In an analysis published Jan. 27 The Guardian drew extensively on the perspectives of Thomas Homer-Dixon to make sense of renewed Canadian anxieties about U.S. coercion and crumbling alliances.
The article revisits War Plan Red, a once-classified U.S. military strategy approved in 1930 that outlined a hypothetical invasion of Canada in the event of war with Great Britain. The largely forgotten plan is newly relevant again amid what The Guardian describes as U.S. President Donald Trump’s “fusion of economic nationalism and belligerent foreign policy.”
Homer-Dixon, executive director of the Cascade Institute, warns in the article that the plan exposes a deeper and enduring vulnerability in Canada’s geopolitical position: “We’ve been critically dependent on the friendship and benignness of the United States, and all of a sudden, both those things have just disappeared,” he says. “They’ve vanished and I worry that only now Canadians fully appreciate what this means.”
The Guardian article puts Homer-Dixon’s comments in the context of other recent U.S. actions and rhetoric, including threats to annex Greenland, which he describes as “outright avarice and greed” and “a vanity project” for which there is “absolutely zero justification.”
“This idea of ‘might makes right’ has always been this recessive cultural gene of the United States,” he says. “And we fooled ourselves into thinking it had gone away. But it has re-emerged to the surface because it never left.”
Read the full article in The Guardian.
