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?