While the United States under Donald Trump escalates tensions with its longstanding geopolitical allies, its neighbor to the north is growing increasingly wary of its antics.
Recently, Canada has announced a number of moves viewed as part of a pivot away from close ties to the United States. Over the weekend, Canadian prime minister Mark Carney announced a strategic partnership with the People’s Republic of China. The commercial agreement involved reduced tariff rates on Chinese energy, technology, and consumer goods like EVs, which will see their tariff rate fall from 100 percent to just 6.1 percent.
That announcement dominated headlines over the weekend, but Canada’s also preparing for worsening relations in less obvious ways. One of them is by drawing up military models to repel a theoretical invasion from the US — the first time in a century that Canadian Armed Forces have done so.
The extraordinary news was reported by the Globe and Mail, a major Canadian newspaper which spoke to a number of anonymous military officials working to develop the plans. According to two senior government officials, the Canadian armed forces were drafting insurgent-like tactics mirroring those used by the Taliban to fight back against the US invasion of Afghanistan.
If the history of US intervention any indication, those tactics might be the winning move should such a spectacular attack ever come. Though the US has more military resources at its disposal than any empire in history, that pen-and-paper might doesn’t always translate to success on the ground.
When the US went into Afghanistan in 2001, for example, a severe lack of intelligence hindered its military successes for nearly a decade, according to an analysis by Harvard’s Belfer Center. Despite engaging in the “enhanced interrogation” of Afghan civilians, the US continued to struggle as Taliban forces carried out frequent rural ambushes and attacks with improvised explosives, culminating in the total US withdrawal from the nation in 2020.
It’s a staggering irony of US imperial aggression, and an indication of just how frayed relations really are between the two neighboring countries.
Though the military models are only pen-and-paper frameworks, they come in the wake of tangible military aggression from the US military under Trump. The horrific attacks on Venezuela, for example, constitute the US military’s first “publicly acknowledged” airstrikes in Central or South America since the US invasion of Panama in 1989, per the Wall Street Journal.
Last year, Trump repeatedly made overtures about Canada becoming the “51st state.” Whether that’s a reference to assimilation or invasion isn’t clear, but Canadians were outraged over the comments all the same.
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