One: A Politician’s DNA
A long time ago, I was told that you can trace a politician’s MO back to their formative years. Joe Biden was a senator for 36 years, since he was 30, and that left an indelible mark on his soul. He thinks that talk and spending money equal results. Also don’t try to hold him personally accountable or he’ll treat you like he treated his legislative staff for all those years.
Obama? He’s a con man, telling you what you wanted to hear. You can tell me that just makes him a politician, but he was doing it long before he became one. Everybody keeps talking how awesome that speech was at the 2004 Democratic National Convention that launched his national career; I’m still waiting for that guy to be president.
Donald Trump? He’s still at heart the real estate developer, the man who wrote “The Art of the Deal” and who is willing to negotiate with just about anyone. When you negotiate you look to persuade, you look for leverage, and you look to expand your options by forcing things onto the table.
You might think Trump’s stated desire to buy Greenland is ludicrous, but it seems people (including Greenlanders) are open to talk about changing things up. For someone looking to cut a deal, the best answer to a proposal is “yes” and the second best answer is “no” because then they are listening. The worst answer is to be ignored. Trump is not the type of man to be ignored.
For the past five years, since the last time Trump brought up Greenland, our political betters have spent very little time talking about that very strategic piece of real estate. Now everyone is talking about it and what its future is. Go ahead and mock him, but he knows how to cut deals and right now he’s got people talking about what he wants. That’s winning. Dial me up some more.
Maybe he knows something the DC establishment doesn’t.
My prediction? Greenland independence and a Compact of Free Association with the US.
Two: The Return of the Monroe Doctrine
Trump’s (arguably) three most “outrageous” comments since his re-election have to do with Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal. What do they all have in common? They are all in the Western Hemisphere, they are all strategically vital, and they are all under some form of foreign influence that’s inimical to American interests. The Chinese are nosing around Greenland and making offers, the Chinese are acquiring and building port facilities around the Canal, and Canada has done diddly about protecting its Arctic coastline from the Russians.
I will add another of Trump’s “outrageous” comments to the mix, his declared willingness to use military force to go after the Mexican cartels. Our debate regarding the southern border for the past four years has largely revolved around domestic concerns, but it has tremendous national security implications as well. The open border turns northern Mexico into a potential forward base for operations by hostile powers. Witness the relationships between Chinese companies and Mexican cartels regarding the fentanyl trade, or the number of people on terrorist watch-lists caught crossing the border.
If you think taking military action in northern Mexico is something only the Orange Hitler would threaten, then you should go back to the old days of the 20th Century. Back then General Pershing and a young hell-raising Lt. George S. Patton drove more than 200 miles into Mexico looking for Pancho Villa, after the latter attacked Columbus, NM, killing six Americans.
Trump’s message to Mexico? Take care of it or we will.
Three: Schadenfreude, Canada, and Conservative, Inc.
When I was a wee lad, I used to read The National Review and I thought Jay Nordlinger was the bee’s knees. Now I occasionally glance at that once-proud periodical and try to remember the man Nordlinger used to be. The other day he interviewed fellow TDS sufferer David Frum regarding Trump and Canada. Frum makes the following comment to the delight of Nordlinger:
“Everyone in Canada knows that Canada was in those two wars a lot earlier than the United States. The U.S. enters the First World War in April of 1917; they don’t enter the second until December ’41. Canada was in both from the beginning. In Canada, there is a national pride that goes with close, cordial relationships with the United States but that does not like to be insulted. It’s never leadership to insult people.”
Good to know you can take the boy out of Canada (where Frum was born), but that you cannot take Canada out of the boy. Frum’s argument boils down to three points:
1) Canada’s moral authority rests on actions of 80 years ago. Not only was that an era when they were still doing the jitterbug, it raises the question of what on earth has happened to Canada over the past 80 years.
2) I should also add that Canada refused to participate in the invasion of Iraq to fight Frum’s “Axis of Evil.” Is the fact Canada flipped off Frum also an example of its moral authority?
3) “It’s never leadership to insult people”? I think Pierre Trudeau and Jean Chrétien would like a word with Mr. Frum regarding their comments about the US through the years.
4) “In Canada, there is a national pride that goes with close, cordial relationships with the United States.” That is perhaps the biggest lie I have heard since the last time I heard Joe Biden. The Canadian relationship with the US can best be described as “passive aggressive.” Canada’s national identity is defined in opposition to the US.
