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"Oh the Urbanity" a Canadian YouTuber just put out a video titled "Donald Trump is 100% serious about annexing Canada" where I think he puts forward a really convincing argument for the title argument, and for why it needs to be taken seriously.
I won't force you to watch the video but here it is, I'll give you his 13 points for it and explain them.
1: "Repeated preoccupation"
This isn't just a "one off brain fart" like a lot of Trump's rhetoric, he's been consistent about it over and over again. From Trump himself "So when I say they should be a state, I mean that, I really mean that"
2: "Aides say he's serious."
Includes a tweet from White House Deputy Chief of Staff to take him at face value and sources to CNN reporting other aides say similar, take his claims seriously.
3: "Canada says he's serious"
Some of the politicians in Canada believe that Trump is very serious about this threat too.
4: "Questioned our border"
He's talked about believing the Canadian/US border to be illegitimate (Something he also points out is that Trump has not done the same with Mexico) and that this is the rhetoric used before trying to take over another country.
5: "Loves big real estate deals."
Trump is narcissistic and loves to put his names on things and claim big accomplishments. "Is there any bigger real estate deal than doubling the land mass of the USA?"
6: "Fits into his world view"
Urbanity believes Trump has a view of great powers dominating over their local spheres of influence
7: "Threatened other countries"
He's talked about this with other countries like Panama and Greenland, showing the expansionist mindset. Along with the reported plans being developed for a potential Panama invasion.
8: "Consider his influences"
People that Trump likes are Pat Buchanan (who has talked about taking Canada and Greenland before) and McKinley (Trump's favorite president) who annexed multiple territories.
9: "Admires Vladimir Putin"
Trump has shown a lot of respect to Putin before and often victim blames Ukraine for being invaded.
10: "Pretexts like Drug Cartels"
They're trying to claim that Canada has been taken over by drug cartels and they need to wage a war to take it back from harming the country. It sounds like the Bush administration talking about WMDs.
11: "Spins Canada as abuser"
They talk about things like Doug Ford putting a tax on electricity exports as an "act of war" by Canada, and treat retaliatory tariffs as unprovoked aggression.
12: "Information Bubble"
Trump lives in an information bubble where the main sources he listens to are the ones that feed from him like Fox News. His ideas about Canada wanting to be taken over from Fox News talking about "Maple MAGA" likely reinforce his desire even more.
13: "No Personal Morals"
Urbanity views Trump as a man who has scammed people before with various business projects, shitcoins and the like. There's little reason to expect he wouldn't disregard the sovereignty of other nations.
While he doesn't mention this, I personally think another major point to consider is that Trump is not consistent on what he wants from Canada. One day he says it's the trade deficit, next day he says its drugs, then the next day its immigrants, the next day he says nothing can be done at all and he just wants the state. It sounds like excuses just being made up based off how he feels that day.
Urbanity goes on to argue that even if the threat isn't likely, it is no reason to take it as less serious. The main thing being that Trump is enacting a trade war, which is still causing serious harm to the Canadian economy and their people.
Like if a mafiaso moved in next door and started joking about killing you. Even if the chance was low, it's understandable to take their words seriously. "Threats don't have to be higher than a 50% chance to take them seriously"
He draws a corollary to Ukraine where there was a lot of disbelief and doubt about Russia invading in 2022, until as we're all aware, it happened. "But they did it"
All in all I think this is very convincing that Trump really does want to annex Canada and that we as a society should be taking that possibility seriously. And as Urbanity also points out, even if it's unpopular now, Trump's followers and the Republican party have been shown to be rather flexible at following his lead against their prior beliefs. They might be against him in 2025, but what about 2026 or 2027 when they've had years of Fox News and Trump speeches repeating the stories of Canadian Cartels and "Acts of War"?
So for discussion, there's a few questions.
