Today's News: Thinking about the Unthinkable - could Trump invade Canada?

Everybody is talking about the Globe and Mail articles about planning for an American invasion.

A headline like this has not appeared in a Canadian newspaper for 100 years.

- Dan Gardner

Read on Substack

On Tuesday, this Globe and Mail news story, by Bob Fife and Gavin John:

Military models Canadian response to hypothetical American invasion (gift link)
Armed Forces envision insurgency tactics like those used by Afghan mujahedeen, sources say. But officials and experts stress a U.S. operation is unlikely, and the scenarios are conceptual
...military planners are modelling a U.S. invasion from the south, expecting American forces to overcome Canada’s strategic positions on land and at sea within a week and possibly as quickly as two days.
Canada does not have the number of military personnel or the sophisticated equipment needed to fend off a conventional American attack, they said. So, the military envisions unconventional warfare in which small groups of irregular military or armed civilians would resort to ambushes, sabotage, drone warfare or hit-and-run tactics.
One of the officials said the model includes tactics used by the Afghan mujahedeen in their hit-and-run attacks on Russian soldiers during the 1979-1989 Soviet-Afghan War. These were the same tactics employed by the Taliban in their 20-year war against the U.S. and allied forces that included Canada. Many of the 158 Canadian soldiers killed in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2014 were struck by improvised explosive devices or IEDs.
The aim of such tactics would be to impose mass casualties on U.S. occupying forces, the official said.
...Military planners envision an American attack that would follow clear signs from the U.S. military that the two countries’ partnership in NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defence Command, was ending, and the U.S. was under new orders to take Canada by force.
Conscription has been ruled out for now, but the level of sacrifice that would be asked of Canadians remains a central topic, the officials said. General Jennie Carignan, Chief of the Defence Staff, has already announced her intention to create a 400,000-plus-strong reserve force of volunteers. The officials said they could be armed or asked to provide disruptions if the U.S. becomes an occupying power.
A senior Defence Department official said Canada would have a maximum of three months to prepare for a land and sea invasion. The first indications that invasion orders had been sent would be expected to come from U.S. military warnings that Canada no longer has a shared skies policy with the United States, the source said.
This rupture in the joint defence agreement would likely see France or Britain, nuclear-weapon states, being called on to provide support and defence for Canada against the U.S.
....Retired major-general David Fraser, who commanded Canadian troops in Afghanistan alongside the United States, said Canada could also use drones and tank-killing weapons like the Ukrainians used against the Russians to blunt their invasion in February, 2022.
... Canada can count on support from European countries, Britain, Japan, South Korea and other democratic nations.
“You know if you come after Canada, you are going to have the world coming after you, even more than Greenland. People do care about what happens to Canada, unlike Venezuela,” Mr. Fraser said. “You could actually see German ships and British planes in Canada to reinforce the country’s sovereignty.”
...If the threat from the U.S. became serious, he said Canadian soldiers would be placed along the border even though there is no realistic possibility that Canada could defeat the U.S. militarily.
Insurgency tactics would be the best way to deal with U.S. invading forces, he said.
“There is a quantum difference between defending another land like Canadians did in Afghanistan versus defending Windsor, Ontario. You do not walk across that border because everybody is your enemy then,” Mr. Fraser added.
Retired lieutenant-general Mike Day, who headed Canadian Special Forces Command and served as chief strategic planner for the future of the Canadian Armed Forces, said it was “fanciful” to think the Americans would actually invade Canada.
But he acknowledged Canada’s armed forces could not stand up to the world’s biggest and most sophisticated military. He said, however, that the U.S. would have great difficulty occupying a country the size of Canada.
...“Notwithstanding the size of the American military, however, they do not have the force structure to occupy, let alone control every major urban centre in Canada.”
“Their only hope would be a Russian-like drive to Kyiv and hope that works and the rest of country capitulates once they seize the seat of power in Ottawa,” he added. “Like Ukraine, it would inconceivable to me that we would give up if they seized our capital.”
Gaëlle Rivard Piché, executive director of the Conference of Defence Associations, said she did not see a situation where the U.S. would attack Canada. But she also said it’s crucial for Canada to significantly build up its defence capabilities.
...University of Toronto political scientist Aisha Ahmad said Canada needs to drastically boost its homeland defence capabilities, regardless of the potential U.S. threat to the border.
“The better Canada can embrace this approach to homeland defence, the less likely all of these horrible scenarios that nobody wants will ever come to pass,” she said.
U.S. generals would be aware that Canadians would fight back against an invasion, using whatever tactics would be the most effective, she said.
“I do believe that there are intelligent generals south of our border who could very easily identify that risk environment.”

