Why America Can’t Conquer Canada
The president-elect of the United States, the man about to be commander-in-chief of the most powerful military the world has ever known, is talking about invading Canada. Of course, he’s also talking about invading Greenland and the Panama Canal. He has declared that he plans only to use “economic force” against Canada, whatever that might mean—tariffs as shock troops perhaps. Canadians need to get used to this kind of terrifying nonsense. There’s going to be a lot more of this pirate king blather over the next four years.
Trump’s fantasies of annexation and conquest are nothing more than that. At this point in its history, America has come off of 70 years of failed imperialist adventures, in which it discovered it couldn’t hold onto Afghanistan or Iraq or Vietnam or anywhere else. America’s military position in the world is shrinking rather than expanding. West Africa is kicking out American forces and replacing them with Russians. Niger vacated its American military bases in August. At least one of the reasons that Trump is boasting about his plans for territorial conquest is that the United States, in its current position of radical instability and a complete collapse of national solidarity, has never been less prepared for conflict.
Trump has promised to return America to its traditional way of life—and, to be fair, losing wars of occupation is traditional for the United States. In the 21st century, it has become harder, not easier, to occupy populations against their will. Ordinary people have become used to controlling their own destinies, and the means of resistance have developed to the point where occupiers are always at a disadvantage. More than any other country, the U.S. has learned this lesson the hard way. When I wrote my book The Next Civil War in the late 2010s, the U.S. had recently published its manual on counterinsurgency, Joint Publication 3-24, or JP 3-24. On the surface, it was a guide to strategies for occupying and pacifying countries. Underneath, it was a big flashing sign to its own military leadership: do not do this ever again. The process of ending a counterinsurgency involves reconfiguring the basis of society from the ground up, a process which a military force, any military force, is incapable of undertaking.
The lesson of JP 3-24 is that counterinsurgency strategies have an implicit weakness: the occupiers cannot overcome the host populations except by annihilation. To hold countries, you need to impose order. To impose order you need to control populations. To control populations you need to use violence. Violence leads to violence, which is inherently antithetical to order. American forces have found that, even with the support of local governments and control of the state-building machinery, tiny pockets of resistance can make chaos more or less permanent and the attempts to quell that chaos counterproductive by their nature. To stop sectarian violence, to give peace a chance, occupiers have to put cities under surveillance and impose zones of control and eliminate terrorists. Each imposition on the local population makes their position less tenable.
That’s why America wins every battle and loses every war. They can perform military actions perfectly but they can’t recognize the ultimate consequences of those actions. War, for them, is a kind of hobby. They only enjoy it on foreign soil, when the stakes are on the other side. They cannot process attacks on their homeland, which a conflict with Canada would provide. September 11 was the most successful military action of the 21st century exactly because it exploited American vulnerability toward spectacles of violence in their homeland. The Americans played right into their enemies’ hands after a single attack. Their foreign policy decisions in the subsequent decade could not have been more self-defeating than if Osama Bin Laden had been dictating them.
American foreign policy operates on a combination of extraordinary technical facility and fundamental stupidity; this may be their defining trait as a nation. The most amazing scene in The Fog of War, Errol Morris’s documentary about Robert McNamara, former secretary of defence and architect of the Vietnam War policy, is when McNamara meets his Vietnamese counterpart, well after the war, who has to explain that the Vietnamese considered their struggle a war for independence. America’s best and brightest did not understand the first thing about their enemy—even hugely successful and intelligent men like McNamara. And the American government today, at least if Trump’s cabinet picks go through, will not be led by their best and brightest.
Even Russia is learning that occupation in the 21st century is not what it used to be. Populations now are not composed of serfs but of professionals. They have plans for themselves and for their futures. To be sure, Russia had military successes in Ukraine, although at a much slower rate and with a much higher cost than military experts expected. But its stated war aims of bringing Ukrainians under cultural and political dominion, of pouring new populations into a restored Russian Empire, died on the first day. Putin’s “mourning war,” as Foreign Policy recently called it, was an attempt to overcome its economic and demographic decline; both have only accelerated during the past three years.
