Democrats (most of them, anyway) are “pro-Americanby respecting laws and democratic institutions, looking toward measures for genuine prosperity for more citizens, and upholding and defending the Constitution. Oh, and not storming the Capitol like a bunch of overgrown spoilt children just because they got an electoral result they didn’t like.
Gutter ball; try again.
Stranger
That post was about the political reality which led to Trump rolling at least a spare on November 5, not objective pro-Americanism.
Certainly not me, nor did I intend to imply otherwise. Those are the consequences I was talking about. Going from a stable trade partner in the north to a violent Hellscape is bad IMHO. The near concensus here seems to be that it’s not going to happen, but if it did, it would have no negative repercussions for US interests.
Do you mean simply that the Canadian military will be unable to provide any resistance or do you mean outright formal surrender?
The implication of Trump’s claim is that an Anglophone Canadian identity doesn’t exist. Is he right? Are English-speaking Canadians and Americans a single nation separated by a border? Is there some motivation for a militant resistance movement in the event of an invasion, an al-Q’Eh’da or ICES, if you will?
Quebec seems to me to be more likely to be motivated to resist due to their distinct cultural identity. Hell, there’s tension between them and their English-speaking countrymen.
The American military is good at the “roll in and conquer” part. Not so much the “indefinite occupation/small-scale campaign against irregulars and guerillas” part, as Iraq, Afghanistan, and Vietnam have demonstrated. I’d go so far as to say it’s impossible for the US to win a counter-insurgency campaign without committing some major league war crimes, and even then the public’s patience/tolerance is likely to run out first.
If America were to invade Canada, the Canadian military would likely collapse within weeks witu minimal American casualties. It’s after that that the soldiers in coffins would start steadily flowing in the direction of Arlington.
A week of resistance before the country effectively fell is about what you’d expect. The military is not deployed and arrayed to counter an invasion from the United States.
Resistance would be pointless. It would be best for the Canadian government to relocate to England, have whatever elements of the navy and air force that can free to the UK or some other friendly nation do so, and govern in absentia from there, and simply have most of the armed forces take small arms and hide them for use in resistance.
Of course a Canadian identity exists, and an occupation would be an absolute mess of the most appalling sort, like Northern Ireland on a continental scale. It would be horrific.
I think most people think it would have VERY negative repercussions for US interests. We would become completely estranged from our NATO allies, and would now be thought of internationally as an imperialist fascist regime…correctly, I might add. And underground resistance within Canada would start to generate dead US military bodies on a daily/weekly basis, as Canadians aren’t going to just go along with it.
In a sense, the fact that we’re even having this conversation is insane. This is what Donald Trump does to people. He floats ideas that are basically insane, and watches people’s reactions and laughs, and then he tries to “work a deal” that backs away from the most insane outcome…usually…
And it’s not likely to lead to anything constructive.
Think about what Trump is doing. He’s made veiled economic and military threats to two of our NATO allies - Canada and Denmark. This should tell people what he thinks of NATO. He’s signaling to the world that NATO is of no use to him. And who else is watching this? Vladimir Putin.
Trump is signaling to Putin that’s he’s OK with Putin’s armed take-over of 20% of Ukraine. He’s also signaling to China that he won’t do anything if they invade Taiwan.
My prediction for the next 4 years:
The US & Canada re-work some sort of trade deal, and the Canadians probably take us to the cleaners, because Trump’s “trade representatives” will by definition be idiots.
The US & Denmark re-work our relationship with Greenland that involves more exploration of their minerals.
The US leaves NATO.
The US removes support of Ukraine completely.
Russia annexes the parts of Ukraine that it has conquered, and starts to re-tool to eventually take the rest of Ukraine in the future.
Hope I’m wrong on #3-5. On 1 & 2, it’s better than some of the alternatives.
I agree that Trump’s Canadian statehood idea is basically insane. But it is insane for a different reason. Republican loyalists would be insane to give electoral votes, House of Representatives seats, and at least two senators, to the Democrats. That’s not how colonialism works. Britain never gave Canada seats in parliament, and an authoritarian MAGA regime would be even less inclined to allow its vassal congressional seats. Trump is floating these ridiculous ideas where you expand your country without blood and gore, and then give the defeated nation a say in your governance, as starting points to go in his (and Putin’s) desired direction, of dividing up the world into spheres of influence, without scaring war-adverse Americans.
Is making Canada an American colony also insane because Trump 45 never invaded a neighbor? No. Every MAGA presidency will be worse than the last one. Are eight MAGA years enough to turn the U.S. into the kind of country that would conquer a peace-loving neighbor? Probably not, but no one knows. All I know is that the risk is higher than it was last time.
The idea of invading or attacking Canada in any way is so ridiculous it’s not worth real consideration.
Canada may not have nuclear weapons but the UK sure does. Canada and the UK are the closest of allies. The UK is not going to sit idly by and watch it happen. They will act on their allied agreements, just like they acted when Hitler invaded Poland.
This is not a real thing, I refuse to believe it, and I hate that we’re even discussing it because of asshat Trump.
It would be literally amazing to see the US in a full-on military confrontation with Canada and the UK, which until Trump entered the scene were probably our two biggest allies on the entire planet.
And again - Note that these countries, Canada and UK, are NATO countries.
Part of Trump’s purpose here with Canada and Greenland is to destabilize NATO, or maybe to lay the groundwork for the US to outright exit NATO and leave Eastern Europe wide open to Putin.
Can’t happen without congressional approval and they don’t have 60 votes in the Senate.
From north of the 49th, the US is starting to look like an existentialist threat to Canada.
No but they can defund military air to NATO and reduce DoD participation in NATO exercises and activities sufficient to effectively choke the alliance. I’d like to believe that the European nations in NATO see the benefit to maintain and find it (although the United States has always been the primus inter pares in NATO and the alliance mostly existed during the Cold War to serve American interests) but in today’s more nationalist climate I just don’t have high confidence in that.
Stranger
Why do they need 60 votes? They aren’t trying to override a Presidential veto.
To end a filibuster.
Ahh, I forgot about the filibuster.
I think quite a few enlightened people living in blue states would like for their states to join Canada.
There is nothing in the United States but a sky high crime rate and a crummy health system that is hideously expensive and gets crummy results.
To make things even worse, Trump has been reelected.
The thing is, just “Joining Canada” won’t fix any of that. Even in Blue States, you have far too many people deep in the mindset and culture that produces those problems. Expecting your new Canadian Overlords to just impose our Superior Culture on your yahoos is unlikely to work.
I’ve heard this complaint in military circles here, too. “Negotiating with them was like trying to negotiate with Martians. In their eyes, there was only one way. The American Way.”
The most infuriating thing is that he isn’t asked where he heard that, or who told him that. This is true for all his bullshit proclamations. If he comes close to being asked for a cite, he gets hostile, and he’s never asked again. Never any pushback.