Then on Wednesday, this Globe and Mail editorial:

In the age of Trump, it’s time to think about the unthinkable
...Whether he wants Greenland in order to shatter NATO, or is merely willing to see it shattered, does not matter. What does matter is his annexationist logic – the United States must own the territory it defends. It cannot count on allies.
The implications for Canada and Arctic defence are as obvious as they are worrying. If Mr. Trump is successful in his illegitimate quest to annex Greenland, tis country would rightly worry about his next move.
The European Union, which has tried to placate Mr. Trump this past year, has been forced into a painful reconsideration, a jolt much like that delivered to Canada in early 2025. Mr. Trump’s campaign to use economic coercion to turn Canada into the 51st state was a shock to this country, accustomed to a relationship with the United States beyond that of even a mere ally.
“Canada was amongst the first to hear the wake-up call, leading us to fundamentally shift our strategic posture,” Prime Minister Mark Carney said in a speech Tuesday at the World Economic Forum at Davos. He did not name Mr. Trump; he did not need to.
Mr. Carney’s speech was a precision munition, a salvo aimed at pushing Canada’s European allies, especially, from muttered and muted complaints into joint action. “When we only negotiate bilaterally with a hegemon, we negotiate from weakness,” he said. “We accept what is offered. This is not sovereignty. It is the performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination.”
The Prime Minister offered a clear-eyed view of the world as it is today, rather than a nostalgia-tinged invocation of the mantra of the “rules-based international order.” If power is to be the only law, then Canada must amplify its power by banding together with other like-minded countries.
Earlier in his speech, he said that Canada stands “firmly with Greenland and Denmark and fully support their unique right to determine Greenland’s future.” Canada’s commitment to NATO’s Article 5, which states an attack on one member is an attack on all, is “unwavering,” he said.
The federal government has yet to announce whether it will join with our European allies in sending troops to Greenland. Canada should do so. It would not be provocation to take that step. To the contrary, it would be a measured response to provocation by Mr. Trump and support for NATO’s core principle of collective security.
As has been the case for decades, Greenland is the first line of defence.

Here is a Reaction Roundup:

Dean Blundell

... According to the reporting, senior Canadian defence officials ran conceptual military models examining how Canada might respond if the U.S. — our closest ally, our NORAD partner, our supposed continental shield — became the aggressor.
And the unthinkable is no longer unutterable.
Why? Because the political environment south of the border has changed radically, violently, and unpredictably.
When a sitting or returning U.S. president openly talks about annexation and his “51st state” rhetoric stops being a joke, and treaties are treated like suggestions and alliances like leverage, you don’t laugh it off.

Charlie Angus

... This is no drill, and time in the short term is not on our side. We must be prepared.
The threat to Canada is coming, and it is serious. Canada must move quickly and with determination.
According to a report in the Globe and Mail, Canada’s military is planning for the possibility of a North American war.
This isn’t going to be like a European ground war. Instead, the Canadian forces will utilize the immense experience they received in the counter-insurgency war in Afghanistan. Except in this case, the Canadians are preparing to fight like the Mujahadeen.
Canadian military scenarios assume the American army could occupy key Canadian points within the first week. Rather than try to stop the Americans at the border, Canadian troops would pull back in order to focus on counter-insurgency efforts. The objective is to create “mass casualties.”
The Canadian military is gaming out strategies studied by Canadian counter-insurgency expert Dr. Aisha Ahmad. Like the military brass, she expects that if the Americans come over the border, they would launch a quick assault on key positions.
According to Dr. Ahmad, that is “not be the end of the story. It’s just the beginning.”
Writing in The Conversation, she points out that people mistake Canadian niceness for meekness. This would not be the case if the Americans invaded Canada.
“Except for a few collaborators, my research suggests many Canadians would likely engage in various forms of everyday resistance against invading forces that could involve stealing, lying, cutting wires, and diverting funds.
She predicts that Canadian resistance would take the fight to the United States.
“The Canada-U.S. border is also easy to cross, which would give insurgents access to American critical infrastructure. It costs tens of billions of dollars to build an energy pipeline, and only a few thousand to blow one up.”
“But in this nightmare scenario, could Canadians successfully resist an American invasion? Absolutely…. a military invasion of Canada would trigger a decades-long violent resistance, which would ultimately destroy the United States.”
She writes that if only one percent of Canada’s population stepped up to resist, that would represent 400,000 insurgents, ten times the number of Taliban fighters.
Americans suck at counter-insurgency; Canadians would be on their home ground.
“Trump is delusional if he believes that 40 million Canadians will passively accept conquest.”
And here’s where the seriousness of this issue comes home.
The federal government has announced plans to create a 300,000-person volunteer force of ordinary citizens. The Globe and Mail states that the number is actually 400,000. That’s the same number Dr. Ahmad identified as being ideal for destroying the American forces.
I hate writing this. I hate imagining it. But I hate the threats posed against democracy even more. We need to be realistic.
The American empire is disintegrating before our eyes. Trump’s threats to attack an independent, peaceful nation have escalated. He claims that he is attacking Greenland because he was rebuffed by the Nobel Prize committee.
Such an admission should have immediately caused the American power establishment to step in and find ways to remove him from power. They haven’t. Meanwhile, the rhetoric against our nation is increasing. Steve Bannon says Canada is becoming “hostile” to the United States.
The Prime Minister and General Carignan must move quickly on reaching out to Canadians about the volunteer force. It may be the one thing that gets the Americans’ attention and makes them think we are serious, and they may think twice.
This is not a drill. Time is not on our side in the short term. But our nation is unified more than at any time in memory.
The Americans will think twice if they know that we are willing to stand up to them.
We’ve got this.

