Defending Canada in the Age of Trump

Airman 1st Class Dennis Hoffman, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

With the recent threats to annex Canada and make it the 51st state, the time has come for Canadians to fundamentally rethink their security needs.   This should certainly begin with a reconsideration of the purchase of F-35 fighter jets but must go much beyond that.    The fact that our neighbor to the south has gone from our close ally and friend (if such a thing can exist in the realm of international relations) to the most serious threat to our sovereignty requires nothing less than a complete overhaul of our assumptions about our place in the world.

Canada’s security has until recently rested on two pillars that are both rapidly crumbling.   The first is our close ties and harmonious relationship with the U.S. since the war of 1812, signified by the longest unguarded border on the planet.   This includes, since the second world war, our membership in NATO and NORAD, the Five Eyes Intelligence cooperation as well as our trade relationship. The second is the “rules based international order” gifted to the world largely by the U.S., in the form of the U.N. Charter, the corner stone of which was the inviolability of the sovereign borders of states.  

Without these two pillars, Canada finds itself unambiguously back in the situation where “the powerful do what they will and the weak suffer what they must”.  This shift transpires in the context of the return of geopolitics, as the declining U.S. confronts the rising juggernaut of China.  What are the options available to a small (in population) and comparatively militarily weak state like Canada?

There is a saying in Africa: “when Elephants fight, the grass gets trampled”, a reality that is only too evident in the consequences Ukraine has suffered in the U.S.-Russia proxi-war fought on its territory.   Can Canada avoid such a fate?   It is far from certain that it can but a close examination of the situation points to some crucial differences.  

If the U.S. decides to annex Canada by any means necessary, there would be little that could be done to prevent them from doing so.   Some of Donald Trump’s statements point in this aggressive direction but whether they are mere bluster or a serious threat is far from certain.  Regardless, such a policy would in one form or another have to be subjected to a cost/benefit or risk analysis, given the many other problems/threats the US faces around the world.  Canada’s hopes rest on such an analysis determining that the costs and risks outweigh the benefits.   This can be the case either because the costs would be too high or because the benefits would be negligible, or both.  

Let’s take on the latter first.  What would the U.S. gain from the annexation of Canada?   This might seem a silly question.   Canada’s water resources, mineral resources, arable land…. The list is so long that it begs the question: why has the U.S. not done so yet?   In the early 19th century the answer may have been the might of the British Empire but ever since I would suggest that a more convincing answer is that they did not have to.   Canada was open for business, including foreign investment in land and resources.   Although the context is different, Canada, like Finland in its relations to Russia/USSR, never gave the US a reason to invade.   It did not itself pose a threat to its more powerful neighbor, and it was unlikely to be used by other more powerful states as a base of attack. 

So long as Canada did not ally itself to a powerful adversary, there was simply nothing to be gained by threatening Canada.   The most extreme example of this pattern was the willingness of the Pearson government to make Canada a nuclear target by allowing the US to station nuclear weapons in North Bay Ont. in 1963.   This and the interference in Canada’s election leading to the defeat of the Diefenbaker government inspired George Grant to “lament for a nation”.   As Grant’s title suggests, this decision essentially ended Canadian sovereignty in all but name.   The long list of cooperative ventures from the purchase of F-35 jets - that the U.S. maintains operational control over - to NORAD, to 5 eyes intelligence sharing, suggest that true Canadian sovereignty remains an aspirational project to this day.  

Although the U.S. and Canada had their differences over the interventions in Vietnam and Iraq, there were few signs that Canada had any intentions to change this relationship.    Even when Justin Trudeau announced himself as the anti-Trump on immigration, after Trump’s first election, he quickly fell into line when asked to poke China in the eye by arresting the CEO of Huawei on a stop-over in Vancouver.   What, aside from Mr. Trump’s unhinged psyche has caused the U.S. to find this relationship unacceptable is very much an open question. The claims of trade deficits, fentanyl and illegal immigrants streaming across the border don’t stand up to scrutiny.

Let’s look at the cost side of the equation.   It has been suggested by some that the cost alone would be prohibitive.   A US attempt to take over Canada would suffer the same fate as their excursions into Vietnam, Afghanistan or Iraq.   As demonstrated by the burst of nationalism since Trump uttered his threats, any attempt to occupy Canada would result in a determined insurgency that the US would be no better at suppressing.   If that were true, Canadians might have nothing to worry about.

