By his threats over the past few days to invade, annex or otherwise subjugate Canada, Panama and Greenland, president-elect Donald Trump is behaving like an utter jackass. Everybody knows it, but whether any of his outbursts on Tuesday should be taken seriously is something even his closest advisers don’t seem to know.
Much of Trump’s Tuesday press conference, convened at his garish Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago, consisted of the usual imbecilities.
The Gulf of Mexico will henceforth be known as the Gulf of America, for instance.
The reason Russia invaded Ukraine was to prevent NATO from gaining a foothold on Russia’s “doorstep,” Trump said, reiterating a commonplace illiteracy that everyone who knows anything about that conflict will recognize as a contrived post-invasion lie that proposes to lay the blame for the war on the West. As far back as 2005, Vladimir Putin’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, said Russia’s neighbours were entitled to join whatever international alliance they wanted. As recently as 2023 Putin was merely quibbling with NATO for taking in Finland, which shares a 1,400-kilometre border with Russia.
There was also this amusing stupidity: An inquiry should be undertaken to determine the extent of the involvement of the FBI and Hezbollah in the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol Hill insurrection — which was mounted by Trump’s own supporters, an unknown number of whom Trump says he intends to pardon for the crimes they committed that day. “We have to find out about Hezbollah,” Trump said. “We have to find out about who, exactly, was in that whole thing.”
One thing that appears certain is that Trump intends to proceed with his 25 per cent tariff on Canadian and Mexican goods imported into the United States. Originally described as measures to force border controls on migrants and drug smuggling, it’s becoming less certain what the threat of tariffs is ultimately in aid of.
What can be known is that Trump’s boast that he’d end the war in Ukraine even before taking office has come to nothing. Putin is thumbing his nose at Trump by doubling down on the bloodiest conflict in Europe since the time of the Nazis. Meanwhile, Beijing’s hackers continue to rampage through American telecoms and even the U.S. Treasury Department’s databases. But rather than confront the major powers that genuinely threaten the interests of NATO and the United States, it’s traditional U.S. allies that Trump has chosen to bully, menace and threaten.
It’s quite possible that Trump is at least vaguely serious about his out-of-the-blue plan to compel Denmark to sell or cede Greenland, by military force if necessary. And maybe he’s serious about his threat to send troops to seize the Panama Canal. But as for relying on “economic force” to erase the Canada-U.S. border and subdue this country as the 51st American state, Trump has come close to accomplishing the impossible: uniting Canada’s political class in disgust with him. Some brilliant “Art of the Deal” negotiator he’s turned out to be.
The opinions of disgraced Prime Minister Justin Trudeau are immaterial now that profound public disaffection and a revolt from within his own caucus have forced him to declare his imminent departure — he’s left the House of Commons padlocked at this moment of national crisis and his Liberal Party is a shambles. Even so, Trudeau was right enough when he said “There isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell” that Canadians would submit to an American takeover of the country.
And Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre was quite right to have struck a measured, grown-up tone in response to Trump’s provocations: “Canada will never be the 51st state. Period. We are a great and independent country. We are the best friend to the U.S.
“We spent billions of dollars and hundreds of lives helping Americans retaliate against Al-Qaida’s 9/11 attacks. We supply the U.S. with billions of dollars of high-quality and totally reliable energy well below market prices. We buy hundreds of billions of dollars of American goods.”
None of this seems to matter to Trump, who spoke of Poilievre’s sentiments this way: “I don’t care what he says.” Poilievre is Canada’s prime minister in waiting.
Trump claimed Tuesday that the U.S. is subsidizing Canada to the tune of $200 billion a year, a mystery figure possibly derived from Canada’s current $40 billion annual trade surplus with the U.S., perhaps combined with some imaginary calculation of Canada’s embarrassingly meagre military budget. Until this week, Trump’s claims about the amount the U.S. is “subsidizing” Canada have ranged from $100 million to $100 billion a year. So nobody knows what he’s talking about.
The costs of the NORAD continental defence system, which Ottawa is replenishing with $38.6 billion in modernization funds over the next 20 years, are generally borne in a 60/40 U.S.-Canada sharing arrangement. NORAD has been around since the Cold War days, and its relevance has been renewed in recent years owing to Putin’s determination to restore Russia as a belligerently imperialist anti-western hegemon.
Trump’s fixation with an American absorption of Canada may well be just another instance of his adolescent tendency to “troll” his adversaries. Or perhaps he’s just been drawing attention away from his own cowardice in the face of genuine threats to the United States, or hoping to distract everyone from the Jan. 6 anniversary. But if he’s serious, the immediate threat to Canadian sovereignty is coming from Washington, not Moscow or Beijing. It’s a scenario that hasn’t figured into Canadian defence planning for more than a century.
Back in 1921, Canada’s very first “war game” exercise, Defence Scheme No. 1, the brainchild of Lieutanant-Colonel James “Buster” Sutherland Brown, laid out a strategy to defend against an American invasion by launching a series of preemptive surprise attacks.
Canadian Forces would roar across the border at several strategic points on the West Coast, the Prairies, around the Great Lakes, and from Quebec and the Maritimes. Our troops would attempt to capture several key American towns and cities within striking distance of the border — Seattle, Portland, Minneapolis, Fargo, Great Falls and Albany, along with the entire state of Maine. They’d then beat a hasty retreat into Canada, blowing up critical infrastructure along the way, then opening the armouries to Canadian civilians and hiding in the mountains until the British Empire came to our rescue.
Nine years later, the United States devised its own war game. It contemplated a British and Canadian invasion and set out its own series of preemptive assaults aimed at the occupation of key ports, railways and airbases. The U.S. Army would invade from Vermont, North Dakota and the Midwest, while the U.S. Navy busied itself blockading the Great Lakes and the ports of Vancouver and Halifax.
For generations, these once top-secret hypothetical ambuscades were the source of great amusement among Canadians and Americans, confident that only clowns and madmen would ever embark upon such follies.
But Trump is about to return to the White House, nobody really knows whether he’s serious, and it’s not funny anymore.
National Post