And a contrary view from Stephen Saideman:

...The big threat is not American invasion--that is a dark fantasy. The big threat is here and real--American coercion. Trump has used tariffs and has threatened tariffs, making Canadian goods more expensive in the US, hurting Canadian industry and costing people their jobs. Trump has threatened to pull out of NAFTA 2.0 (also called USMCA and CUSMA). He will push Canada via economic threats and via real policies that hurt the Canadian economy, hoping that Canada caves. The Canadians may not be used to this pain, but Trump has activated Canadian nationalism like nothing else. While he could try to pick at the seams via Albertan and Quebec separatism, that would require more nuance, consistency, and good policy-makers than Trump can summon. Indeed, the separatists will be seen as allies or abetters of Trumpism, which will make a big dent in their popularity.
So, let's not fear an American invasion and fantasize about Canadian IEDs covered in moose poop or maple syrup. Instead, plan for and become resilient in the face of a trade war, recession, and diminished quality of living. It will suck, but we can get through it. My bet is more Americans get killed by ICE than Canadians get killed by the American military.
Wow, these are dark times. Just let's not imagine them to be darker still.

Saideman also posted this:

I am more worried about war in Minnesota than in Greenland or Canada. The US is hours or days away from civil war. This might sound extreme, but if Walz has the Minn National Guard blocking ICE ops, the usual response of the fed govt to governors using NG against feds is to call out the army. 1/

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— Steve Saideman (@smsaideman.bsky.social) January 21, 2026 at 12:02 PM

And here's a couple of American views about Canada:

