Canadian and U.S. flags fly atop the Peace Arch monument at the Douglas-Peace Arch border crossing in Surrey, B.C., in November, 2021.DARRYL DYCK/The Canadian Press
‘INHABITANTS of CANADA!” begins the social media post from the U.S. general assigned the job of occupying us. “The ARMY under my command has invaded your country, & the Standard of the UNION now waves over the Territory of CANADA. To the peaceable unoffending inhabitant … I come to protect, not to injure you.”
He declared that “the arrival of an Army of friends must be hailed by you with a cordial welcome” – though Canadians who refused to be “emancipated from Tyranny and oppression” would “be treated as enemies.”
But why resist? “The UNITED STATES offer you peace, liberty and security.” And if we didn’t say uncle to Uncle Sam, we’d get “WAR, slavery, and destruction.”
That was U.S. General William Hull’s proclamation to the people of Canada, issued in July, 1812.
For those of us lucky enough to have lived in the Western world through the long post-Second World War era, such threats sound outrageous and even incomprehensible – as outrageous and incomprehensible as Donald Trump saying he wants to take over Greenland, the Panama Canal and Canada, and will use military might or economic pressure to make it happen.
But in the sweep of human history, it’s all depressingly normal. Give me what I want, or I’ll take it. Ho hum.
In 416 BC an army from Athens landed on the Aegean island of Melos. Athens, the most powerful city-state in Greece, was at war with Sparta and it demanded that Melos – which was neutral – become part of its empire, or else.
The people of Melos were not only surprised, they were morally offended. They had good relations with Athens. These demands were illegal. This was not justice. This was not right.
The Athenian response is summed up in the most famous line of what is known as the Melian Dialogue: “You know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”
Political scientists of the realist school use the story to illustrate how relations between states tend to work. Countries and leaders pursue their interests, and may treat morality, international law and even friendship as so much easily swept-away gossamer. As for Mr. Trump, this observation about how the world sometimes goes is his North Star for how it should always be.
In devoting so much time to putting pressure on Greenland, Panama and Canada for the benefit of the Trump Inc. mergers & acquisitions department, while saying remarkably little since his election about bigger and more difficult challenges from China to Russia to Iran to the U.S. economy, he’s also living out another important part of the Athenian argument.
As any seven-year-old on a schoolyard at recess will be happy to explain, bullies go after soft targets, because they can. They avoid harder targets, because they must.
Mr. Trump has turned an ancient observation about how people sometimes behave into a credo guiding his behaviour. Perhaps that is why Mr. Trump is always so uncomfortable among traditional friends – NATO, the European Union, Canada – but at home treating with dictators and despots. The former spend a lot of time on niceties like rights, while the latter only speak the language of power.
And might over right is the most commonly spoken language in human history. If you were lucky enough to live in Canada in the past 80 years, you got a vacation from that history. The holiday has gone on for so long that you may have been left with the impression that we’ve made a hard break with the past, and this is how the world goes now.
Canada has lived in the lee of the American empire – which was, at least for the past century with regard to us, a mostly positive thing. We had the good luck to live next to the Great Republic and not, say, China or Russia or any one of a long list of hungry neighbours. Maybe that benevolent state of affairs will return, but for the next four years we have Mr. Trump. Instead of the American exceptionalism, he incarnates its all-too common opposite.
The Melians rejected the Athenian offer and were conquered. All the men were murdered; all women and children were sold into slavery.
As for Gen. Hull, after briefly invading western Ontario and issuing his proclamation, he marched back to Detroit. His army was later surprised and surrounded by a smaller force under Gen. Sir Isaac Brock, to whom he surrendered. At war’s end in 1814, a U.S. court martial sentenced him to death, though the sentence was commuted by the president.
Through the 19th century, former territories of Mexico were conquered by the U.S., from Texas to California. Canada escaped this fate because we were part of the British Empire, so Manifest Destiny had to content itself with marching west and south, not north.
Ancient history, right?