The US-Canada frontier is unlike any other, because the relationship between the two peoples is unlike any other. Large stretches of the border — out west — are watched over by drones but otherwise left unguarded. It’s a proper border, as anyone discovers if they try to cross without the right papers, but it is unlike those barbed wire zones that divide enemy peoples in so many places of the world.
People speak the same language on both sides, though with different accents. They watch the same TV shows, root for the same sports teams, wear the same Lycra and leisurewear, holiday in each other’s countries. Whole industries, such as automobiles, are completely integrated and billions of dollars of goods cross the border every day. When Canadian forests go up in flames, Americans fly in to help, and when LA catches fire, Canada sends its water planes. The ties are more than neighbourly. They are intimate. Intermarriage and dual citizenships mean that families span the border. As many as 800,000 Canadians live permanently in the US, and thousands of Americans live on the Canadian side, some as refugees from what they regard as the craziness back home.
When most Americans think about Canada, which is rarely, they think of snow, lakes, good hunting and how pleasant it is to have a neighbour who doesn’t make trouble. When Canadians think about Americans, which is all the time, the psychology of the weaker party makes for a mixture of envy coupled with fear and loathing.
Sigmund Freud’s theory — “the narcissism of minor differences” — maintained that the smaller the real differences between two peoples, the larger these differences would loom in their identities. The differences between Canadians and Americans are so small that foreigners can’t tell them apart, and when Americans want to conceal their nationality from foreigners, which is often, they easily pass as Canadians. On the Canadian side, however, no one ever thinks our differences are minor.
When America rebelled in 1776, the British colonies to the north stayed loyal, and those who stayed loyal within the American colonies streamed north into exile, sometimes accompanied by slaves whom they liberated. As a result, Canada never had plantation slavery. Instead, it became a destination for the Underground Railroad that conveyed slaves in secret to freedom. As the first British colony to secure self-government, Canada kept the Crown and parliamentary democracy, and because a third of the population was French-speaking and Catholic, the founding fathers created laws to safeguard differences of language, religion and legal traditions.
About the photography
At 5,525 miles, the border between the US and Canada is the longest international border in the world. Photographer Andreas Rutkauskas’s ‘Borderline’ project features images of official crossing points and places where they used to exist. Some of the latter are now barricaded, he writes, while at other locations “a no entry sign, rusted wire fence, or fallen tree is all that separates one country from the next”. andreasrutkauskas.com/borderline
With such diversity in its founding, compromise was built into Canadian political culture, while in the US, compromise was sometimes seen, as in the war over slavery, as an existential surrender of principle. Canada ran an internal empire, over aboriginal peoples, while the Americans built an empire overseas, including the Philippines, Guam and the Panama Canal. Two peoples, who on the surface look the same, ended up being different deep inside, because their histories gave them different institutions.
Canada doesn’t have a Second Amendment guarantee of the right to bear arms, so Canadians can’t understand why Americans can’t stop the madness of mass shootings. Canadians think publicly funded healthcare is a right, so they can’t abide the idea that Americans must take out their wallets to get into hospital. As an editorial in the country’s national paper, The Globe and Mail, put it last week: “This is a country where the civilian in front of you at the coffee shop won’t be carrying a semi-automatic rifle over his shoulder, and the person behind you won’t be tearfully telling someone that they had to sell their home to pay for their child’s cancer treatment.”
Canadians look at the US and fear the violence and anomie there, but they also envy the power, energy and dynamism. Americans on the progressive left look north and see “a kinder, gentler America”, while Americans on the right, in Pat Buchanan’s immortal words, used to see “Soviet Canuckistan”, a hellhole of socialist dirigisme. Trump supporters nowadays see Canada as the last bastion of a liberalism that has collapsed under the weight of woke.
So this is roughly where matters stood between the two peoples until the next president of the United States began lobbing rhetorical hand grenades into the relationship. There was no good reason for him to start trouble since Canada is the very least of his problems as an incoming president. The question is why he wanted to.