Do you think Trump has serious intentions to annex Canada? Is it right of him or wrong of him to do this? If he does ramp up rhetoric (or efforts) to annex or invade, would you wish for the Republicans to oppose him or continue to support him as duly elected president? And how likely is it that Trump will transform from his rhetoric to serious action (beyond the trade wars)?
I’m not buying it simply because I don’t see anything to make me believe that he’s ramping up to start a war. No reporting of troop movements even on the Canadian side, no announcement of anything of that sort. It’s not something you can just do on a whim. Canada isn’t just going to roll over and become part of the USA. You need tanks and planes mobilized on the border.
Something that a lot of people tend to forget is that there is no land border between Canada and the United States. Tanks aren't going to do the US much good here, and that's even if the average Canadian tank wasn't broken down.
Now sure, you can say "but the Western border", and it's true that isn't defensible in the slightest, but it also isn't really Canada, it's just a territorial possession. The people who live there will all say that too, by the way- they vote like it, those who opposed Canada violently in the past are venerated, etc. Just like Quebec, for that matter.
In truth, Canada is (as it was originally, back when it was called Upper Canada) defined as "the peoples who live in the area constrained by 2000km of vast, relatively impassable Ontario wilderness to the West (there is one road, and a lot of bridges along that road), the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence to the South and East, and the French to the North (and they are similarly surrounded by water and wilderness)".
As far as the peoples unprotected by the natural barrier of the St. Lawrence go (where you can just drive across), the fact of the matter is there's nothing out there worth taking that the US doesn't already have. Halifax is strategically significant because there's a warm-water port there, and the Great Lakes ports are not (or at least, they aren't yet). Everywhere else is about as populated as the Territories are: PEI has less than 200,000 residents, and NS only has a million.
Thus, Canada is literally an ocean away from the US (in the absence of those bridges, which for all the faults of the Canadian military they will still have the capacity to destroy in open warfare with the US). And sure, while their tactical situation is completely untenable for other reasons- modern artillery has range sufficient to just sit on the US side of the border and dismantle Canadian industry completely unchallenged, something that wasn't possible in 1812- it's going to take the US long enough to actually get their military pieces into position for foreign military aid to arrive.
While it's likely that Canada would still lose extremely quickly due to a complete lack of will to prosecute a war against an ally offering better terms to its soldiers than the Canadian government ever would, the destruction of Canadian industry in that area would nullify Canada's value as an ally. This isn't a war that can be realistically won by the US primarily with a traditional exercise of military power.
Were I to attempt this I'd exploit the fact that the West is unwilling to fight a war the East gets itself into. Thus, I would target industry most commonly found in the East with a competitive advantage against American industry due to its dirt-cheap power, that being steel and aluminum production, and wait for counter-tariffs and a political split to get the West to the table. And I'd offer the most powerful Western province special treatment- a comparative exemption on tariffs to its strategic resource- to suggest that provinces willing to deal independently of the federal government may have other payoffs (and to further drive a wedge between the West and the East, for the East hates petrochemical development).
Which is probably why those things are happening.
Certainly trying to take Toronto by invading from the West along the North Shore would be silly. But forcing crossings of St. Lawrence River and the Niagara River is far easier than crossing an ocean (or even the Great Lakes). If the US for some reason decided to invade Canada, certainly it could head north and west from Maine and New York, and cross the St. Lawrence. The Niagara is a bottleneck and so harder, but I expect it would still be done, probably combined with true amphibious crossings over the lakes. And the St Clair, though that's also a bottleneck -- it might be a race to see who can get heavy units there faster.
All the major objectives would be seized within a week of an American attack, even with no preparation. For example Fort Drum holds the 10th Mountain Division, which alone is more combat capable than all of the Canadian Armed Forces combined even if they weren't spread out. It takes Ottawa on day 2.
The biggest defence of Canada is that a large proportion of Americans likes us quite a bit, and an attempt to actually violently seize us would more likely result in an American Civil War then a straight-forward invasion.
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