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The US won the first one.
And yes, MAD is supposed to work as you say. But a sane US leader isn't going to attempt to take over Canada, and a deranged one isn't going to care.
That is very contingent on political factors. Two years ago, I would have said that no sane US leader would try to take Greenland from Denmark, either. These days, the question boils down to how serious one should take Trump's threats and what one thinks of his mental health.
Get rid of NATO, and Canada:US is not totally dissimilar to Ukraine:Russia. In both cases, the smaller country is culturally similar to its bigger neighbor, and most of the people speak the language of their neighbor. A shared land border makes an invasion logistically feasible. The big neighbor outspends the little one by a huge factor (6.5x for RU:UA pre-open-war, 30x for US:CA). Both are non-fundamentalist, industrial nations with low TFRs whose populations are unlikely to engage in asymmetrical warfare against occupiers at a similar rate as the Taliban did, especially if the takeover was done quickly without a lot of bloodshed.
Of course, Canada is much larger than Ukraine, but also more urban. The military advantage of the US is much larger than Russia's, most of their cities are close to the US border (Ottawa is less than 100km from the US, while the distance between Russia and Kiev is about 300km) and I do not see vastly outnumbered Canadian forces turning their cities into Gaza by trying to defend them one block at a time. Nor do I think that their rural population, cut off from critical resources like gasoline and maple syrup would be very willing to forgo their creature comforts to fight a Talibanesque insurgency for a few decades.
Like Greenland, Canada has a lot of lands in the arctic whose resource exploitation will become more feasible due to global warming. Also like Greenland, its northern parts cover relevant ICBM paths towards the US. It also has lots of fresh water which might be crucial for regions of the US due to climate change.
I do not think that Putin was insane to try to enact a regime change in Ukraine (though opting for a long war when his surprise attack failed was obviously a bad call), merely evil. Likewise, if Canada and the US drift apart politically as RU and UA did, I would think it evil but not insane of a US president (or emperor) to try to annex Canada.
No US leader (sane or otherwise) has attempted to take Greenland from Denmark by military force. Trump actually threatened nothing but tariffs. Not ruling out something is not the same as threatening it, and not ruling things out when asked is something that is both characteristic of Trump AND characteristic of the US (which, e.g., has never ruled out first use of nuclear weapons).
Certainly the US could take Canada, militarily. It's not going to happen under a sane leader. An insane leader could take Canada, militarily, even in the presence of a nuclear deterrent.
Now, yes. Canada now is just like Ukraine in 2014.
This could change fast. Ukraine in 2014 was hopeless wreck, Ukraine in 2022 was something else.
Perhaps, but not in the way/with the implications you're expecting.
The US invading Canada would have Battle of Baghdad (2021) levels of resistance, and the vast majority of Canadian heavy industry sits within conventional artillery range without the US even having to cross the border. (The reverse is not true.) Now, since that industry is the only reason the US would really want to invade, they probably wouldn't start laying the factories to waste, but the point remains that Canada simply can't depend on domestic war materiel production.
If the US wanted to take Canada tomorrow, they would accomplish that task with little effort and have the English-speaking part integrated within a year (since it basically already is). Quebec might give them some trouble, though, since there's a language barrier there, and even the part without a language barrier will be the most radicalized; it'd probably take long enough for the French to reinforce them militarily. They have an unsinkable aircraft carrier ~20km off the Quebec coast already; it's French (and thus EU) territory.
At that point I expect Canada = Quebec to petition for admittance into the EU as a member state. Most of the border problems for English Canada are obviated by losing the hard border with the US.
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