Four: A Proposal from Russ Douthat
In regard to Trump’s statement about Canada becoming the 51st state, Russ Douthat writes:
“And, of course, permanently adjacent to America itself, whose global hegemony may be threatened but whose influence over the English-speaking world is being magnified by our very-online age. Which leaves Canadians in an unenviable position — pinned under American hegemony and buffeted by American culture war, but without the agency and influence that actual Americans enjoy.
“Which is the simplest case for just becoming American, for adding some number of new stars to our flag. As the Canadian political theorist David Polansky puts it, ‘Why shouldn’t a country that abjures all national identity and interests seek advantage in a kind of geopolitical merger?’ Because there would be clear advantages: to participate in the great drama rather than watching from across the border, to shape the imperium rather than negotiating a position in its shadow.”
As Douthat sees it:
“The problem is that it’s hard to see how Canada can successfully renationalize. The country isn’t going back to some Tory past, there’s no clear narrative of assimilation for the millions of recent arrivals, and the only viable nationalism is the separatist spirit in Quebec.”
We’ll see what the incoming conservative Poilievre government brings to the table later this year, but Canada has always been subject to severe entropic forces and now that it has abandoned its Tory past it seems adrift. To modify Porfirio Díaz’s old aphorism, “Poor Canada, so far from its past and so close to the United States.”
Five: Québec and Immigration
Québec has an immigration problem.
Québec has had a population problem for nearly 50 years as its birth rate dropped from 3.91 per woman in 1960 to 1.68 in 1980. Keep in mind that Québec doesn’t just see itself as a minority of six million French-speakers in a country of 30 million people, but as a minority in a North America of 350 million English speakers. Ask the Cajuns what happens when you get demographically swamped.
If Québec wants to survive, it needs to keep its population up, and the only way to do that is immigration. However, if Québec wants to survive as a French nation on an English-speaking continent, then it needs to take aggressive steps to promote its French-speaking identity.
That might not be possible any longer within the Canadian constitutional framework, which raises the possibility of Quebec holding its third independence referendum of the past 50 years.
“For the Québécois, it is no longer just a question of leaving a federation that marginalizes and anglicizes them, but breaking with a state that has been swept along in an ideological delirium. This resistance finds its reasons not only in the principles of a liberal society but in a substantial national identity, which cannot be reduced to the abstract categories of the “civic nation” …
“…The nation is a historical reality, and while it is possible to assimilate into it without belonging to it by birth—that goes without saying—it cannot be reduced to its legal or administrative dimensions.”
Whether Quebec can survive as a separate, francophone nation-state on an English-speaking continent is questionable; of course, it has been battling for survival as nation without a state since 1759. However, Quebec’s survival is no more problematic than whether Canada can survive solely as an English-speaking country on an America-dominated continent.
Ward Carroll had a very interesting segment on the Greenland talk. He made the point that he would be more successful if he had kept it private with the Danes rather than public in a metaphorical stadium. And since it is public what’s to prevent the Russians or Chinese from upping the offer?
Well spotted on the Trump-wheeler-dealer thing.
> a federation that marginalizes and anglicizes them
Bah, that’s most of the Western world, they aren’t special.
Greenland has a population of 56,0000, is 81% covered by ice a mile or more thick with that minuscule population confined to the small, “ice free” coastal areas. The capital, Nuuk, once registered -94°F, ice free, in this case meaning the temperature is occasionally above freezing, water, not CO2.This is not and never will be a viable independent entity. The problem is that the Danish military couldn’t fight off a determined troop of Girl Scouts and the natives have just enough “independence” to become the next Sri Lanka for any country like China willing to invest a few bucks spread around a few politicians with the promise of some sort of development.
Any proposed keeper needs to be willing to foot the bill for everything consumed on the island beyond seal blubber and fish in perpetuity. Any talk of resources needs to deal with the aforementioned mile+ of ice over everything. It is more realistic to talk about mining the moon than Greenland.
It is the perfect example of an attractive nuisance. We don’t need it and don’t want it but can’t let it fall into the wrong hands.
Obama? He’s a con man, telling you what you wanted to hear. You can tell me that just makes him a politician, but he was doing it long before he became one.
Here is an earlier example of Obama as poseur, more concerned with the impression he makes than with being “authentic.” In his memoir,Dreams From My Father, Obama discusses his freshman year at Occidental College.
