How To Deal With Mad King Donald

In a guest post today, military historian Sean Maloney weighs in.

Canadians! It has been said that we are on the verge of a revolution. We are in the midst of one; a bloodless one, I hope, but a revolution to which all those which have been will be counted as mere child’s play.

- William Lyon MacKenzie, 1837

If Canadians had not been so de-educated about their own history to start with, things might have turned out differently. We might not have been so susceptible to the past decade’s state-enforced revisionist history, about which we are instructed to be ashamed.

The battle of December 14, 1837, and the defeat of the Patriotes, at Saint-Eustache. The rebels of 183738 would later unite under William Lyon Mackenzie and Lous-Joseph Papineau.

We might have been in a better position to comprehend the dire peril posed by Donald Trump, who every day ramps up his threats to abolish Canadian sovereignty by “economic force,” and in equal measure by Justin Trudeau’s Liberals, who have usurped Canadian democracy by placing Parliament under lock and key.

But we are in the worst possible position. Instead of the House of Commons, we have a 21st century version of the Chateau Clique, in the form of the 18-member Council on Canada-U.S. Relations.

I’ve had my say about all that in the National Post this week: Recall Parliament Now. I’ll be back to this subject soonest. For today I’m turning things over to Professor Sean Maloney, an old and trusted acquaintance.

Sean served as the historian for the Canadian Army’s NATO forces, and later as the historian for the war in Afghanistan. He specializes in strategic nuclear issues and is the author of the forthcoming book, The Cool War: Nuclear Forces, Signaling, and the Russo-Ukrainian War, 2014-2022.

A Failure of Imagination

by Sean M. Maloney

It feels like we’re living through the preliminary chapters of a Richard Rohmer novel.

For our younger audience, in the 1970s and 1980s Rohmer wrote best-selling novels depicting various forms of conflict between the United States and Canada, with titles like Ultimatum, Exxoneration, and Retaliation. All of them had a healthy shot of economic warfare embedded in their plots. And none of them ended neatly.

There’s another novel in that genre, The Canadian Civil War, by Bruce Powe. It was written in 1968, but it gets reissued in mass-market paperback whenever there’s a Quebec sovereignty referendum, as in 1980 and 1995. The novel ends with a U.S. invasion of the new country, with Canadian troops deployed to Quebec to fight American forces as ‘Quebecois guerillas’ in order to buy time for a political settlement. It does not end neatly, either.

Nobody really wants to sail into the minefield of trying to predict what the impact of the Trump administration’s first week of heavy activity on our relationship is going to be, especially when it comes to defence and security. But there are some pertinent observations that we need to make now.

The first is to assess how presidential social media posts, that appear at first glance to be jovial taunting, produced consternation in Canadian media, which in turn generated defensive Government of Canada reaction. . . and the next thing we know the future of national unity is under discussion, followed by bellicose commentary and declarative government statements followed by the wearing of MAGA-like “Canadian is not for sale” ballcaps. Is the sky falling?

In less than six weeks we are in a national crisis, which, ostensibly, originated in a handful of tweets. I mean, this has been more effective at generating consternation and fear than all of the Russian information operations thrown at Canada since they declared Chrystia Freeland to be a Nazi.

The question, then: How is it that Canada is so destabilized by this sequence of events?

For the answer, we can and should look at Canada’s discombobulated leadership. The biggest mistake was for the prime minister to fly down to Mar-a-Lago to supplicate with the new POTUS before he was even installed. It was like something straight out of the Middle Ages: Spare my people, good Lord.

Only Liberal commentators in the Ottawa Bubble would view this as a bold move. The rest of the world sees it for what it is: expressions of weakness and fear.

The second biggest mistake was the spectacle of Canadian provincial premiers doing exactly the same thing. The world marvels: Is there a Canada, or is Canada merely a collection of independent provinces and territories that will sell each other out when the going gets rough?

The only message that could be derived by a global audience is that Canada is weak and divided. Any other country would have sat back, assessed the situation, and developed courses of action between the start of those social media posts and the inauguration. Any other country would have kept its powder dry, and consulted behind closed doors for the good of the nation.