He is what the anthropologists and scholars of ancient mythologies would call a trickster. Tricksters intimidate and unsettle. Barbed humour is the weapon of choice. They have an instinct for what gets under the skin of opponents and a gift for keeping them off balance. As the master trickster of global politics, the president-elect plays his Canadian cards with zest. Calling the prime minister “Governor Trudeau”, referring to the country as the 51st state, saying that “economic force” may be needed to bring Canadians to heel on tariffs, trade and border security, has certainly got under Canadian skins.
Keeping a Canadian cool is hard this time. Even the most pro-American prime minister of recent memory, Stephen Harper, says Trump’s recent comments don’t sound like the words of “a friend, a partner and an ally”. It’s upsetting to be treated like an enemy for the first time since the War of 1812. Trump is antagonising allies everywhere while making overtures to Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un, whom Canadians and Europeans understood as the adversaries they had in common.
Canadians, like Europeans, have made their alliances with the Americans the cornerstone not just of their foreign policy but of their identities, but when Trump looks at alliances, he sees Gulliver tied down by the Lilliputians. When he takes over as president, he believes, Gulliver will rise and shake off the Lilliputian cords. Instead of tying him down, the Lilliputians will become subalterns in a transactional empire, whose guiding purpose is only to make America great (again).
The president-elect is demanding that his allies in Europe and North America increase defence spending, not just to 2 per cent of GDP, but 5 per cent. That’s a target beyond the reach of any Canadian government. The economy suffers from endemic productivity problems and fragmented labour and capital markets. If that weren’t enough, as everyone knows, Canada doesn’t have a government, not a real one, just a caretaker administration, until an election gives some party a mandate, likely the Conservatives, after a vote probably in the late spring. In Ottawa, it is said, the mood is dark.
Besides resetting the defence relationship, Trump wants to use tariffs to bring the North American economy ever more firmly under US control. Some observers believe the destination is full, borderless continental integration. A country whose population is around a 10th the size of its neighbour’s has only limited room to bargain when that neighbour threatens 25 per cent tariffs on oil, natural gas, minerals, auto parts, wheat — everything that Canada ships to them. Canadian politicians have long experience in appealing directly to key American audiences, and they are already on the US media telling anyone who’ll listen that 25 per cent tariffs will be paid by American purchasers, with an inevitable inflationary effect.
Besides persuasion, Canadians are making some threats of their own, such as imposing countervailing tariffs on Florida orange juice and American whiskey. These aren’t exactly a big stick. Using the bigger sticks, such as shutting off energy exports, hydroelectric power from Quebec, oil from out west, may do Canada as much harm as good, given how dependent the country is on the US energy market.
Using these threats last time did work. In 2019, the Canadian government discovered that behind the trickster’s bluff and bluster there was a politician ready to make a deal. The Liberal government managed a deal that salvaged cross-border trade. In 2025, no one can be sure that even a new Conservative government, ideologically aligned with Trumpian views, can do the same. A trickster president will keep everyone guessing.
Dealing with a trickster means grasping what Shakespeare called the method in his madness. Might there be a logic, a strategic ambition that ties together his provocations to Denmark over Greenland, to Canada over border security and tariffs, to Mexico over migration and to Panama over the canal? Any trickster worth his salt wants to keep his opponents guessing. What Canadians hear is a president conjuring up the 19th-century rhetoric of “Manifest Destiny”. Canadians can’t forget their school lessons about “54-40 or Fight”, the war cry of Americans in the 1840s who wanted to run the US border halfway up the Canadian Pacific Coast, five degrees north of the 49th parallel, where the border is now.
Trump may not be recycling 19th-century war cries. He may be looking to the future, to a world where the writ of “the rules-based international order” no longer runs, and where power over the global economy has devolved to three zones of influence: the Chinese in east Asia, the Russians in Eurasia, and the Americans, with an exclusive sphere of influence in the western hemisphere, stretching from Greenland in the Arctic to Chile at the southern tip of Latin America.
