Well, if we pretend the US becomes a fascist empire, I can’t see how Canada retains its independence for very long. Or alternatively, if the the UFSA (United Fascist States of America) can’t subjugate Canada, then how the heck are they going to conquer the entire Middle East? If the whole point is to steal oil, Canada has quite a bit of oil shale, it’d be loads easier to conquer Canada, exterminate the populace, start strip mining, and dump the waste piles on the prairie.
Of course, if you count the expenses of conquering and pacifying Canada and setting up slave labor camps and so on, in with your gasoline bill, gasoline suddenly becomes a heck of a lot more expensive than just buying it from Canada.
So maybe genocide should be our back-up plan–you know, just in case this whole democracy and freedom thing doesn’t work out.
It might be possible, with nuclear weapons from Britain, or by building it’s own. It depends if goatee-US starts its campaign of conquest overseas, or begins its campaign by attacking its neighbors.
If just seems that if we’re so weaksauce that we can’t conquer Canada, the rest of our global domination plans are probably not gonna go without a hitch either.
Evil Overlord hat on again: I’d personally find out where all my potential enemies nuclear arsenals are stored (assuming the US doesn’t already know where they are) and do a first strike to eliminate them all. Sure you might miss a few, but you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs!
Well, the trouble with invading Canada is the U.S. has no chance of preventing counter-invasions, with a 3000-mile border. So an angered Canadian walks into the U.S. and steals a car with American license plates, fills it with explosives, and drives it down to New York City to demolish the Empire State Building… He’d probably be white and speak perfect English… nothing that would trip any profile. The only American defense would be to turn every border state into an armed camp, with local Americans constantly being hassled for their papers, lest one be a Canadian on a mission. And you could forget about the billion dollars of trade that now casually passes that border. Any one of those thousands of trucks or shipping containers or boxcars could be carrying a radiological bomb, since Canadians have the resources and education to make them. You going to stop and inspect them all? And are you going to send the military to guard the various oil pipelines and hydroelectric lines (Hydro Quebec alone supplies a not-insignificant amount of energy to the Northeast states, especially in winter) to protect them against disgruntled Canadians who built them and know exactly how to effectively sabotage them? So with the resultant collapse in trade, and the increasing scarcity of energy, the crackdown on your own citizens that would need to apply out of fear of Canadian terrorism, northern states feeling the crunch of the jackboot while southern states try to distance themselves from the crisis (and of course no longer able to trust northern visitors - as they might be Canadian)… I figure the president who started it stands an excellent chance of being hanged by an angry mob.
Basically, you could destroy my country, but probably only at the cost of your own.
Given the current state of western culture, I’d say it was impossible without a huge change in the mindset of Americans. Currently the US is using motion sensors and even flying drones over the US/Canada border in order to patrol it (picked that one up on CanadaAM this morning during an interview with Derek Lundy, author of ‘Borderlands’. He traveled across the North and South US borders and wrote about his experiences). Imagine the further paranoia generated if there was such an incident as you described. The place is already overly populated with religious whackjobs waiting for an excuse to start Armageddon.
I’m not sure how you can blow up Canadians without destroying the very infrastructure you’re ostensibly invading to seize. Beside, the refugees would just flee south and blend in, with revenge on their minds…
You have to find us to conquer us; Canada’s a real big place, with lots of hiding places. And every farmer has explosives on his farm; they’d just have to pool their resources, and farmers are used to doing that.
And the nature of this control would be a bit like a fascist dictatorship wouldn’t it? Or would US fascists be different and better than ones with other religions, languages or skin colour?
I think the answer to the OP is that absolute conquest isn’t as easy as he thinks.
There was a time when one country could conquer another, with technological superiority and absolute brutality. The conquerors would come in, blow away all vestiges of the conquered nation’s military, suppress any resistance with absolute brutality, and wait. The general population wouldn’t put up much of a resistance, because for them, things wouldn’t change much, and really, there wasn’t that much they could do anyway, even if they wanted to. The conquerors were sufficiently brutal to take their own civilian casualties due to resistance activity pretty much in stride, and to make the cost of resistance activity so high to the conquered people that resistance would tend to end, at least in the short term. But bear in mind, eventually the “Barbarians” conquered Rome.
But things have changed a lot. Our stomach for brutality on the part of conquerors has decreased as our ability to inflict it has increased. Assymetric warfare is both more likely and more likely to be effective in a time when technology exists that allows a single individual to kill large numbers of people, and population and educational levels are such that numerous members of the contemporary equivalent of peasants (let alone the burgeoning middle classes) are likely to care very much who governs them, and to take actions to get vengeance, if not justice, from conquerors.
In short, you’d better be prepared to kill them all. Lopping off the head of a distasteful government isn’t going to cut it. True dominance of another nation is going to take very expensive occupation and a level of brutality that the American people are generally unwilling to accede to, even ignoring the reaction of other nations watching on the sidelines, assuming they stay on the sidelines.
And on top of that conquest destroys infrastructure, and the resistance can destroy it as well to deny it to the occupier as has happened in Iraq. There simply wasn’t as much infrastructure to destroy nor was it so easy to do so back when conquest was profitable; and it all has the be expensively rebuilt if you want to profit from your conquest.
The thing is (and please, bear with me because it’s not exactly an intuitive notion) people don’t fancy the notion of living under the ever-possible threat of being bombed to smithereens by the next country over for some hazy reason or other.
This goes doubly when your stated reasons for the mass carpet bombing are “taking all the oil” and “making sure everyone knows we can blow them away at any time” : you’re not making any friends, even should that seminal carpet bombing actually work. No one likes living next to the gun toting maniac who takes pot shots at the mailman just to make a point.
Other countries besides Iraq have stuff the US might need or want, be it now or at some unspecified point in the future. Lots of stuff. Piles of it, really. It’s actually mind boggling the sheer amount of stuff that exists, and yet is out of US grasp. Cool stuff, too.
So should the US act the bully and basically out and out act like if and when they want it, they’ll damn well take the stuff and kill everyone in their path, well, the people that make up “everyone” are going to want to take steps in order to hopefully make that little scenario less likely. Again, not an intuitive notion to be sure, but thems the breaks. Cue the nukes pointed straight at you and the trade embargoes, every country in the world shoulder to shoulder trying to get right in your way because they know damn well that if they don’t hang together, they’ll hang separately (or, in that case, have separate albeit mirror-shiny landscapes-slash-parking lots).
You might have heard something kind of like that happened to the old USSR, back in the good old days. They didn’t win
I’ve got the answer. If you want to do the “destroy the middle east” thing without the “US v. everybody” thing right after, the US should just destroy evebody along with the Middle East.
I think I already addressed that. Destroy the enemies nuclear arsenal before they have the chance to use it and you have a whole new world where if anyone pisses you off you incinerate one of their cities until they bow to your wishes again. Develop neutron type bombs to deal with unruly populations. Do it from orbit so they have no chance to fight back. Bwahahaha!