I had a conversation last week with a Canadian journalist about the culture war on American campuses. After we finished talking about that, she had one final question for me.
“What the hell is Trump thinking about Canada?”
She wasn’t just asking about President Trump’s tariff threats. She was also asking about Trump’s obsession with referring to Canada as the 51st state. The tariffs were somewhat understandable, even if terribly misguided. They are, after all, one of Trump’s few consistent policy obsessions. He likes tariffs perhaps even more than he likes walls.
But if anyone thinks that Trump is merely trolling or joking with his constant references to Canada as the 51st state, I refer you to my newsroom colleague Matina Stevis-Gridneff’s report that Trump told the former prime minister of Canada Justin Trudeau “that he did not believe that the treaty that demarcates the border between the two countries was valid and that he wants to revise the boundary.”
Trudeau told Canadians that Trump wanted “to see a total collapse of the Canadian economy, because that’ll make it easier to annex us.” The president’s statement is not one a world leader lightly makes, even if that world leader is named Donald Trump.
And why wouldn’t Canadians be alarmed? Trump has been quite clear with his intentions and his reasoning.
Let me quote Trump’s recent conversation with Laura Ingraham, a Fox News host.
“Here’s my problem with Canada,” Trump told Ingraham. “Canada was meant to be the 51st state, because we subsidized Canada by $200 billion a year.”
When a baffled Ingraham pressed him, saying, “You’re tougher with Canada than you are with some of our biggest adversaries,” Trump responded with the same talking point: “Only because it’s meant to be our 51st state.” Later, he said, “One of the nastiest countries to deal with is Canada.”
So, how did I answer my new Canadian friend? “Canada is Donald Trump’s Ukraine.”
Apparently, Trump agrees. On Friday, he made the comparison explicit. While talking to the press in the Oval Office, he once again called for Canada to become the 51st state and then compared Canada’s bargaining position to Ukraine’s. “The expression I use is some people don’t have the cards,” he said. “I used the expression about a week and a half ago” — referring to his infamous exchange with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, when he told Zelensky: “You’re not in a good position. You don’t have the cards right now.”
I did not mean that Trump is preparing to invade or use force against Canada. But he does intend to dominate Canada, to render it little more than a vassal of the United States, making it only nominally independent. In fact, you can’t fully understand Trump’s approach to Ukraine without understanding his view of Canada (or Mexico or Greenland or Panama) — and vice versa.
By word and deed, Trump treats Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping as his only real peers. Our allies, by contrast, are our subordinates. It’s as if Putin, Xi and Trump are feudal lords, and each is entitled to his own feudal domain.
It’s easy to forget that Trump’s open hostility to Ukraine isn’t the full story of his response to the Russian invasion. The day after Putin signaled his intent to attack and as the Russian Army massed on Ukraine’s border, Trump told a pair of conservative radio hosts, “This is genius.”
In the same interview, he even declared his admiration for Putin’s ruse of declaring the independence of Ukraine’s eastern regions. “But here’s a guy that says, you know, ‘I’m going to declare a big portion of Ukraine independent,’” Trump said. “He used the word ‘independent,’ and ‘we’re going to go out and we’re going to go in and we’re going to help keep peace.’ You got to say that’s pretty savvy.”
It’s a mistake to think of Trump as a student of history, but he does learn, and he does carefully observe the men he thinks of as his peers (and they are all men). As a result, his second term is already substantially different from his first. He had some ideas his first term, but much of his foreign policy and domestic policy seemed to be rooted in impulse rather than ideology. His senior team often resisted those impulses — sometimes to the point of public disagreement and submitting your resignation.
Trump’s first secretary of defense, Jim Mattis, resigned in protest against Trump policies, for example, and his second secretary of defense openly broke with Trump when Trump proposed sending active-duty soldiers to police American streets in 2020. It’s hard to imagine Pete Hegseth permitting any daylight between him and his boss.
The Biden years transformed both Trump and his movement. Trump still has his impulses, but he’s surrounded by people with plans, and we can now see a much more coherent plan in operation.
