Asymmetries in the Current Canada-US Conflict
The obvious asymmetry in the current Canada-US conflict is that the US is in a position to inflict far more pain on Canada than Canada can inflict on the US.
But this isn’t the only asymmetry in the conflict. Thanks to Trump’s alarming rhetoric and a steady stream of insults, Canadians are highly focused on the threat, unified, angry, and braced for pain. There is very little grassroots appetite on the American side for a conflict with Canada. Rather, Americans are either only dimly aware of this issue as one of about a hundred that are currently in the news, horrified and embarrassed by Trump, or fine with a little shakedown of their neighbor as long as it doesn’t disrupt their own lives. But it certainly will if it drags on much longer. The main focus of this last group is high inflation and high prices. But this makes for a notable asymmetry in the pain tolerance of the two parties to the dispute. If the conflict escalates further, even modest negative net consequences may well backfire on Trump before Canada backs down, even if Canada suffers far more damage.
And that’s the third asymmetry here: Canadians really can’t back down much, having been backed into an extremely unpleasant corner. Canada will be looking for constructive ways to manage this threat, and will likely end up making concessions, including painful ones. But it’s obvious that the stakes are higher now than compromise on any one issue. The sovereignty and viability of the country is suddenly rudely the focus of the conversation, and that makes substantial compromise harder than it would otherwise be on any of the issues that Trump is pretending to care about.
American Trump haters are mostly aware to some extent of how this is playing in Canada. I see occasional mentions of the view from Canada on the Democratic side of US social media and liberal-leaning American news, so it’s not impossible to get some sense of things. But I suspect very few Americans understand how profoundly enraging this bullshit is for Canadians and how much long term damage Trump’s regime is doing to relations between the countries. To take an example almost entirely at random, here is a post by Brett Cannon, a very well-known and highly respected figure in the Python (a programming language) community, explaining why he will be skipping PyCon US for the first time since 2003. I hope that a better understanding of the view from Canada will gradually percolate through personal and professional networks through messages like this, since with everything going on even well-informed American critics of Trump are likely to underestimate the consequences.
