this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2025
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This is why Donald Trump really wants to annex Canada (thelogic.co)
submitted 2 days ago by Sunshine to c/canada
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[–] [email protected] 38 points 2 days ago (3 children)

When U.S. President Donald Trump threatens to annex Canada, he is, in many ways, eyeing the Ring of Fire. The wealth of chromite, copper, nickel, platinum, vanadium and gold in Northern Ontario are globally significant, part of the critical mineral wealth that, according to former prime minister Justin Trudeau, has Trump wanting to make Canada “the 51st state.”

I absolutely don’t think this is true. Trump does not value minerals any more than he values factories or values the military being strong and protected.

Mostly, I think he fantasizes about Canada being a state because he is The Weak Strongman:

https://snyder.substack.com/p/the-weak-strongman

Somewhere in Canada, he knows that there are people outside his orbit who can treat with him on a somewhat vaguely level playing field, and that’s intolerable to him because he is too feeble to accomplish anything on a level playing field, and so he needs to co-opt them somehow so he can start to tear them down. I think that’s what he cares about, not minerals.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

It's the same hunting for narrative that usually happens.

He says something without meaningful context, and his base and others fill in the blanks in a race to make it profound. "He's actually playing 5D chess because..." And others ponder why he'd do something as reprehensible as trying to steal everything from an ally.

There's always boons to taking other people's shit; resources, access (NW Passage), infrastructure (energy), water, etc to give a couple examples.

Most of the time, it's because he's robbing someone else blind so needs another horror to enable and distract, and he got angry someone pointed out he's little more than a jerk.

[–] floofloof 7 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

I think it's more likely to be about the USA's strategic control of the Arctic as the ice melts and ships can operate more easily. Right now it's bordered by Russia, Scandinavia, Greenland, Canada and a little bit of the USA. Trump wants all of the Canadian and Greenland coastline to be the USA's, so Russia and the USA can effectively control the Arctic Ocean and its shipping routes, and threaten Europe from the north. This is something that's so simple even Trump would think of it when looking at a globe.

Other factors include resources, including fresh water, and Trump's ego and inability to relate to others except through more or less lame attempts at dominance and bullying. Also that Trudeau out-handshook him a couple of times.

[–] SpaceCowboy 9 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It's not about defense, that's bullshit. When JD Vance went to Greenland for a photo op where did he go? To a military base. Which country is running that military base?

Before Trump, the US already had the ability to have as much military presence in the Arctic as they wanted, because of NATO. He's actually weakening US strength in the Arctic with all of this bullshit.

Why are we guessing at reasonable motives for this? He's already said why he wants to do this. He wants to change the map. He things having Canada and Greenland as part of US will make the map look nicer. First thing he did was to rename the Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America. His motive is to redraw the map, but has no understanding of what that involved. Because he's an idiot that doesn't understand how anything works.

Look at his history, he doesn't really understand the concept of people consenting to what he wants. So he looks at the map and decides he wants it to look different and doesn't see any reason why that isn't going to happen. Because he doesn't understand the concept of needing Canada and Greenland to consent to these changes. Because he's and idiot... and a rapist.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 day ago (2 children)

America wants the minerals and oil under the ground. They had military power in the artic. Next they want to own the artic.

[–] SpaceCowboy 4 points 1 day ago

If it was really about minerals and oil, why did Trump put a tariff on these things?

It's not like Canada was refusing to sell minerals to the US. Everyone was totally fine with selling them. It was Trump that decided "we don't need anything" from Canada.

An attempt to annex Canada won't make these things cheaper. You have to pay people to extract minerals from under the ground. In fact a lot of Canadians might refuse to mine those resources after and invasion and those sites would be a prime target for sabotage.

So tariffs make oil and minerals more expensive. Invasion makes them even more expensive and makes the supply chain incredibly unreliable. If it were really about minerals, then the US would just continue to do as it always has: just buy them.

Sure I'll grant you Trump is dumb enough to think that invading a friendly country might somehow make the resources cheaper to extract from the ground, he doesn't have a solid concept of paying workers after all. But if that's the case he's still stupid and he's lying when he says the US doesn't need anything from Canada, and also lying when he says it'll make the US look good on the map.

Not sure why people want to assume Trump is lying when he says dumb shit and further assume he has some other motive that might seem reasonable, but is also dumb shit.

