Smart people who dislike President Trump are capable of saying the stupidest things. Take, for example, Hal Brands, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, whose latest column in Bloomberg is titled “Canada Made America Great.” Even if Brands didn’t pick the title, his article expresses concern that President Trump’s hostility to our northern neighbor will in “military, geostrategic and moral terms … bring a heavy price” to U.S. national security policy. “Trump,” he writes, “is tempting America’s neighbor to seek security by aligning with outside powers,” namely the U.K. and Europe. Brands knows, of course, that Canada is already aligned with the U.K. and much of Europe in NATO. But he implies that a hostile Canada would be a threat to U.S. security. Really?
Brands is a member in good standing of the American foreign policy establishment, which means he has to abhor or at least show disdain for Donald Trump, otherwise he might not be welcome at the Council on Foreign Relations or Bloomberg, or any other globalist group or organization that promotes liberal internationalism instead of America First. Brands supports his thesis by invoking classical geopolitics, which supposedly teaches that countries with hostile neighbors cannot be global powers because such continental distractions interfere with their ability to project power abroad.
Yet, China is surrounded by potentially hostile powers (Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Australia, India, Vietnam) but has been very successful in projecting geoeconomic power abroad and is building the capability to project military power abroad. Power in international relations is all relative. A hypothetically hostile Canada has a population of about 40 million, while the U.S. population is about 340 million. Canada’s gross domestic product (GDP) is about the size of New York State’s GDP and smaller than California’s. The United States’ military power vastly exceeds that of Canada in every important category. And Canada’s economy is hugely reliant on trade with the United States.
Brands’s suggestion that Canada may forge new economic and security partnerships is a chimera. His notion that the U.S., because of Trump, may face “serious threats along a 5,500-mile border” presumably from Canada’s armed forces is laughable. His belief that a hostile Canada would prevent the United States from projecting power abroad is unworthy of someone who claims to understand classical geopolitics.
It is true that having friendly or at least weaker powers on our land borders has benefited American foreign policy. Of course, a hostile Canada that aligned, say, with China, would pose a security threat to the United States, but Brands doesn’t pose that hypothetical. He apparently envisions the possibility of Canada, the U.K., and “Europe” teaming up against the United States, when in reality, the last thing those countries want is to lose America’s security umbrella. And none of those countries want to partner with China. (RELATED: The Future Is Dim for US–Canada Relations)
Brands likes the U.S. to have invulnerable frontiers because it allows us to, in his words, “roam far and wide.” But Trump doesn’t want the United States to “roam far and wide.” We have roamed too far and too wide since the end of the Cold War by expanding NATO and trying to democratize the world. And that is the real dispute between globalists like Brands and America Firsters like Trump. Especially revealing is Brands’s claim that Trump’s approach to Canada “will tax America’s diplomatic soul.”
There is no such thing as a “diplomatic soul.” Relations between nations are based on interests, not otherworldly sentiment. Individuals have souls; great powers do not. President George W. Bush once claimed to have looked into Russian President Vladimir Putin’s soul and found him “very straightforward and trustworthy.” Vladimir Putin does have a soul, but Russia does not.
Brands is correct that we benefit from a friendly Canada as an ally, but Canada benefits more from good relations with us. Which is why the Canadian government should ignore Brands’s suggestion that it align itself with “outside” powers against the United States, and even more important, is why no U.S. administration should let Brands within 10 miles of the State Department or Defense Department.
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