignty by claiming a greater portion of the Great Lakes. He would likely do this by ordering a handful of naval vessels to sail into Canadian waters, in the same way the Chinese navy harasses Filipino boats in the South China Sea to expand territorial control. A cross-border skirmish could quickly erupt and easily spiral with fire exchanged.

While I don’t think this scenario is likely to happen, with Trump it is certainly within the realm of possibility. We are dealing with an illogical madman, without guardrails, who rules by capricious mood swings. When a mercurial ruler lacks the mental capacity to contemplate consequences, it exponentially increases the likelihood of geopolitical catastrophes.

Similar to his view of Ukraine, Trump probably thinks that Canada doesn’t have the cards. That notion becomes dangerous when one realizes that Trump isn’t playing with a full deck.