[–] AJ1 3 points 1 day ago

FYI, it's Arctic, not "artic"

[–] phoenixz 3 points 1 day ago

I think you're rather optimistic bright there thinking that Trump ever looked at a globe, and I don't mean that jokingly

I'm also not trying to underestimate trumo, I really don't believe he is that smart. The people pushing and likely controlling him are, though

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 days ago (3 children)

Canada has a ton of untapped natural resources that he wants to irresponsibly harvest and sell for the fastest profit and growth. A lot of these resoucres are hard to access due to how northern they are but melting sea ice is making northern ports and shipping routes more feasible, increasing access to these remote resources. The times he refers to as "america being great" were times of heavy natural resource extractions and little to no environmental regulations. He is also eying Canada's vast fresh water supplies.

The Colorado river has customers purchasing more water than the river even has flowing in it. On top of this, very poor water regulation policy means farmers are encouraged to use as much water as they can rather than preserve water when possible because unused water may be taken off of next years allotment. Instead of reworking these policies and discouraging water intensive agriculture cash crops in the area, he'd rather just take Canada's water.

A big part of this may have started from his ego but strategically America absolutely stands to benefit economically, militarily, and food security wise from annexing Canada. Canadians cannot afford to take these threats lightly.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 days ago

strategically America absolutely stands to benefit economically, militarily, and food security wise from annexing Canada

I can absolutely completely agree with you there. I'm just saying that Trump doesn't give even the slightest little bit of a shit about any of those things.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

strategically America absolutely stands to benefit economically, militarily, and food security wise from annexing Canada.

Only of you pretend there are no Canadians. Once you factor in the cost of generations of hatred, terrorism, and insurgency from the people America just stabbed on the collective backs, not to mention the international reaction, maybe the old idea of paying for our resources in fair trade would have worked out better.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Average Canadians are not well armed and don't have as much access to a weapons market as other insurgencies in the past. If america genuinely needs more water at some point, its very likely they are willing to pay those prices. Look how long they fought in places less important than securing water, essential for life. America also doesn't give a shit if they kill civilians in a bombing run and those numbers could increase if they are trying to send a message. Some of the thirsty Americans would even be cheering the flames if it kept their taps running.

Canada should invest in its own defense and also look into alliances with other nations.

[–] SpaceCowboy 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

You should look at a map. The headwaters to the rivers you depend on originate in Canada. We currently have agreements on how those rivers are managed, so we all have water. You throw away those agreements? Well I guess we can just dump whatever into those rivers with no fucks given to the Americans that live downstream.

Don't kid yourself, the US takes military action against Canada and we're talking guerilla warfare. And guerillas poisoning the wells is something there's accounts of going back to Roman times. Poisoning a river that flows into enemy lands? No brainer.

And this is the dumbest thing ever. You could buy water (or any other resource) from Canada. This is something your criminal President dreamed up because he has a history of ripping people off whenever he could. You want to be considered the most dishonorable country in history by going to war with a country that just fought alongside you for decades so you can steal some resources?

Bottom line: there were 1,922 Americans killed in Afghanistan. 4,492 killed in Iraq. So Canadians would need to kill between 2000 and 5000 Americans to win the war. I'm willing to fight Americans for decades to get to that number. How long are you willing to fight in a war to help your President Judas betray it's allies?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 day ago

I think its foolish to assume that annexing canada is the same scale of warfare as the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan.

In the case of occupation, american culture is very similar to canadian culture and they will quickly work to control media to paint any insurgencies as violent and terroristic to normal people.

I think canada's best course of action is to be ready to respond to an american military threat. It is far easy to be ready to defend than to spur an insurgency.

America could also bomb us back to the stone age as they've done in other countries by targeting drinking water, waste water, manufacturing, and communications targets. Destroying a couple railway bridges and highway bridges could rip the nation in half trade wise. Even if we mount a succesful insurgency we'd likely have to rebuild from the ashes. I'd rather us come up with a defense plan to prevent that future.

[–] Knoxvomica 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Critical infrastructure that could easily sabotaged by Canadian guerilla forces, pipelines, waterlines, dams, bridges, electrical infrastructure,etc. We look like you, sound like you and we can get to you.