David Garrow , an Obama biographer, called Obama’s Dreams of My Father which brought him to the national stage a work of “historical fiction”
Obama knew what people wanted to hear and he was willing to sell a version of himself they wanted to buy… they wanted to be fooled.
This was actually the MO for his administration, including one of his main acolytes David Ben Rhodes who treated the press as tools and held them in contempt
I take Trump’s sudden interest in Greenland and Canada as a tell that the newly elected government of the United States has given up on the clumsy attempts to be global hegemon and is now refocusing upon the actual interests of the actual nation-state existing in the middle part of North America.
Awesome. I approve. More importantly, some faction of the Deep State must also approve, because they let Marco Rubio make reality-friendly observations at his hearing today.
This obviously has major implications not only for Greenland and Canada, but also for the swarm of expensive protectorates laughably referred to as “US allies.”
About Canada, too bad. I was born there, so I’ll assign myself expert status. The Canadian government has long worked to ensure that Canadians would ignore the obvious cultural similarities with Americans in fear that they would want to join the American union. The relevant consequence for us today is that actual Canadians- the people who went to war in 1914 and 1939- are well on the way to becoming an irrelevant afterthought for the present globalist Canadian regime.
In other words, Canada is toast. Either the people of that former nation-state get swamped by the endless stream of foreigners imported by their regime or they replace it and drastically change their present policies, which effectively will result in a much closer relationship with the colossus to their south.
I note that I am shoehorning a vast swarm of possibilities into a mere bifurcation but if the present Canadian immigration realities persist then the country is over. The foreign-dominated nation-state north of us will become a military problem of the sort as if Mexico had become a colony of France circa 1865. And if that doesn’t happen, then the new Canadian regime will be quite aligned with the new nationalist American regime, because it would share roughly the same goals.
That is, not to be swamped by endless streams of foreigners, and not to be bankrupted by foreign mercantilism. I think it would go looking for friends south of its border, to better resist demands from powerful foreign regimes who would be upset that they can’t continue colonizing North America.
Quebec? A footnote.
Xennady: “Quebec? A footnote.”
A footnote — or the canary in the coal mine? French-speaking Canadians have long found themselves, their language, and their culture under pressure from their (to them, foreign) English-speaking fellow citizens.
What is the difference when those English-speaking Canadians now find themselves in danger of becoming an irrelevant minority, sandwiched between ethnic Chinese Canadians on the West Coast and ethnic Indian Canadians in Ontario? Maybe it is time for the “native” Canadians to learn from the successes & failures of the Quebec experience and develop a better way of handling their analogous situation?
French-speaking Canadians have long found themselves, their language, and their culture under pressure from their (to them, foreign) English-speaking fellow citizens.
As an expert on Canada, I dispute this. Left alone, French would have been well on the road to extinction in Canada for the same reasons it became essentially extinct in Louisiana, or why Italian and German have disappeared from America.
But the frogs of Quebec were big mad about this, so they tormented the rest of Canada incessantly, lest Quebec secede. End result, every Canadian child was taught French beginning in the 4th grade and English was made effectively illegal in Quebec. So if you had a store in Quebec and you had an English apostrophe in your store’s name the language police would make you take it down. I also recall that the Quebec government had at least one agreement with an English-language school to allow it to continue to teach in English- but because they could, they abrogated that agreement.
Bottom line, I just can’t find any sympathy for Quebec and how put-upon they are to have to exist upon a continent where most people don’t speak their language. Perhaps they should just go back to France and enjoy learning Arabic. After all, Canadians are now expected to make stolen land declarations at every occasion so of course the Quebecois are also on stolen land. So go, frogs, back to where you belong.
Maybe it is time for the “native” Canadians to learn from the successes & failures of the Quebec experience and develop a better way of handling their analogous situation?
Quebec has failed. It has a birth rate that makes Japan look fecund and importing French-speaking Africans and Haitians won’t fix that.
So: footnote.
Here’s an obscure historical note regarding the moral authority of Canada at the time of WW II…
In 1938, Britain and France were confronted by Nazi Germany’s territorial demands against Czechoslovakia. They caved in, making the infamous Munich Agreement. British Prime Minister Chamberlain has ever since been viewed as an exemplar of cowardice and weakness.
But few people realize that his position was significantly weaker than it later appeared. When Britain went to war a year later for Poland, it was joined by the “Dominions” (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, who collectively provided a war effort comparable to Britain’s own. But in 1938, the Canadian government privately informed Chamberlain that if Britain went to war then, Canada would stay out.
