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Notes -
Do We Live In the Dankest Timeline?
Or
Is the United States Going to (Re)Join the British Commonwealth?
(Probably not, but this is funny.)
Earlier this month, @hydroacetylene gave a flattering compliment about how if he ever lucked into power, he'd consider me for an advisor. However, I deferred at the time and now must formally defer in favor of another Motte poster, who has a geopolitical creativity I would never have thought of despite dropping their hints in ways that only most perfidious minds of Albion could make appear unserious at the time.
Specifically-
@FiveHourMarathon, care to explain how you convinced King Charles that all he had to do was just ask Trump to join the British Commonwealth?
Because according to Trump... Sounds Good!
More seriously(?), emerging reporting of the hour(s) is that Trump has pre-empted (via his Truth Social, no less) a planned-but-not-yet-extended invitation by the British government to bring the US into a voluntary association agreement with the Commonwealth of Nations, aka the British Commonwealth, aka the post-British empire talking club.
As a geopolitical unit, the British Commonwealth... isn't? The wiki page summarizes obligations as-
A no-obligation talking club isn't the worst thing in international politics. It offers a channel to communicate, nice summit opportunities, and engagement opportunities. Not much, but not nothing either.
So... why now?
The Independent speculates-
Would Commonwealth-association defuse the trade war? Probably not.
But it will be a heck of a funny if the British government tries to run with this opportunity(?) of a generation.
It will also be funny to watch how European (social) media covers this story, if it goes anywhere. A significant policy effort by the Europeans of late has been to try and get the current Labour government more and more involved with EU projects vis-a-vis US engagements. This is... not necessarily a reversal, but at the same time anything that lets the UK play the US of the EU (or vice versa) complicates efforts at reversing British disentanglement from the EU that followed Brexit.
Plus, the memes will be funny.
I imagine some British foreign policy experts (cough @FiveHourMarathon cough) have an interesting weekend ahead of them from this Trump tweet-leak.
I still have no idea why any Republican would want to make Canada the 51st state and thus add tens of millions of people who tend to lean significantly further left than the GOP to the US electorate.
Being term-limited and on his last term, Trump is unmoved by the electoral concerns of other, future Republicans. What he cares about at this point is legacy, and integrating the second largest country on earth, becoming the largest country on earth in the process, is pretty legacy-setting.
I'm not fully convinced, but that's an interesting theory. Trump does seem to really love size, he constantly uses the word "big" and he likes big buildings and so on. Although to be fair, who doesn't? A USA that includes Canada and Greenland would look gigantic on the map, and Trump would then be sure to have gone down as one of the most significant US Presidents of all time. Even more than he already is, I mean. From a purely aesthetic point of view, the map would look even better if the US also expanded all the way down to the Panama Canal. There would be something aesthetically satisfying about one country's color painted over the entirety of North America. But then, if the US absorbs not only Canada, but also Mexico and Central America, well US politics would become completely unrecognizable.
Not if they were merely territories with no voting power
So like 95% of Canada by land mass is already, then. Nothing would change for most of the country if this occurred.
About (aboot?) 40%, but what's half an order of magnitude between friends.
The 40% of Canada that doesn't live in Toronto has virtually no political power, and this has been true for the past 150 years.
The controlling empire being American rather than [Upper] Canadian would change relatively little.
Besides being a big move of the goalposts, you seem to have some weird-ass misconceptions about both Canadian demographics and Canadian politics. Toronto is about 17% of the population, not anywhere near 60%. That's not quite as weird as thinking the Territories are 95% of the land mass, but it still seems to be massively skewing your perspective. Things are certainly weighted heavily toward the East but it's nowhere close to all-powerful.
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