Canada’s collision with Donald Trump’s America has thus far followed the rules of the schoolyard bully or – it’s much the same thing – the protection racketeer.

Don’t pick on anyone your own size, choose a weaker opponent. Threaten them, insult them and generally shake them up. Then comes the hard sell: you’ve made the point that they need protection and now you offer to let them join your gang – on your terms – for which there is a membership fee. If they refuse then somehow their windows will get broken and they start to have unpleasant accidents. They are on a terrifying escalator, with more and more pressure applied.

Forget all the waffle about Canada’s trade terms with the United States (US). This fight was never really about that. Trump had decided that he would like to vastly increase American territory and Canada was the obvious target. Thus the world’s second biggest country would effectively be swallowed by the third biggest – and it would join as a single state of the US. (Greenland could follow along behind).

Simple arithmetic suggests Canada, with 41.6 million people, should have nine or ten states in the resulting superstate with a population of 383.4 million. That would completely change the political balance of the US, very much in favour of the Democrats and it would considerably enhance the social democratic current in North American life.

But that presumes that such a union would be a democratic deal of genuine give and take. Trump was never interested in such a thing: he wanted to make Ottawa an offer it couldn’t refuse. “Surrender your sovereignty on my terms or I’ll wreck your economy.”

Looking back

All of which makes one look back. It was always anomalous that the US and Canada enjoyed probably the world’s most comprehensive set of social, economic, and defence relationships and that they have the world’s longest undefended border (8 841 km).

Before James Wolfe had completed Britain’s conquest of Canada in 1760 the French and British had fought four separate wars over what was to become Canada and when the American War of Independence broke out many Americans hoped that Quebec and Nova Scotia would take their side. This came to nothing and an American invasion of Canada ended in fiasco. Things only really changed when France declared war on Britain.

In the resulting settlement the US gained parts of south-west Canada and 70,000 Loyalists (i.e. pro-monarchist Americans) were settled in Canada.

This left an awkward situation. The Napoleonic wars had created many difficult issues dividing Britons and Americans and while the new American republic was arguably the strongest power on land, the Royal Navy controlled the seas. Yet when the US declared war and invaded Canada in 1812 it was defeated by British regulars and their Native American allies while the Royal Navy created havoc up and down the American coast, climaxing with the burning down of the White House and other public buildings in Washington.

Canada learned to look back on this as a heroic war of resistance and the war gave birth to a real sense of Canadian identity.

Both sides greatly preferred peace and stability but the rise of America’s industrial power and the clearly approaching US Civil War changed the balance. Lord Palmerston, like many British aristocrats, felt a natural sympathy with the plantation gentry of the South and argued that a Confederate victory would be in Britain’s interest: a victorious South would preside over a slave-owning agrarian society which would be a far lesser competitive threat to Britain. William Gladstone was a natural anti-slavery man but in addition feared that if the North lost the war it would not stomach an existence as merely an American remnant and would probably gobble up Canada.

At the war’s end the leading abolitionist, Senator Charles Sumner, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, demanded that Britain pay $2 billion in reparations for the help it had given the South during the war – or, failing that, cede all of Canada to the US. The gauntlet was thus thrown down.

In fact Sumner was willing to settle for less but both Britain and Canada stalled while American attention was mainly focused on the dramas of Reconstruction. In the end the case went to international arbitration which awarded a mere $15.5 million to the US. Britain heaved a sigh of relief and paid up.

Co-existence

Canada became self-governing in 1867 and a long period of amicable co-operation followed. It was almost as if Canada and the US shared a familial relationship. Only in 1927 did the two countries exchange ambassadors for the first time. The Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930 was furiously resisted by Canada – which naturally retaliated against US trade. The commerce between the two states fell by 75%.

But the Depression was worldwide. Much has sometimes been made of the fact that right through the 1930s the US and Canadian militaries continued to conduct war games in which they saw one another as enemies. But this speaks more to the long hang-over life of military stereotypes than to political realities. Throughout the 1920s-30s the US based itself on War Plan Red – a war pitting the US against the British Empire, fought mainly on American soil. Yet even in 1927 Herbert Hoover had spoken publicly of “the absurdity of contemplating the possibility of a war between the US and the British Empire”.

In 1938 President Roosevelt said that the US ‘would not sit idly by” if any other power attempted to dominate Canada. By implication he appeared to be extending the protectorate of the Monroe Doctrine to Canada but both Ottawa and London remained silent: it was clear enough that Roosevelt was warning off Hitler. In fact the US built a number of large military bases in Newfoundland during the war and it seemed more likely that the territory was effectively becoming part of the US.

Newfoundland was, at that stage, still a separate Crown Colony and so Canada quietly suggested that the moment was opportune for it to join Canada. This it did after two referenda. Interestingly, the option of joining the US was not on the ballot paper – a fact to which Washington made no reference.