 This assessment ignores substantial differences between Canada and the context of the previous US failures.   First, with the partial exception of Iraq, the failed US counter-insurgencies took place in states that were predominantly agrarian/rural.  Canada is overwhelmingly urban and 90% of its population resides within 100km of the US border.  Second, U.S. officials and soldiers had little understanding or familiarity with the local cultures and languages of their opponents in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, whereas Canadian language and culture are pretty familiar.   And lastly, whereas the unfamiliar terrain that gave insurgents an advantage in places like Vietnam and Afghanistan, once outside of their cities, most Canadians are no more familiar with the terrain that their U.S. counterparts. Surviving winters in such regions would be an extreme challenge.    Launching an urban insurgency might be the only option but we have seen how the U.S. dealt with urban insurgencies in Iraq.   Canada would see its cities reduced to rubble in a similar manner.   Armed insurgency to raise the cost of US intervention would be suicidal.

Another means of raising the cost of a U.S. invasion would be for Canada to ally itself with other powerful states.   Theoretically, much of the world has a great deal to gain by maintaining the “rules based international order” and such states should be willing to come to Canada’s defense.   In the halls of the UN that may well prove to be the case, just as much of the world correctly denounced the violation of Ukrainian sovereignty by Russia.   Lamentably it will end with rhetoric and not much more.   The idea that Europeans states would, or even could, provide military capacities to protect Canada is unthinkable on the basis of logistics alone.    It is even harder to imagine China or Russia coming to Canada’s defense given the fraught relations Canada has with both.   It goes without saying that even the suggestion that Canada would ally with Russia or China would instantly generate the invasion it is intended to prevent.  Remember the Monroe Doctrine!

That appears to leave only one option for Canada.  We might call this the porcupine approach.   Canadians could prepare themselves for the task of making themselves ungovernable through pacifist non-cooperation.    That might seem like a thin reed to hang our hopes on but let us not forget the British officers that chuckled when Gandhi suggested that they could be driven from the Indian subcontinent by a campaign of nonviolent resistance.   Two decades later, the British were gone.   Czechoslovakia took a similar approach to the Soviet invasion in 1968.  (Science for Peace has extensive discussions of civil defense based on nonviolent resistance on its website.)

To conclude this discussion on a somewhat positive, if not optimistic, note, I think it is worth pointing to a few basic realities.   First, states invade other states almost exclusively for reasons of security.   Whether its concerns were real or imagined, even the former head of NATO Jens Stoltenberg has conceded that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reflected their security concerns over NATO expansion and the CIA presence in the country, not the desire to get access to their resources or to gain territory.   The literature of international relations is virtually unanimous in rejecting the idea of resource wars.   Wars are extremely expensive.   By comparison resources can be accessed much more easily through trade than through invasion.   Canada does not pose a security threat to the US, no matter what Mr. Trump dreams up. Canada is not blocking US access to Canadian resources.  

Could Canada’s weakness make it a source of U.S. vulnerability by allowing Russia or China to attack the US through Canada?   This seems to be implicit in several of Mr. Trump’s comments, but it is pure fantasy.   Neither China or Russia has the capacity to transport huge numbers of troops to the undefended Arctic to launch a 3000 Mile march across the tundra to invade the US.   Accordingly, Canada finds itself in an admirable situation.   There is only one state that could conceivably threaten our sovereignty, but it has no reason to do so other than in the fevered mind of its unhinged current leader (and his minions).   

We should nonetheless not underestimate the ability of constructed enemy images to convince the American public of the necessity of military action to confront non-existent threats.   The Bush administration fabricated the justifications for the invasion of Iraq out of thin air.   A large portion of the U.S. public was convinced that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, (despite UN weapons inspectors finding none) and that Iraq played a role in the attacks of 9/11 (it didn’t).  None of the key officials involved have ever been held to account for launching what amounted to a war of aggression, the highest crime under international law.   It is also worth remembering that long after it had been debunked, large numbers of Americans continued to be convinced that the attackers of 9/11 had entered the country through Canada.

In short, Canada should not be complacent about the threat to its sovereignty.

Arnd Jurgensen is Chair of the Nuclear Weapons Working Group and international relations specialist at University of Toronto.