A war between the Canada and the United States would not resemble past American wars that consolidated national unity. It would instead function as a catalyst that converts long-standing internal fractures into open domestic conflict. The reason is not ideological novelty or foreign threat, but legitimacy. Modern states fracture when large portions of their population conclude that the government has crossed a line that cannot be justified morally, legally, or materially. A war against Canada—America’s closest ally, largest trading partner, and most integrated neighbor—would be widely perceived as such a line. Legitimacy is the quiet infrastructure of state power. Citizens comply with taxes, laws, conscription, and sacrifice not merely because force exists, but because the state’s actions fall within a shared understanding of reasonableness and necessity. A U.S.–Canada war lacks the narrative scaffolding that sustains legitimacy. There is no historical grievance that resonates nationally, no existential threat that can be credibly demonstrated, and no moral framework that explains why Americans should suffer, kill, or die. Without that framework, compliance becomes conditional, and conditional compliance is the seedbed of internal rupture. Geography would accelerate this collapse. The U.S.–Canada border is not a hard edge between strangers; it cuts through integrated economic, social, and infrastructural systems. Energy grids, auto manufacturing, agriculture, shipping, and water management are binational by design. Cities like Detroit and Windsor, or Seattle and Vancouver, function as paired ecosystems rather than rival outposts. A war would instantly force Americans living in these regions to choose between federal directives and local survival. When federal policy directly threatens livelihoods, jobs, and basic services without a compelling justification, resistance ceases to be ideological and becomes practical. Practical resistance spreads faster and more quietly than protest, because it is rooted in daily necessity. That resistance would not remain local. Federal–state relations would come under immediate strain as governors, legislatures, and courts confront demands for National Guard deployments, emergency powers, and wartime restrictions. Some states would comply, others would delay, litigate, or refuse. The United States has already normalized a form of constitutional hardball in which states openly defy federal priorities. War would raise the stakes of that defiance. Once the federal government must coerce states to participate in an unpopular conflict, the question shifts from foreign policy to sovereignty. At that point, the conflict has already turned inward. The military itself would not be immune. The U.S. armed forces are drawn from the same polarized society they are meant to defend, and they rely heavily on reservists and Guard units whose loyalties are both civic and local. Orders to fight Canada would place service members in an ethical contradiction that military training does not easily resolve. Refusals, resignations, leaks, and fractured chains of command would not require ideological coordination; they would emerge organically from moral dissonance. Historically, civil conflicts accelerate when military obedience becomes uneven, not when armies are defeated abroad. Economic shock would deepen the rupture. Canada is woven into American supply chains at a level unmatched by any other country. War would disrupt energy flows, manufacturing inputs, food systems, and transportation networks almost immediately. The resulting inflation, shortages, and layoffs would concentrate pain in precisely those regions already skeptical of centralized authority. Economic suffering without moral clarity radicalizes populations far more effectively than abstract political rhetoric. People tolerate hardship when they believe it serves a necessary end; they resist when it appears gratuitous. Information dynamics would ensure that this resistance cannot be contained. Unlike earlier wars, there would be no unified media environment capable of sustaining a single narrative. Allies, veterans, economists, and international institutions would publicly contradict U.S. justifications in real time. Attempts to suppress dissent would only confirm suspicions that the war itself is indefensible. Once the informational consensus collapses, state authority becomes reactive rather than directive, chasing legitimacy rather than exercising it. The likely outcome would not be a conventional civil war with clear fronts and uniforms. It would be a fragmented crisis characterized by mass non-cooperation, state–federal confrontation, selective enforcement of laws, and uneven military obedience, all unfolding under severe economic stress. This is how modern civil conflicts begin: not with declarations, but with refusals that spread faster than the state can compel compliance. In that sense, a U.S.–Canada war would not create division so much as reveal it under intolerable pressure. The external conflict would be the spark, but the fuel—legitimacy erosion, institutional mistrust, economic precarity, and polarized identity—already exists. Under those conditions, the question would not be whether the United States fractures internally, but how quickly and along which fault lines the fracture spreads.

- Jamal X

Read on Substack

Georgia Tec international studies professor Jon Lindsay says Carney's speech demonstrates the biggest shift in Canada foreign policy since 1940:

... Bound to the United States geographically and economically, Canada cultivated a distinctive ideological commitment to international order to differentiate itself from the 800-lb gorilla to its south. Canada would generally accommodate the United States in most material policies, but it would provide an alternative moral vision for the world to soften the hard edge of American hegemony. ...
But Carney now says the quiet part out loud: “This bargain no longer works.” And this is a huge change for Canada. Canada now openly acknowledges that the emperor has no clothes. The American hegemon provides more systemic risk than public goods. Carney argues that the liberal order forged in the Cold War is not simply in crisis but in rupture. That means there is a before and after, and we are now in the after part.
This is a really bold move. Color me impressed. Canadian strategy has long walked the razor’s edge between autonomy and assimilation by pursuing a healthy helping of accommodation and appeasement. But now Carney seems to be shifting Canada (and arguably has been shifting for the past year) toward more autonomy and more explicit balancing against the United States. It it impossible to exaggerate how challenging this will be.
Disintegrating the United States and Canada, militarily and economically, is a mammoth task. I am not even sure I can write intelligently about this right now, considering how thoroughly integrated are the US-Canadian defense of North America and intelligence partnerships. This is so hard, and some degree of integration may be all but determined geographically, that perhaps Carney’s heroical rhetoric will ulitmately be just that.
But if we take Carney at his word, then Canada desperately needs allies. Canada is exposed and vulnerable to American aggression, but there are ways to make hegemonic hubris costly. I thus think it is helpful to understand Carney’s Davos speech as a call for a new Atlantic triangle to balance the United States. This is not the soft-power entanglement of the NATO triangle in the Cold War against an external threat, but a back to the future of the hard-power balancing with Great Britain. It is more difficult this time because instead of one imperial actor, there are many middle powers, each of which have a different vulnerability profile. We may also see something of a Pacific triangle start to emerge, if Canada’s abrupt dropping of its 100% tariffs on BYD is any indication. In a newly multipolar world, Canada will find itself caught in a new web of opportunities and threats.
The house is not fireproof. The inflammable materials are just over the border. The inviolable security guarantee is now a growing risk of violation. Defence against help must become defence against harm. And the geometry of the Atlantic triangle is now more complicated than ever before.

Finally, on a lighter note:

Trump demands Carney give him his standing ovation from Davos

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— The Beaverton (@thebeaverton.com) January 21, 2026 at 12:49 PM