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Comment by mattmanser | Hacker News Reader

Put it in context. The USSR basically occupied all the countries near it. Every country was effectively ruled by Russia. The US didn't occupy Canada, or France, or the UK, etc.

Yes, the extremely weak countries were pawns but, relatively speaking, the US let France be France and Canada be Canada.

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>Yes, the extremely weak countries were pawns but, relatively speaking, the US let France be France and Canada be Canada.

Thank you very much but we let ourselves be France by getting nukes as soon as possible, leaving NATO command and kicking US troops out.

France seems almost as bad as us (the UK) at thinking they're still relevant in their post-empire age.

It's got nothing to do with being relevant, or having delusions of grandeur. It's just a matter of not having terms dictated by the US, Russia or nowadays China within our effective perimeter. Back then acquiring nuclear power was essential to those aims, and building a European block was also the right answer for the foreseeable future. Stumbles aside, it seems to be fairly reasonable and workable to me. You can't just pretend everything's fine and be a good boy for the overlord of the day.

In the 50s a number of people were acutely aware of the bullet we dodged in WW2 (we came quite close to being scraped apart into rump states).

The US let Canada be Canada by forcing them to renegotiate NAFTA and then unilaterally imposing steel and aluminum tariffs while the negotiations were going on as leverage?

The US is by far the biggest bully in the world and has been since WW2.

Countries tariff each other all the time, big and small. It's probably the rule more than the exception.

Mexico has always been extremely leery of the United States. Notable they very prudently nationalized their oil industry on the eve of WWII.

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