[–] humanspiral -1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

No idea what OP is saying, but there is historically 0 US investment that Canada has ever said no to. Canadian owned companies have never refused to sell to US, and Canada has been a perfectly good US slave in invoking national security BS against Chinese ownership of resources. US system of colonialism is through private oligarchy, and they have (had) full access to Canada.

So, the resource access argument is complete BS. The blocking Russian access to Arctic passage and resources is also 100% BS. Canadians are already fully programmed to hate Russia, and their only interest in our resources or passage would be as invited friends, sending us goods we happily paid for. Russia has a massive amount of their own undeveloped resources, closer to its/natural trade partner market, and trade with Europe or Africa has no need for Canadian waters access. Traitorous lying filth program you with any stupidity that Russia is a threat to Canada.

I would suggest that Trump does not want to annex Canada. He wants to destroy Canada in order to move manufacturing jobs to US under the false logic that Americans can do everything that Canadians can, and that a destroyed Canada would be willing and able to buy US goods. I doubt that a destroyed Canada would be given same (nice) treatment as east germany during reunification. But East German complaints existed.

Any explanation of Trump's extortion of Canada, has to be in the context of what the US is unable to get from Canada or get Canada to do. Because no such circumstances exist, it is irrational. Trump, relative to his first presidency, is fully in charge, and he can say complete stupid and illogical stuff without any filter, and the only response to save Canada is industrial policy and international partners to destroy the US economy.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I was interested because it made sense, then a little bit confused about somehow bringing China into it, then I read “Russia” “ Traitorous lying filth” and so on and went back and read the username and it all clicked into place.

Never change buddy. I have no idea how you’ve kept this account going for this long but I’m planning to report this comment.

[–] humanspiral -2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

The "threat to Canadian Arctic" has always been a transparent ploy to baselessly force Canadians to support purchase of overpriced US weapons. It is theft by traitors who hate us. Plenty of Chinese offers to buy/develop resources in Canada were rejected.

Maybe you could stay out of Canada, if you have no awareness of the BS people like you submit us to.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Maybe you could stay out of Canada, if you have no awareness of the BS people like you submit us to.

I know when I talk with Canadians about stuff like "Trump is a dope why is he doing this", they always start ranting about China and Russia and traitors and theft and hate. It's a perfectly normal thing to do, and I'm the weird one here. Truly.

I want to start asking you about the slrpnk admins again. Why did you want to involve yourself in standard fare Lemmy drama and why, the only time you got coherent and started trying to make some sense, was it on behalf of one of their strange moderation decisions? Why was that what motivated you to step out of low-effort-chaos land? As far as I can tell, almost literally every other thing you say is this type of schizophrenic nonsense. You'll start talking about electric vehicles and within one sentence you're yelling about the US proxy war on Russia and Mexican state sponsored terrorism and Yemen. But the slrpnk moderation drama was a super weird outlier, as minor as it was, and I'm still curious about why that was.

[–] humanspiral -1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Why did you want to involve yourself in standard fare Lemmy drama and why, the only time you got coherent and started trying to make some sense, was it on behalf of one of their strange moderation decisions?

My interjection on BS oil industry shilling "free speech" was consistent with human sustainability. I don't consider being anti-war and anti-evil to be schitzo. On topic, the political BS that gets repeated as "Trump motivation" is simply distractive BS. The CIA agents that are platformed in our media to tell us such BS, will in their next breath, advise Canadians that we need to spend 3-5% of our GDP on F35s.

Does a different US agency than the CIA pay you to try to normalize evil and disinformation on lemmy?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yeah, my funding's been all in disarray since the Trump cutbacks started. I've had to start a whole proxy war in Nicaragua to self-fund the whole thing and it's been a huge pain in the ass, let me tell you.

[–] humanspiral -1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Good news that nicaragua war has yet to hit my news feed. Starving couldn't happen to a nicer guy. Ask to get in on that sweet Panama operation.

[–] SplashJackson 26 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

Donald Trump and everyone who agrees with and enables him should go fuck themselves with a garden gnome.

[–] Franklin 7 points 1 day ago

Donald Trump and every aspiring fascist need to be put in prison.

[–] phoenixz 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Garden gnome? They can go fuck themselves with an umbrella

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

I usually suggest a running belt sander. With.....60 grit. Nice and coarse.

[–] CircaV 5 points 1 day ago

Trump and all supporters can keep trying to cope

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

Paywall