Domestically, his administration is attempting to revolutionize the constitutional order, placing the president at the head of the American government and subordinating the legislative and judicial branches to his wishes and whims and granting himself unchecked power, including — most recently — the power to yank people off American streets and send them to El Salvadoran prisons without due process.
Economically, Trump has praised the Gilded Age. Just after his inauguration, Trump said: “We were at our richest from 1870 to 1913. That’s when we were a tariff country.”
In foreign policy, his actions no longer appear to be isolationist as much as they’re a revival of Manifest Destiny, the belief that God had destined the United States to spread across the continental United States and the rest of North America, and the Monroe Doctrine, a declaration to the European powers that the United States was the dominant power in the Western Hemisphere.
This is one reason the Trump administration refuses to blame Russia for starting the war. In this formulation, assertions of actual independence by neighboring countries are deemed a threat even if they don’t offer a military challenge. They’re a threat to the great power’s desire to spread its dominion. In this formulation, Zelensky and Trudeau both committed the same sin — they refused to subjugate themselves when the feudal lord was entitled to their subservience.
The MAGA movement is pushing America back to the 19th century on a number of fronts, but it is worth noting that this was a century in which we invaded Canada during the War of 1812 and threatened to go to war again over the border with the Oregon Territory in the 1840s. The slogan “54-40 or fight” (the northern border of the Oregon territory was at 54 degrees 40 minutes latitude) became closely associated with the Polk administration, one of the most militaristic and expansionist presidencies in American history.
Canadians remember this history well. I must confess it was a jarring experience to visit the Canadian Naval Museum in Halifax, Nova Scotia, several years ago and see exhibits celebrating victories over American forces in the War of 1812. The successful defense of Canada against American aggression helped establish Canadian national identity.
The pattern is unmistakable. Trump has questioned our defense commitments to Japan, an allied nation only a few hours away from China, and Taiwan holds its breath as Trump has accused the nation of stealing from America’s semiconductor industry. Trump threatened to impose crippling tariffs on Taiwan until the Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturer TSMC agreed to build new manufacturing plants in Arizona.
There’s an old foreign policy term for this new Trump approach: spheres of influence. Under this theory of foreign relations, each great power has its own zone of dominance. Think, for example of the Warsaw Pact in the Cold War — the countries in the pact were nominally independent, but if they exercised actual independent will, they’d soon see Soviet tanks in their streets.
Or think of the competing spheres of imperial influence in the 19th century. Imperial France, Russia, Britain and Germany were constantly colliding with one another.
America hasn’t been immune from the desire to dominate. I’ve already referred to past conflicts with Canada, but the history of Latin America is checkered with armed American interventions.
The problem with spheres of influence is that they’re inherently unstable. Smaller nations chafe under domination. Larger nations don’t agree on the boundaries of their respective zones of influence. As a result, an approach that theoretically separates the great powers actually causes them to collide, as they deploy violence to determine the full extent of their reach.
In practice, the spheres of influence aren’t separate. They’re more like a Venn diagram, with overlapping regions — and it is often in these regions where wars begin.
The inherent injustice and instability of spheres of influence (see August 1914 and September 1939) are one reason the Western alliance reached for voluntary cooperation as a competing model. The United States is the most powerful nation in the Western alliance, but it exerts disproportionate influence, not Soviet levels of control.
As a result, it’s been eight decades since the great powers have gone to war against one another. In addition, free trade and mutual cooperation have helped lift the nations of the Western alliance and our Asian allies to extraordinary levels of prosperity.
I’m hardly the only person to see the similarities between Canada and Ukraine. The Bulwark’s Will Saletan wrote an excellent piece last week noting the remarkable similarities between Trump’s rhetoric about Canada and Putin’s rhetoric about Ukraine. But more people need to recognize the patterns.
The MAGA movement has real ideas, and those ideas will outlast Trump’s impulses once Trump finally leaves the political scene. Those ideas have been tried — and been found wanting.
We already know what happens when great powers feel entitled to their zones of control, and the strong try to dominate the weak.
