In normal times, a G7 and NATO leader accusing a U.S. president of craving annexation would be a headline-detonating, multi-megaton blast of news, leaving shock waves for months.
These aren’t normal times.
Donald Trump’s repeated talk of annexing Canada is almost universally treated as a joke in Washington. Or, maybe, as a negotiating ploy. If it’s neither, the U.S. president would face a Himalayan climb to make it a reality.
The consensus in Washington that he can’t be serious — right? right? — is reflected in the scant immediate coverage of eye-popping remarks made Friday by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who was overheard telling business leaders that, yes, Trump really would like to take over Canada.
Apparently, the U.S. president made a cryptic comment in his Monday afternoon phone call with Trudeau about having read a 1908 treaty setting the Canada-U.S. boundary and finding it interesting. He did not elaborate.
The story was at the bottom of the home page of the New York Times, its site awash in stories about allegedly unlawful actions by the new administration.
It was halfway down the home page on the Wall Street Journal, below routine economic news and wasn’t on the Washington Post’s main page at all.
Nor has all this talk even come up at recent congressional hearings where Canada featured prominently: one on trade and tariffs, one on minerals.
At the latter, a Democrat mocked Trump for threatening tariffs on a neighbour that has vital aluminum copper, cobalt, graphite, lithium and more.
“The stable genius has decided to start a trade war with [Canada],” said Rhode Island Rep. Seth Magaziner, invoking a phrase Trump once used to describe himself.
There was no mention of making Canada a 51st state and changing the political map of North America and electoral map of the United States.
Republican Sen. Ted Cruz waved off Trump’s plan on his podcast this week, calling it “an epic troll… I think he was just yanking [Trudeau’s] chain.”
Following his public remarks at the Canada-U.S. Economic Summit, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told business and labour leaders that U.S. President Donald Trump’s comments about making Canada the 51st state are ‘a real thing.’ Trudeau’s comments were heard over the loudspeakers.
Gargantuan roadblocks
A reason to discount this talk might be the poor politics of it: Canadian statehood is slightly to massively unpopular, according to U.S. public opinion polls.
It seems highly dubious that this unloved, highly complex and deeply controversial plan would gain a critical enough mass of support to win a vote in the U.S. Congress, let alone the extreme longshot of Canada approving it.
Some existing U.S. territories know this from experience. They’ve been working for decades to get such votes through Congress.
One veteran of the battle says even if there were enough supporters in Congress, the actual votes would be a political minefield.
Lawmakers would have to agree to dilute their own power — transferring about five dozen House seats to Canada, plus, depending on the number of new states introduced, two, four, or six Senate seats.
“That would fundamentally change the balance of power within that body,” said George Laws Garcia, executive director of the Puerto Rico Statehood Council.
“So is that something that Congress is going to just jump into? I don’t think so.”
And there’s little time: Trump’s party has a razor-thin House majority and could lose it in the midterms in 23 months. If he keeps talking about unpopular ideas like annexing Canada, Trump might unwittingly expedite that process.
Weighing Trump’s endgame
The bits of evidence, however, that Trump is dead serious about territorial expansion are starting to accumulate into a hard-to-ignore mountain.
He mentioned it in his inaugural address. He keeps talking about it — in the context of Canada, Panama, Greenland and now Gaza.
His Middle East envoy is a property developer and Trump is talking about building properties in Gaza after moving residents elsewhere; Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner mused about something similar months ago.
There’s enough evidence to suspect that Trump is no longer satisfied by his current station as a two-term U.S. president — and that he has imperial ambitions.
Which might not be surprising given that two biographies of the man, including one written by his niece, include the words “never enough” in the title.
But some people who study U.S. global hegemony still aren’t buying it.
One analyst of imperialism in U.S. history tells Canadians he has no expectation of sharing a nation in his lifetime.
“As pleased as I’d be to be your compatriot, I wouldn’t wager much on it happening,” said Daniel Immerwahr, professor at Northwestern University, and author of How to Hide an Empire.
He says he believes Trump delights in shocking people — in saying outlandish things, either for fun, or in pursuit of some goal.
From goofy AI-generated social media posts to threats of ‘economic force,’ Donald Trump has been taking jabs at Canada’s sovereignty for weeks. CBC’s Ellen Mauro breaks down the president-elect’s escalating rhetoric against Canada.
That goal, he said, might be a new trade deal with Canada, or his desired outcome in Gaza, or a new security arrangement in Greenland and the Panama Canal.
He’s not ruling out the possibility Trump is serious, however. If so, Immerwahr says, he’s seeking no less than a return to the global order as it existed before the Second World War.
In that view, gone is the world where the U.S. usually hid its hard power and used soft-power instruments like trade, aid and global institutions to exert its massive influence and achieve desired outcomes.
This would be a return to the world where great powers threaten the territory of their neighbours — Immerwahr says, mentioning China, Russia and, now, the U.S.
The Gaza annexation talk might be similar, says Stephen Wertheim, an analyst of U.S. statecraft and strategy at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He expressed doubt that the MAGA faithful are clamouring for a Middle East nation-building exercise with so much destructive potential.
The idea of annexing Western Hemisphere territory, he says, harkens back to the 19th century and the Monroe Doctrine, as Trump alluded to in his inaugural address by talking about expanding the U.S.
But whatever Trump is doing, it’s still a watershed moment.
“To the extent Trump is using threats of annexation merely as negotiating ploys, we’re pretty much in uncharted territory,” said Wertheim, author of the book Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy.
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