Tariffs are only the start: we must buckle down for years of conflict with the U.S.

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In the history of the world, few countries have been in quite such a strategic bind as Canada is today. Many countries, God knows, have had to endure living next door to a hostile and expansionist superpower – for make no mistake, that is what the United States, under Donald Trump, has become.

It is rarer to find examples – Poland in the 1930s, Mongolia today – of a country wedged between two hostile and expansionist superpowers. That, alas, is where we are today, with not only the United States to our south but Russia to our north.

What makes our situation unique, however, is that one of them was until very recently our ally. The Poles would have been under no illusion that Germany was their friend, even before the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. But the United States was not only our ally, but our protector.

Few countries have ever relied so heavily on another for their defence. But such was our situation, thousands of miles from any potential enemy, and in such proximity to the United States that any attack on us would be tantamount to an attack on them. It never occurred to us that the threat would come from the south.

And so it never occurred to us to invest in the defence of our homeland. There had not been an attack on Canadian territory from outside our borders since the Fenian Raids in the 1860s. The military was something we sent “over there,” to fight for other countries’ freedom, not our own.

Which made sense, since there was very little we could do, realistically, to defend our land if it did come under attack. The current territory of Canada, Newfoundland excepted, was fixed in 1880, with the transfer of the Arctic Archipelago, bringing the country’s total area to more than nine million square kilometres. At the time we had a population of just over four million.

We are 10 times as many now, but not much has changed. Our claim to this vast expanse of territory, and all the riches it contains, has always depended, essentially, on no one contesting it – either because they did not want to tangle with the United States, or simply because one does not do such things: in the Westphalian, and certainly the post-Second World War system, sovereign nations are forbidden to seize each other’s territory by force.

So to find, after all these years, that our friend has become our adversary, that our protector has become a predator, that the country with whom we share the defence of North American air space, joint management of the Great Lakes and a continental free trade area suddenly wants, in so many words, to make us “the 51st state” – I’m not sure there’s ever been anything quite like it.

No one thinks the United States would annex us by military means, that is by invasion and occupation, such as Mr. Trump has threatened in the case of Greenland. But he is on record that he intends to use “economic force” to beat us into submission: the 25-per-cent tariff that is the subject of current controversy should be seen as the first salvo in a long war of attrition – a “siege war,” as the NDP MP Charlie Angus has called it – intended to divide, demoralize and ultimately induce us to throw in the towel.

And well short of annexation, we can look forward to a future, at least under Mr. Trump, of escalating attempts to use whatever leverage the Americans have over us to bully us into accepting the unacceptable: incremental surrenders of our sovereignty, across a wide range of areas, leaving us as little more than a vassal state in the end. It is not hard to imagine Mr. Trump demanding control over the value of the dollar, over the level of tariff we apply to other countries, or over our resources, with the threat of various punishments if we do not comply.

Or suppose there were a major terrorist attack in the United States, and suppose they were discovered to have entered the country from Canada. Can we be confident the American reaction would be confined to operations on their own side of the border?

Last is the possibility, increasingly a probability, of foreign powers, notably Russia and China, setting up shop in our North and daring us to do something about it: not invading, as such, but thumbing their noses at our sovereignty. Once, as I say, we would have relied on the Americans to warn off such attempts. Now we cannot be sure they would not join in.

That is the world in which we now find ourselves, after these last few disorienting days and weeks. At first it was assumed the Trump administration was too eager to strike a deal with the Russians over Ukraine, too willing to bargain away important safeguards. Soon, the horrifying realization sank in that these were not concessions, but rather that America, under Mr. Trump, had crossed over to the Russian side – against Ukraine, yes, but also against the democracies. As the nearest democracy, along with Mexico, we were simply first in the line of fire.

There is every possibility it will get worse: as Mr. Trump’s mental state deteriorates, as he solidifies his grip on power, as America’s democracy collapses. Set against that is an alternative hypothesis: that Mr. Trump has made so many enemies, having deliberately tanked the economy and alienated all of America’s allies, that he is bringing on his own downfall. The two trends are on a collision course: if there are still free and fair elections in 2026, they may decide whether Mr. Trump is stopped, or moves on to higher glories.

Either way, however, the world, and Canada in particular, will have to reckon with the fact that America’s democracy is so fragile, its people so divided, its electoral system so rickety, that the votes of 120,000 people in three swing states are all that stand between it and autocracy. That is a reality that will remain, long after Mr. Trump is gone. Even if he is replaced by someone more rational, there is no guarantee that America will not flip back into madness in some subsequent election.

How to deal with this new reality? On the one hand, there have been a raft of proposals to strengthen our economic resilience: to increase productivity, diversify our trade, tighten our own economic union. These are all to the good, but they will not suffice. The United States has other ways of throwing its weight around besides tariffs.

On the other hand, I keep seeing proposals that strike me as fanciful, at best, harmful at worst: acquiring nuclear weapons, say, or imposing conscription. Again, the risk is not invasion, and if it were, there is nothing we could really do to prevent it, either alone or in concert with other countries. The European countries are willing to go to war for each other because they know if one falls, the others are next. No one is going to war with the United States to save Canada.

Smaller-scale or hybrid incursions, such as in the North, can and should be met with military force. That will take a much larger commitment to the military, but before we can do that we will have to make the mental journey of seeing ourselves as a nation like any other, with enemies it must defend itself from. We will have to acquire a culture of self-defence.

Beyond that our defences against attempted American domination are more general than specific. We are limited in the degree to which we can “decouple” from them. We share a continent, and we have to work with them. Whether we do so from a position of weakness or strength, however, is something we can affect.

One area in which this may apply more and more in future is in our capacity to resist disinformation campaigns. To now the focus of these efforts has been countries like China or Russia. It seems naive to think that an administration that is so frankly admiring of those regimes, and moving fast to align itself with them, would not resort to similar tactics.

Second, Mr. Trump has seemed keen to try to probe our divisions as a country. That has failed so far – the sudden emergence of this external threat has served to unify us to a quite unusual degree – but there is no guarantee that will last. We need to be thinking about national unity as an element of national security.

So far as our electoral system, for example, encourages parties to target their appeal to certain regions while ignoring others, racking up seats in the former while being all but shut out of the latter, it’s worth looking at systems in which every party can win seats in every part of the country, and every party must.

Last, and perhaps most important: if we’re tired of the Americans kicking sand in our faces, maybe it’s time we bulked up. We’re roughly 42 million to their 340 million today. But suppose we aimed to make that eight-to-one margin more like four-to-one by the end of the century. Suppose, that is, we took seriously the idea of aiming for a population of 100 million.

To get there in 75 years would require no acceleration in population growth: in fact, it would mean slowing our growth considerably, to roughly 1.2 per cent per annum, from the 1.5 per cent annually it has averaged over the last 75 years.

It isn’t only our relationship with the United States this would change. Most other large developed countries are projected to flatline or shrink over the same interval. By 2100, according to the United Nations, the population of Japan will fall from 123 million today to 74 million; Germany, from 85 million to 71 million; Italy, from 59 million to 35 million. France and the United Kingdom are projected to grow slightly, to 68 million and 74 million, respectively.

Were we merely to double our current population by then (a growth rate of less than 1 per cent annually), therefore, we would be the second largest developed country, a major player on the world stage – and better placed to hold our own against the Great Republic to our south.