If there is method in the madness, this is the possibility that ties together the provocations to Canada, Denmark, Mexico and Panama. What makes America great again, in this vision, would be critical minerals mined in Greenland, US bombers and surveillance equipment on the old Thule Air Base; a single North American economy drawing in Canadian oil and gas, uranium and critical minerals; a wall to keep Latin Americans out and Mexico as a cheap labour platform for US manufacturers; privileged access to the Panama Canal excluding China, and a Trumpian version of the Monroe Doctrine defining North and South America as America’s exclusive zone of power and protection.
If this is how to make America great again — hegemon over a bi-continental sphere of influence, with the US homeland as its heart — this might just be Trump’s quid pro quo for accepting Russian and Chinese spheres of influence and letting India tack between the two. Accepting their spheres of influence, provided they recognise his, would allow him to cut the Gordian knot that has tied America’s strategic interests to Europe and Asia.
He’s never had any patience with the Washington liberal elite’s vision of America providing global public goods in a rules-based liberal international order. If his strategic competitors accept an American sphere of influence in its own hemisphere, what strategic interest would America still have if China blockades, invades and absorbs Taiwan? If Russia imposes direct or indirect control over Ukraine, what would that matter to the US? If first eastern Europe, and then western Europe, becomes a satellite in a Russian sphere of influence, why should America try to stop it?
Trump’s designs on Canada, Greenland and Panama make sense, in other words, if you accept, as he might, that spheres of influence will rule global politics in the 21st century. From Trump’s point of view, a sphere of influence reduces American interests to a hard, defensible core, allows a president to discard lost causes, avoids needless conflict with other hegemons, and in doing so brings peace, that prize he never ceases to proclaim as his goal.
No one can tell, perhaps not even the president-elect himself, whether this is the Trumpian grand design. But if it is, it makes America great again by reducing its overseas commitments. It reprises long-standing isolationist critiques that America has been over-extended. It revises key US defence doctrines that commit the nation to fight wars on two fronts at the same time in defence of distant allies. It allows, at least in theory, substantial cuts to the American state and to its defence establishment. It meets the demand of a disillusioned Republican electorate to concentrate on the home front and amputate the power of the “deep state” that oversaw American imperial expansion after 1945.
Focusing American power on its own hemisphere would allow Trump, in other words, to square many circles: to make America great again by making America’s imperial footprint smaller, to reduce the tax burden on the rich by cutting into the apparatus that a global imperium required.
The very fact that Greenland doesn’t want to be an American colony, Canada doesn’t want to be swallowed up, Panama doesn’t want to give the canal back, Mexico wants to preserve its independence, and Latin America thinks the Monroe Doctrine is a synonym for Yankee imperialism: all this only tells the incoming president that he has a battle worth fighting. Great causes always attract great resistance. That’s what makes them worthwhile. Resistance may delay the inevitable, even beyond his presidency, but he can get the ball rolling, and once he does, the rest of us know what the direction of travel may well be for the rest of the century.
Europe has most to fear from a world divided into three blocs. A despotic and aggressive petrostate sits on its eastern border and has never ceased to think of eastern Europe as within its sphere of influence. If America decides that its defence priorities are hemispheric only, its old allies will have to defend their freedom on their own.
Canada, being cocooned inside an American sphere of influence, at first, might feel safer. It might be willing to contribute more to North American air defence, to surveillance and deterrence missions in the high Arctic as climate change opens its northern waterways to Russian and Chinese shipping. It could even welcome ever fuller integration into the capital and labour markets of the powerhouse to the south.
Inevitably, Canadian people will have to ask, as they have done many times in the past, whether economic and security integration should end in political integration and loss of sovereignty. In epochal elections in Canada — 1911 and 1988, for example — free trade with the US triggered a furious debate about whether economic integration would end with Canada being absorbed. In both cases, Canada took the plunge into closer ties and felt that it survived with its sovereignty and political culture intact. Trump’s presidency — and the possibility that it heralds a grand design of hemispheric integration — makes the future of Canada as an independent state a live, existential question once again.
Michael Ignatieff is a former leader of the Liberal party of Canada. He teaches history at Central European University, Vienna
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