Who would have thought that the United States would one day seize a sitting President and bundle him out of his country; unilaterally tear up a nuclear agreement with Iran that the other signatories and the UN nuclear watchdog had regarded as being honoured until the US withdrawal; threaten to take Greenland by force; unleash an unprecedented tariff war; menace its own existential ally, the Nato; and repeatedly suggest that Canada should become the 51st American state?
And yet here we are. The astonishing thing about the second Trump presidency is not simply that Donald Trump says outrageous things. It is that so many things that once sounded outrageous have acquired the unnerving quality of reality. Ask the Iranians. Ask the Venezuelans.
So perhaps Canadians can be forgiven for no longer laughing when Mr Trump talks about annexing their country. Canada has now begun contemplating something that, until recently, belonged to the realm of military science fiction, i.e., what if the United States actually attacked? Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has acknowledged that his government has considered the possibility. He stressed that the risk remains extremely low and the scenario highly improbable. But he warned that his responsibility was to consider all possibilities as the relationship between the two countries is fundamentally redefined. “That’s just risk management,” Mr Carney said.
War-gaming an American invasion is not the same as believing one is imminent. Militaries plan for improbable contingencies because the price of being unprepared for the improbable can be catastrophic. Canada’s defence policy places the defence of Canada and Canadians at the centre of the Canadian Armed Forces’ mission, alongside sovereignty, Arctic security and continental defence. But there is something uniquely surreal about the contingency now occupying Canadian planners. It is not Russia or China crossing the Arctic. It is America.
For generations, Canadian defence planning rested on an assumption so deeply embedded that it barely needed stating — the United States was the shield, not the threat. Canadian and American soldiers trained together. Their intelligence services shared information. Their aircraft patrolled the skies together. NORAD made the two countries partners in defending North America. But because that architecture still exists and they remain deeply integrated militarily, Mr Trump’s unhinged rhetoric seems so corrosive.
The fact that the Canadian officials now have to think about it exposes something profound, i.e., alliances depend not merely on military capability, but on assumptions about political behaviour. And Mr Trump has spent years smashing those assumptions. The United States possesses overwhelming military superiority over Canada. No serious Canadian strategist needs a spreadsheet to understand the imbalance. But an invasion would not necessarily be simple.
Canada is vast. Its population is concentrated along the American border, but its territory stretches across an enormous Arctic expanse. Canadian and American forces are deeply integrated. Their officers know one another. They train together. They share intelligence. It would be a rupture between military habit and political command almost without precedent in modern North America.
And Canada has history. Fear of American expansionism is not a paranoid invention of the Trump era. It is woven into Canada’s origins. The United States invaded British North America during the War of 1812. American forces captured parts of what is now Canada. The colonies that eventually became Canada understood that their survival required a political and military counterweight to the enormous republic to the south. Canada’s identity was, in part, built around not becoming America.
That history faded as the two countries became extraordinarily close. Trade, culture, defence and geography made the border almost psychologically disappear. Mr Trump has made Canadians look at it again. And once you start looking, the old questions return. What happens if tariffs become instruments of political coercion? What happens if economic pressure is used to force concessions on sovereignty? What happens if Canada concludes that dependence on Washington has itself become a vulnerability? And what happens if the political assumptions underlying NORAD are suddenly no longer reliable?
These are no longer entirely academic questions. Canada is investing heavily in continental defence, Arctic surveillance and NORAD modernisation. Its military is expanding capabilities across land, sea, air, space and cyber. The purpose is not to prepare for war with America. It is to prepare for a world in which assumptions about security can no longer be taken for granted. That is the real strategic revolution. Canada is preparing to be less certain that America will always be there to protect it.
For decades, Canadian defence policy could afford a degree of complacency because the world’s most powerful military was sitting immediately to the south, and was, overwhelmingly, a friend. Now Canada is being forced to rediscover the oldest principle of statecraft: a country that cannot ultimately defend itself must trust the intentions of someone else. And intentions can change.
Most Canadians still believe an American invasion is extraordinarily unlikely. They are probably right. But the fact that Ottawa now considers it prudent to war-game the possibility tells us something that probability alone cannot capture. The unimaginable has entered the planning room. And once something enters a military planner’s map, it has already ceased to be entirely unimaginable. Don’t just ask the Venezuelans or Iranians, but also check with the Continental Europeans (including Ukrainians) if indeed Canadian fears are unfounded.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: deccanchronicle.com
