“We take nothing by conquest…Thank God,” wrote the National Intelligencer and Washington Advertiser, an influential Washington newspaper, in February 1847.
The United States had just purchased 55 per cent of Mexico for US$15 million as part of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The pact concluded the bloody Mexican-American War, which claimed thousands of lives.
Despite the loss of life, and American ambitions to take all of Mexico, the treaty painted the whole experience as a rightful “cession” of land rather than a conquest.
Every Canadian needs to pay attention to this bit of American history. In one treaty, the U.S. annexed the present-day states of California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Oklahoma, Kansas and Wyoming. It subsequently illegally invaded Indigenous territory in the west.
Canada could be next — perhaps not immediately as the 51st state, but quite possibly as a U.S. territory that would deny Canadians any voting rights for Congress or the presidency, allow only some autonomy and make questions of citizenship ambiguous. The constitutional architecture exists in the U.S. to make it happen.
Impossible? Unthinkable? Many pundits dismiss Trump’s bellicose rhetoric as hot-headed bargaining. It’s just tough talk, they say. Some have argued his bluster is simply part of his favoured “art of the deal” negotiating tactics.
That’s the wrong reading. How Trump could make good on the threat can be found in the U.S. Constitution. There is both potential and precedent for the U.S. to acquire territory through cession or subjugation.
The War Plan Red of 1930 was also drummed up by the U.S. Department of War on how to invade Canada if ever needed.
It included shocking details about........