PM Carney declares U.S. ties now a 'weakness' in address to Canadians

I'm struggling with how to articulate the idea that seems to be in so many Canadian heads, regardless of their military experience.

Assume the worst case, that the US invades Canada and that no allies come to assist, for whatever reason.

The best the US can hope for is a pyrrhic victory: while it may well be true that the Canadian military and population cannot hope to resist the US military, anyone thinking there would be anything other than a pyrrhic victory does not understand how, uh, what words to choose, hmm, bloody mindedly petty and vindictive Canadians can be.

There is that old trope about mistaking "polite" for "nice". Canadians are mostly are the former, and are mostly the latter most of the time, and can even be the former while not at all being the latter. But remember too the trope as to why so many of the specific rules of the Geneva Convention, etm., exist.

Canadians don't pick fights, generally, but see fights to the end, always, and almost always no matter what. And it's not a red mist thing: That comes and clears. What is left is cold. Sober. Focused. Are you still here? Are you not retreating fast enough? Do I still have functional limbs/weapons/comms? Carrying on....

We don't stop until it is safe to stop, and by safe I mean we can stand down and not have to stand to again, or until there is no we left.

Now, more tropes:

Longest sniper kill: Canada has the top spot and at least two more of the top five. Those are all recent.

Only force to meet its D-Day objectives: Canada, with fighting as fierce on Juno as elsewhere.

Only western soldier to fire on a Soviet: A Canadian with the group sent to protect Denmark from Soviets who were rolling fast and hard over northern Germany. The RoE were sort of vague on that point, but they were explicit about not withdrawing, about not giving up an inch. Words didn't work, triggers were pulled, a standoff occurred until sufficient forces arrived to convince the Soviets to withdraw to their agreed lines.

Before becoming PM, Lester B. Pearson won the Noble Peace Prize for the idea of UN Peacekeepers, of putting Canadians in harm's way to separate combatants in hot zones. The idea was taken seriously because memories of Canadian performance in WWII and Korea were fresh in mind. "Oh, those guys? Yeah, OK, ceasefire and separation sounds good."

Again, I am not in anyway suggesting that the US would not win in an invasion of Canada, if Canada stood alone. What I am suggesting is that what would be left (of the US, let alone Canada) would make the victory hollow and bitter.

(You do know that the Canadian boycotts that are so impacting tourism and distillers, among others, are not economically motivated, right? So many US talking heads cite tit-for-tat tariff nonsense, and very few miss the point entirely: Canadians mostly didn't give a damn about tariffs, but when "51st state" was mooted, even if as a joke, Canadians stopped buying US stuff. The tariffs could disappear today and many would still push for closer ties with the EU, possibly even membership, for distancing Canada from the US even more, all because we are fiercely independent, and willing to sacrifice a great deal to retain that independence. Canadians are mostly quiet about it, but never mistake silence for acquiescence or consent.)

But despite that, Bush's presidency was generally continuous with American presidencies since World War II. He still, at root, steered the ship as though he were a believer in the narrative of America as a leader of the free world, rather than as a selfish actor who needs to get one over on everyone else in order to get ahead. Regardless of the world's judgement of Bush, I don't think it sowed much doubt in many minds about their overall relationship with America, and not just because of 9/11 or because he was just one president. The US could have continued electing Bushes forever and not much would have changed.

Whereas: Trump's presidency - especially this second term - is utterly destabilizing. He's single-handedly destroyed America's soft power and place in the world.

the one thing that the US still has is money. countries want to trade with countries that have money, whether they're trustworthy or untrustworthy, moral or immoral. as long as the US continues to be rich, they'll continue to have good trading relationships. we've all just got to hope that this current trend reverses before the us stops being a rich country.

> It will be a slow, multi-decade process, but it’s probably irreversible at this point.

I don't think any Western democracy can keep up such a project for that long, after the immediate political irritant has disappeared. I mean, FFS, pretty much everything "new" that's people build is dependent on China. Trump is an stupid old man, China is a bigger long-term threat to democracy and is smarter and more strategic.

What I'm saying is: is once Trump leaves office (and especially once he's dead), the process you talk about will almost certainly reverse. It may seem hard to believe in this moment, but people will move on from Trump.

> It will be a slow, multi-decade process, but it’s probably irreversible at this point.

I think it is important to distinguish talk intended to appease the public, that currently is very anti-US, from real policies. For example there is lot of talk about sovereignty in the EU, you can even see lot of that here, but so far no real steps were taken. Globalism cannot be reversed, not without some external factor like global cataclysm. And the public opinion on anything, in the age of Twitter et al, change as often as Trump's proclaimed policies.

Truth is, EU countries have not other potential ally that could replace US, especially among themselves. In Poland some groups dream about European army and French nuclear sharing, when first is pure fantasy, and second is even less reliable that the US one.

You can balance however much you want between US and China, but there may be time when you need to choose. As bad as current state of US is, China is an antithesis to everything EU and its democracies say they stand for.

If Canada's going to wag a finger at the US about breaking commitments, it does.

He was referencing the words of a writer from Czechia, a country where communism discredited itself, who discussed how people pretended not to notice the gap between the government's rhetoric and its actions, and compared it to how countries politely have pretended to ignore the gap between the aspirations of the "rules-based international order" and how it played out in practice.

Of course, he could have used as an example a different dissident who said something similar from a different country who operated under a different totalitarian regime. Or skipped the analogy to political repression altogether. You could say that reflects Carney's particular biases, I guess, but I wouldn't go further than that. At no point does he ridicule or even mention unionization.