I don’t claim that was a decisive factor, but it had some effect. And it clearly places Canada in a bad light.
Xennady: “Quebec has failed.”
You may be right — but then where does that place all those white Anglophone Canadians who are now at risk of being swamped by ethnic Indians and Chinese? And what does it say about the prospects for white Anglophone people in England … or in the US?
If Quebec has failed, then what are the lessons others should learn when what they think of as “their” country (or at least their grandparents’ country) is in the process of being over-run by people of different ethnicities? It is a serious question! Should they just lie back and think of England? Or might there be a better way?
I have plenty of experience with Quebec, Bill 101 and all of that.
Quebec has one big difference over the Cajuns and Acadians, let alone other nationalities in the world, because it has a control over specific borders in a semi-autonomous format. It has a government that can actually do things and it has also normalized the idea of separatist referendums.
What was mentioned earlier about “Les Habitants” is that it went from one of the highest birth rates to one of the lowest int he western world during its Quiet Revolution which transformed the French-speakers of the province from a garrison, basically Catholic-run state mentality to one of a secular nationalism
So basically Quebec went from the ability to survive as a separate country but has little int he way of the consciousness to do so to in a few decades of gaining that consciousness but losing the ability (due to demographics)
The problem with the non-white, Francophone immigration designed to keep the province’s population numbers up is that those people have little loyalty to French Canadian nationalism so much as getting a toe hold on the larger English-speaking continent.
Given that what Quebec is facing are basically the circumstances of many other nationalities across the western world, it’s probably worth another post.
You may be right — but then where does that place all those white Anglophone Canadians who are now at risk of being swamped by ethnic Indians and Chinese?
I’d say that they’re in roughly the same boat as the rest of the Western world- betrayed and not pleased about it. How much that will matter and how soon I’d won’t try to guess.
But eventually the status quo is going to implode and something too noticeable for the usual suspects to pretend everything is fine.
That may have already happened, instigated by Trump. I note that the Premier of Alberta is supposedly meeting with Trump, apparently inspired by the rest of Canada’s desire to fight back against the Bad Orange Man and his tariff talk by cutting off oil exports to the US, thus wrecking that province’s economy. Now I don’t actually expect Alberta to secede but I’d say the mere fact that their leader is having anything to do Trump after his comments about annexing Canada is an interesting tell. Canada once rejected a free trade deal with the US under the slogan neither truck nor trade with the Yankees, so something has changed.
If Quebec has failed, then what are the lessons others should learn when what they think of as “their” country (or at least their grandparents’ country) is in the process of being over-run by people of different ethnicities?
Stop the invasion, any way you can. That’s the lesson. Eventually I think ethnic Europeans will notice how racist the citizens of the various foreign countries colonizing their lands are and react accordingly. There will be violence and regime change- and not in the sense that one globalist party is replaced by another after an election stuffed full of vote fraud. I expect there will be a lot of mass graves appearing in the next decade or two and the only question is who gets to lie in them.
Or, alternately, Trump will make it all better and we’ll all live in harmony and peace with the people who hate us and want us all dead.
But I doubt it.
The problem with the non-white, Francophone immigration designed to keep the province’s population numbers up is that those people have little loyalty to French Canadian nationalism so much as getting a toe hold on the larger English-speaking continent.
True. But they also have no particular reason to care about the English-speaking continent either, other than how it benefits them. There is also no particular reason why that self-interest would necessarily include any sense of loyalty or duty towards those English-speakers or their country.
One of the statistics that shocked me was finding out during the 2016 campaign was that during the entire War on Terror ™ that there had only been six Muslims killed in action. Considering that Bush allowed millions to come into the country because reasons I’d have presumed that there would have been plenty who ended up in the US military, especially since we were engaged in a war to bring blessed democracy to their co-religionists, but no, not happening.
That’s a problem. The last time there was mass immigration to the US there was an extensive and successful campaign to teach foreigners how awesome America was and how lucky they were to be here.
Not now. Instead, we get Africans who were flown into the country at taxpayer expense and who get to live in 4-star hotels and receive everything for free complaining that Americans aren’t learning their language.
This is not sustainable. There are enough Americans to make that matter, but I’m not sure if there are enough Canadians.
But I suppose we can always invade, if that becomes a problem for us…