During the Cold War Harry Truman observed that “Canada and the US have reached the point where we can no longer think of one another as ‘foreign’ countries”. On the other hand Pierre Trudeau said the relationship was “like sleeping with an elephant” – for Canada could not be unaware of their larger partner’s slightest twitch or grunt.

However, the fundamental point, reached long before (in 1869) by William H Seward, Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of State, was just that of contiguity and the fact that there was no natural obstacle to America and Canada becoming one country: “Nature designs this whole continent, not merely these 36 states, shall be, sooner or later, within the magic circle of the American Union.” This thought was bound to recur time and again.

As indeed it did. Theodore Roosevelt was fascinated by the thought of America incorporating Canada – but it was assumed that any such move would be bitterly resisted by the British and in practice there was never a good reason for upsetting and disturbing one of your country’s most important allies. This was not much of a prohibition of an idea which was bound never to go away. And, sure enough the question has come back to haunt Ottawa.

More aggressive

What is surprising is that Trump has turned to this far more aggressive approach to the enlargement of America’s “manifest destiny” at a time when the decline of the American imperium has become obvious. Given the large advance achieved in the 1990s with the foundation of North American Free Trade Agreement one might have expected further organic growth of that three-cornered consortium or possibly its further expansion into Latin America.

In a sense, of course, America’s partners have been “spoilt” by three generations of a liberal Rooseveltian era (1945-2025) in which America was generous, doled out aid, and respected national dignity and national sovereignty. But it remains true that a much softer, more co-operative approach might have achieved better results.

The same is true, of course, of Trump’s threatening approach to Greenland. As it is Trump’s protection racket tactics have deeply alienated America’s natural allies, Canada most certainly included, and made them feel that any agreement reached with Trump is worthless.

Trump has massively overplayed his hand. He says Canadians are “nasty”, has slammed tariffs on them and won’t even let the Canadians open the new cross-border bridge they’ve built. But there is no sign of Canadian resistance weakening. It now seems more than likely that America will reach the end of the Trump presidency without any concession of territorial sovereignty by either Canada or Greenland. Yet what Trump wants is to be able to boast of the great deals he’s pulled off.

He will, of course, try to claim that the Iran war was a triumph but nobody believes that. So the only trophies that Trump will be able to wave at the voters in November may be the rather tatty scalps of Nicolas Maduro and perhaps the Castros. Trump doubtless had visions of hero-worshipping crowds cheering him through the “Arc de Trump” and demanding “Four More Years” but this seems unlikely now.

No more territorial expansion

Part of the problem is that the era of large-scale territorial acquisitions really ended in the 19th century. Trump has blithely ignored that – for him it’s just all real estate. Just how little he cares for the politesse of international relations has been shown up again by reports that if Britain surrenders the Chagos Islands to Mauritius Trump will try to buy them back. But in a sense, this is quite logical.

Once you abandon the old liberal Bretton Woods order for the delights of the new multi-polar world there is no longer any real reason to make a shibboleth out of national sovereignty. Putin had already recognised the force of this when he invaded Ukraine in 2022. And Trump’s reaction to the same event was to hail it as a stroke of genius on Putin’s part….

Nonetheless, the cases of Greenland and Canada will be important. If Trump fails in these cases it will actually be because of the peculiarly crude and maladroit tactics he has employed rather than any general failure of what one might term “multipolar theory”.

At present the nations of the Global South are trying to have it both ways: they cheer on multipolarity along with the Russians and Chinese, but then want their national sovereignty to be sacrosanct. And currently the Global South holds most of the cheap seats in the gallery so for a while that irrational compromise may hold.

But the crunch will probably come in the Pacific where China is quite outrageously bullying many smaller nations which also border the South China Sea. What’s at stake is strategic military positions enabling Chinese dominance and precious mineral and undersea rights. China has made it clear that it is brutally intent on a winner-takes-all policy and that it is willing to back up its stance with whatever amounts of military force may be required.

In theory the Global South has to support the likes of Vietnam, the Philippines, Brunei, Indonesia, and Malaysia. But will they?

In the analagous case of the persecuted Muslim minorities of the Xinjiang region (the Uyghurs and other Turkic groups) China has been remarkably successful in silencing the protests of many Muslim nations. Not only have most leading Muslim nations gone quiet on the matter but China flatly insists that there is no persecution taking place at all, despite the plentiful evidence to the contrary. And China isn’t satisfied with just silence. Many Uyghurs have fled westwards and sought refuge with a variety of central Asian Muslim states. But, sad to relate, many of those Muslim states are handing back these refugees to the tender mercies of the Chinese.

That is, the evidence to date suggests that fragile majorities built on the votes of the Global South are no match for China’s mix of stick and carrot, its muscular diplomacy and its sheer intimidating strength. And the reason why the principle of inviolate national sovereignty was upheld through the Bretton Woods period was that many of the major powers were willing to uphold that principle even though that might sometimes be against their own interests.

Now, with Russia, China and America all throwing international law to the winds, there is no sign of such self-denying ordinances this time.