Thomas Jefferson, during the War of 1812, declared that the conquest of Canada would be “a matter of marching.” But in that case, even though America had a seven-to-one population advantage, Canada still won, largely because of the incompetence and arrogance of the American commanders and the military genius of Shawnee chief Tecumseh. And America in 1812 could not have been more united. Now, the country is ripping itself to shreds. Ordinary people with Ivy League degrees are assassinating CEOs on the streets of New York, to widespread approval. Terrorist incidents are growing, executed by more sophisticated and more resourceful terrorists than ever before. Trump plans to install loyalist appointees whose stated plans are to gut the national institutions—the FBI, the CIA, the Department of Justice—to give the president-elect more impunity. As I write, Los Angeles is on fire.
And that’s what Trump’s threats are really about. They are his attempt to distract the country from its own suicide. Trump is a rage-attention machine. That’s how he has accumulated power. That’s how he is. But now that he has overtaken the Republican party and the U.S. political system, he must keep the rage machinery pointed outwards. Otherwise it will turn inwards. Civil war within his own base is already waiting in the wings. Eventually, Musk or Bannon will have to fight it out. It can be only one or the other.
Trump’s comments on Canada must be put in this context. He has to keep the world afraid of him, because the moment that stops, his power collapses. He is attempting to spread loathsome anarchy everywhere, not just here. Elon Musk is forcing governments to respond to his weird outbursts in Britain and Germany. The Danish king has had to change his coat of arms over the threat to Danish sovereignty. But think about it for a second: Trump’s “foreign policy,” if that’s even what it is, is a proposal for a multi-front violation of the territorial sovereignty of Canada, Europe and South America. I am a professional worrier about America. I am not worried about this possibility.
For the sake of argument, let us consider the absurd proposition of an American invasion into Canada. As for the military action, it is impossible to predict. There is no historical parallel of an ally conquering another ally, because, on an obvious level, it’s insane. And Canadian and American intelligence services and military forces are entirely integrated. Would that mean that the Americans would just walk over the border or, rather, would it mean that Canadian forces, integrated into the American system, could effect unprecedented sabotage?
One of the lessons of the JP 3-24 is that it only takes a few committed people to make an occupation borderline-impossible. Canada would no doubt produce many Quislings, but the vast majority of us want to stay Canadian. Widespread civil disobedience and resistance would certainly take on a violent dimension, contributing to the already violent political breakdown of various factions in the United States. America is already facing significant pressure from separatist forces within its current borders. It would add two more.
There’s also the fact that if Canada were a state, it would inject a massive left-wing presence into the United States. Democrats would be in power from that point on. But this is all absurd on its face, because, to conquer Canada, the United States would have to put itself on a war footing, and it isn’t even willing to invest enough in its public services to put out fires in its second-largest city.
America is a threat but no enemy, which puts Canadians in a complicated position. We should fear American weakness rather than strength. And America has never been weaker in our lifetimes. It is barely in a condition to defend itself, or even to understand when it is being attacked. Sometime in the next four years, America’s enemies, rather than its allies, will pick their moment and pop the United States like a balloon. All it will take is a pinprick.
The last time America was in this much turmoil, during its first civil war, Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of state, William Henry Seward, proposed an invasion of Canada, since they already had such a large standing army. Lincoln declared that he would fight one war at a time, but many people weren’t placated. The fractious Northern colonies, who spent most of their time until that point squabbling, decided that they needed to bind together into a Confederation. Our connection to each other has always been our resistance. We have largely stayed together so we don’t have to be them.
Canadian solidarity has never been more necessary than now. In the United States, it is unclear who is a traitor and who isn’t. Not so here. The key figure in Canada at this moment is Doug Ford, who is fighting for the country as a whole. And he knows how to fight. While Pierre Poilievre has said Canada will never be the 51st state, it’s unclear to me if his party is more loyal to this country or to the American manosphere. The Liberals, in disarray, have no voice. They did, however, get us through the last Trump administration more or less in one piece.
Ordinary Canadians must prepare, not for war but for chaos—economic, political, social, cultural. If your neighbour’s house is on fire, yours eventually will be too.
Stephen Marche is the author of The Next Civil War.