What Canada got was the equivalent of a bunch of chickens with their heads cut off flapping about while the farmer’s son laughs holding a bloody axe. Canada was trolled. But then it escalated far beyond what could have been imagined.

The Post-2015 Alternative Universe

There will be those who have access to ruling circles who will seek to demonstrate that this was all part of a clever plan to lull the Americans into a false sense of security. People who think this way underestimate the power of perception. Let’s talk about that.

It is almost as if Canadians have repeatedly chosen to live in an alternate universe since 2015. This alternate universe has increasingly diverged from global economic and strategic reality. Justin Trudeau, enabled by the New Democrats’ Jagmeet Singh, has led quite a few willing and well-educated Canadians into this unreal world with promises of what amounts to an environmentalist utopia.

This is similar to how Vladimir Putin has shaped the milieu of the Russian people with promises of another unreal utopia where Russia is made great again, and they’ve marched down the road to destruction in pursuit of a Second World War fantasyland of fighting Nazism.

Like the Russian example, Canadian policymakers, policy commentators, the bureaucracy and the academic community are all to blame in various degrees, particularly for policing the groupthink that maintains the alternate reality. The very idea that Canada is some kind of “postnational” state was never seriously challenged. It was uncritically accepted, and Canada’s immigration policy was radically modified to prove it.

A belief system that Canada is somehow the moral equivalent of Nazi Germany (Kamloops as Auschwitz) was introduced and sustained, despite historical evidence to the contrary. Canadians are somehow supposed to maintain a permanent state of shame. The unwillingness to rein in not one but two pogroms, the burning of Catholic churches and the unleashing of antisemitism, has legitimized hatred I have not seen in Canada in my lifetime.

The scourge of Beijing’s malign influence continues to hover in the background with no resolution because the possibility exists that all political parties have been so influenced. Nothing is resolved because it is easier to keep problems in what amount to “frozen conflicts,” another habitual Russian concept.

Ten years of this has left Canada in the position of struggling to keep up, three steps forward and two back. There is no means to get ahead of the problems that face us. The inability to clearly define real national interests that transcend elections is a key aspect of the problem. The Prime Minister’s throwaway statement that Canadians define themselves as “not American” is insultingly glib, especially to those who have served overseas, but it is an indicator of the elitist mentality at the highest level.

That attitude - we know what’s best, don’t trouble the populace with details - echoes what I recall growing up in Pierre Elliot Trudeau’s Canada in the 1970s. But what happens if they don’t know what is best? Who is going to tell them that in the face of possible bureaucratic retaliation?

What kind of image does this project?

What do our opponents see? A Canada that is not unified. A Canada that cannot realistically define what it is and what it wants. A country loaded with natural resources that is geographically positioned next to stronger, more capable neighbours. A country lacking credibility in most international organizations, including the vaunted United Nations.

Canadian national security has been and is based on collective security, but what happens when that fails?

This doctrine must be re-examined immediately. Canada cannot conduct operations under the ice in what we believe to be our third ocean: this is done by the United States and the United Kingdom. Canadian interceptors require U.S. Air Force tankers in order to project power into the Arctic when Russian bombers probe our Air Defence Identification Zone.

Indeed, Canada needed assistance to recover two hostage diplomats from the People’s Republic of China because Ottawa couldn’t even conceptualize effective coercive measures against this adversary. Iran murdered 55 Canadians. There was no riposte.

What message does this send?

The alternate reality, in which Canada uses quiet diplomacy, peacekeeping, and the United Nations to accomplish strategic goals, simply does not resonate in the current environment. Yet Canadians are taught this because it is congruent with the outlook of those who run the school systems. Canadian students are not taught about Canada’s nuclear strike capability, which formed part of the NATO deterrent in the Cold War; they are not even taught about the Cold War and how it was won. They are not taught that Canada played a key role in the destruction of the Al Qaeda organization. They are not taught that Canada played a major role with NATO partners and stopping a genocide in Kosovo.

We get “Hamas High” in Ottawa instead.

If we do not know who we really are, what we want and how we’re going to get it in realistic terms, in the face of multifaceted opposition, we will not continue to exist as a nation.