In 2018, Donald Trump became the first US president since 1977 not to visit Canada in his first year in office. At the time, the snub raised eyebrows. In retrospect, it would have been better if he’d forgotten we exist altogether.
Trump has become rather focused on Canada, to our great consternation. He is threatening economic annexation, floating the idea of Canada as the fifty-first state, and keeps signalling plans for devastating 25 percent across-the-board tariffs on trade.
In turn, Canada has become fixated on the president’s every move, parsing what each decision means for our economic and security future. And what choice do we have? With a trade relationship worth nearly a trillion dollars a year, a deeply integrated and interoperable defence arrangement, and enduring cultural ties, the disintegration of connections would be cataclysmic—particularly for Canada, at roughly a ninth the population of the global hegemon and thus at constant risk of being crushed by the giant.
Trump is a mercantilist obsessed with the balance of trade. He sees commerce as a zero-sum game. In his view, if the US buys more from a country than it sells in return, it’s getting ripped off. And since Americans import more from Canada than we do from them, we get an outsized share of his attention—hence his preoccupation with punitive tariffs. “We pay hundreds of Billions of Dollars to SUBSIDIZE Canada,” Trump raged on social media in early February. “Why? There is no reason. We don’t need anything they have.”
An economic illiterate, Trump’s claim that the US subsidizes Canada on trade is nonsense. For one, the 2024 US–Canada trade deficit was $63 billion (US), not hundreds of billions. Regardless, a trade deficit isn’t a subsidy. It’s an economic transaction, like purchasing a sandwich from a deli—which is different than the government subsidizing the shop’s production of pastrami on rye.
Canada isn’t the only country or grouping that he’s given his attention. He has targeted China, the European Union, Mexico, Colombia—any entity that trades with the United States is exposed. In another social media post last month, Trump said the US would hit back with tariffs on countries that use a value-added tax (a consumption tax, like the goods and services tax) or any policy his administration deems a subsidy or trade barrier. Again, Canada stands out because we are a top trading partner. This fact is an accident of geography—the same accident that helped forge a military alliance that includes the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, and many other integrations and instances of co-operation.
Proximity is also a reason for Trump’s focus on the US–Canada border, which he erroneously claims is a porous source of massive flows of fentanyl. Trump ran his 2024 presidential campaign on the platform of restoring law and order—an effective strategy that relied on him and his supporters imagining their country as a lawless wasteland under then president Joe Biden. Part of that restoration hinged on solving the country’s drug-poisoning crisis, which does in fact exist but isn’t fuelled by fentanyl crossing the forty-ninth parallel. Last year, a mere twenty kilograms of the drug was found crossing the border between our countries, compared to 9,500 kilograms along the US’s southern border. But Canada is a convenient and even effective distraction or scapegoat for Trump’s grander designs on the continent and, indeed, the world.
In early February, Global News reporter Ashleigh Stewart spoke with former Trump strategist and aide Steve Bannon. According to Bannon, Canada is part of Trump’s geopolitical long game, particularly in establishing Arctic dominance for economic and military advantage to shore up US domestic interests—which has historically been the goal of foreign policy. This strategy of “hemispheric control,” Bannon tells Stewart, includes Trump’s designs for acquiring Greenland as a military outpost and for gaining control over the Panama Canal to control a critical trade route—which amounts to the same thing: security.
It’s easy to mock Trump, just as it’s easy to respond to his madness with boos and boycotts and counter tariffs, all of which we ought to welcome. But if we take Trump both seriously and literally, the president’s manoeuvres make terrifying sense. Trump is obsessed with control—and loyalty. In the early 2000s, ahead of the US invasion of Iraq, George W. Bush adopted a Manichaean world view in which individuals and states were either with his country or “with the terrorists.” Trump has expanded this view to include any policy or strategic goal he deems as essential to US security, well-being, and supremacy: from defence spending to trade to border security and beyond. And he’s willing to torch relationships, alliances, norms, and anything else that gets in the way of his designs or his conception of fair dealing between countries.
The second Trump administration’s approach to geopolitics is predicated on a revival of the nineteenth-century Monroe Doctrine, an undertaking of the fifth American president, in which the US asserted hemispheric control beyond existing colonies and promised to keep its nose out of European and colonial affairs. Trump is pairing it with a posture reminiscent of William McKinley, the twenty-fifth American president, and his later designs for territorial expansion. That’s the same McKinley whose name Trump insisted on restoring to Mount Denali in Alaska—around the same time he was busy rebranding the Gulf of Mexico in America’s image.
When Vice President J. D. Vance recently spoke to European leaders at the Munich Security Conference, he made it clear that the US was no longer interested in underwriting European security, that the transatlantic alliance forged in the aftermath of the Second World War was, effectively, over. “It’s important in the coming years,” he said, “for Europe to step up in a big way to provide for its own defence.”
The US would, from now on, look inward. Trump’s interest in ending the Russian war in Ukraine, and securing the latter’s critical minerals as a form of repayment for American assistance during the war, is further evidence of the shift—and its cost to erstwhile allies. As it happens, the cost to Ukraine of these reparations, at $500 billion (US), would be higher as a share of gross domestic product than what Germany paid after the First World War.
In his social media announcements for reciprocal tariffs, Trump said: “For many years, the US has been treated unfairly by other Countries, both friend and foe.” Among these countries, he counts Canada—presumably a friend, but that’s not the slam-dunk guarantee it once was. Here Trump’s words reflect both his drive for control and for his conception of fairness, one which sees advantage accruing to his country above all others. “There are no Tariffs if you manufacture or build your product in the United States,” Trump wrote.
As much as Canadians might wish to believe Trump’s attention is driven by something particular to our country, we seem to be, at best, incidental to his grander designs. Trump wants American dominance without the responsibility of soft power exercised through foreign aid or disproportionate spending on a military umbrella that stretches across the continent and the Atlantic Ocean. (He recently argued that countries like Taiwan should pay the US for defence, comparing it to an insurance arrangement.) He also wants American industry and workers to thrive without reliance on trade deficits—or wealthy people paying taxes.
To the extent that Trump views Canada as standing in the way of his hemispheric and domestic plans, by way of a trade imbalance, an under-securitized border, inadequate defence spending, and an inconvenient geographic location in the Arctic, he will bully this country by any means necessary—and annex it if he must. Wrong place, wrong time, Canada.
If the country can’t or won’t serve Trump’s nineteenth-century program, he’ll force it to, as a hammer forces a nail into a plank. And to Trump, that is what Canada is—a nail, piece of a project, no more animate or sacred or sovereign than a tiny spine of metal.
