The 51st state, eh? From my study I can see the lights of the Ambassador Bridge at night; if I walk to the bottom of my driveway, I can see across the river to Detroit. America is so close, and so far.

Decisions, decisions.

Would we still be able to buy Beavertails, or would Bearclaws become the dominant fried dough confection? Could we still call Corndogs Pogos? Could we negotiate a carve out for ketchup chips? Would we be forced to drink Verners, or would Canada Dry ginger ale still be sold? Could we still make rye, or would bourbon become the national whiskey?

And spelling: would we have to drop the ‘u’ in neighbour and adopt other Noah Webster barbarisms like ‘thru’ for ‘through?’ If I say, “I was really pissed last night,” will my new co-citizens understand that I was drunk, or will they think that I was angry with someone? Would Windsorites in time develop the nasally Midwestern drawl of Michiganders? The metric system would be gone, but it never really took hold of the popular imagination anyway.

On the other hand, I wouldn’t have to wait in traffic at the border if there were no border.

Hmm…. no more wait times at the border.

I am not a nationalist or a dogmatic anti-American. I am not going to boycott Tigers’ or Red Wings’ games or give up my membership at the Detroit Institute of Arts because 1/3 of eligible American voters cast their ballot for Donald Trump. Still, joining up? It would be ideal if there were no borders or boundaries dividing up the globe and everyone could just wander freely where they will. But people do not live in ideals. There are borders, and, like a comforter on a cold winter night, they create a warm space in which one can feel at home. There is no place like home, wherever home is, and I just happened to have been thrown into being here, in Canada.

I have no illusions about the place- every problem that bedevils America can be found here. Our reputation for peace and equality rests more on foreigners’ ignorance of our history than our realities. Still, there is no place like home: one develops a feel for a place and appreciates ease of motion through the culture in which one grows up. So I feel attached to Canada by temperment and habit. The pace of life is just a little slower, our public policy perhaps just a little more cautious. Public health care is a good idea, even if the practice is more and more wanting. There is no abortion law, and most Canadians do not think that their country was put on earth as a beacon towards which all other ships of state must steer– or be sunk. Canadians are not as nice as our reputation makes out, but there is some civic humility at odds with the Manifest Destiny triumphalism of our neighbours– or should I say neighbors.

Most Canadians agree. A poll taken in the wake of Trump’s bluster about annexing Canada found only 13% in support becoming the 51st state, So, while millions of Canadians are happy to winter in Florida and Arizona and thousands more will no doubt continue to seek their fame and fortune in Hollywood (if it does not does not burn to the ground), most of us are attached to our independence. So thanks, Donald, for the offer, but maybe we’ll just keep muddling along, attached but separate.

As with much of what he says, Trump’s chatter about annexing Canada is part provocation and part feint. Trump is a carnival barker and an illusionist. His bluster is sleight of hand to distract people from the real agenda. Remember the border wall? It did not get built, but the number of migrants crossing the Southern border rapidly declined, because his rhetoric dissuaded them from coming in the first place. Annexing Canada is drawn from the same playbook. The USMC free trade agreement is due to be renegotiated and Trump is simply positioning the US to extract more concessions from Canada and Mexico.

If I were a poker player I would love to play someone like Trump. He pushes his chips in every hand. Occasionally a player like that will not be bluffing, but the math says that his hand will be weaker than he thinks more times than not. However, in order to beat him you have to have the courage to push your chips in too and call his bluff. Remarkably, few players do.

Trump’s threats had Justin Trudeau scurrying down to Mar a Lago to grovel at Trump’s knee. No sooner did he get off the plane from Florida than a billion dollar border security package was unveiled. Denmark similarly has promised to make billion dollar military investments in Greenland to appease Trump. The situation there is made even more complicated by the fact that Greenland wants its independence from Denmark. Self-determination is their right, but they ought to think very carefully about whether the time is right to exercize it. Denmark is a member of NATO and the EU. Those memberships would help Greenland resist any unilateral American moves to legally incorporate it as some sort of dependency like Guam or Puerto Rico. But alone, a nation of 55 000 people would be totally at the mercy of American power. Trump does not respond to moral suasion, only counter-power, and such a small nation would have none.

A better example than the Canadians and Danes of how to respond to Trump has been set by the Mexican President Claudia Steinbaum. Instead of genuflecting, she repaid Trump in his own currency, mocking his proposals and reminding Trump how much of America was once Mexico. Trump is not only a carnival barker, he is a bully. Bullies are not tough but only seem so because they pick on weaker victims. As soon as a victim stands up for themselves the bully moves on to an easier mark. When all the victims stand together there are no more targets and the bully either stops trying to intimidate people or ends his days isolated and lonely.

Trump is motivated by nostalgia– make American great again implies that there was a time when America was great, but no longer. He forgets that the time for which he is nostalgic, the early twentieth century when American manufacturing and science led the world, was reconfigured by American economic power because the old model no longer worked for American corporations. High wages and working class power helped create the stagflation crisis of the early 1970s. Exporting manufacturing industries undercut working class power, mass migration, legal and illegal, increased the supply of cheap labour for service industries, generating downward pressure on wages, while making the American dollar the global reserve currency ensured American control over the terms of trade, vastly increasing the power of Wall Street in the global economy and ensuring American political economic hegemony.

Trump’s nostalgia may be rooted in a correct assessment of the relative weakening of American hegemony. China, India, Russia, Brazil and the other members of the growing BRICS bloc are not going to take dictation from Donald Trump. While it is too early to say what a new configuration of global political economic power is going to look like, there is little doubt that such a re-organization is underway. No one nation, person, or movement is powerful enough to resist the tectonic forces of the global political economic system. Trump’s braggadocio masks the fact that America is less able to steer the global system in its own interests than at the end of the Cold War, when America stood alone, economically and ideologically, as the global hegemon. Who today seriously looks to the United States for moral leadership?

But global trade still flows through Wall Street. The American dollar will not be dethroned anytime soon, and America retains enough destructive military power to destroy the earth a few times over. Trump is going to find out very quickly that America has less power than it did when he left office the first time, not because of Biden’s mistakes, but because the nations of the rest of the world have begun defining their interests against America’s. They have seen sanctions and asset seizures and technology embargoes deployed against America’s enemies, but they have not sidled up, begging to become friends. They have learned that America cannot be trusted, and they have re-worked trade routes and invested heavily in technological development to free themselves even further from the American yoke.

Trump is not as stupid as he sometimes sounds. He knows that American power has declined. His threats and posturing are transparent efforts to put competitors off balance. His approach is not always ineffective in the short term, but over the long haul his tactics will force other nations together in blocs like BRICS and accelerate the very decline that Trump is trying to arrest.