Q&A | N.B. military historian examines Trump's threat to annex Canada
UNB professor emeritus says suggestion of American invasion is 'alarmist at best'
U.S. President Donald Trump's persistent boast that Canada will be the 51st state has been taken with different degrees of seriousness in Canada.
Some say it's just bluster, an empty threat. Others say it's a threat Canada should take seriously.
"We are under attack," retired vice-admiral Mark Norman said in a strongly worded piece in the National Post.
Marc Milner, a military historian and professor emeritus at the University of New Brunswick, had some thoughts of his own after reading Norman's column.
Milner spoke with CBC Radio's Information Morning Fredericton host Jeanne Armstrong.
The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: When you read someone like retired vice-admiral Mark Norman say, "we are under attack," how do you respond to that?
A: I think he's right in the sense that we have the head of state of the most powerful country in the world basically saying, "My intent is to destroy you economically and then annex you."
As things go traditionally in the history of the world, that's virtually a declaration of war. But you have to take it from where it comes. And the man who uttered those words is known for his eccentricities and his boastfulness. I'm trying to be discreet on the radio, but everybody understands, I think, what I'm trying to say.
Even so, it's alarming that the head of state of the United States would actually say things like that about Canada. It's undiplomatic, it's ungentlemanly, it's uncalled for.
Q: You're a well-known military historian in town. Do people ask you what you think of all this?
A: Yeah, they do. They ask me, you know: Do I have to get ready? [Are we] going to meet him at the Maine border? You know, how is this going to go down? Are the Americans going to invade?
And Mark Norman's piece is a bit of an extreme piece, and I think he's right. I mean, we need to be vigilant.
The thing about Trump is that he was elected by nearly 50 per cent of the American electorate. And the people who back Trump are not people who have suddenly emerged in the American political spectrum.
This element of America, this part of America, that maybe is less than its best nature has been there virtually since the time of the Revolutionary War.
Q: Remind us about the history of Canada-U.S. relations when we've had tensions like this before. What are some of the big episodes that come to your mind?
A: The United States has always been an existential threat to Canada. The Americans — even before, actually, America was founded — the people who live south of where we are now always thought it would be really cool if they could just conquer New France and get rid of the Catholics and the French and, you know, establish a broader English or British suzerainty over all of North America.
And when they go into rebellion, the first thing they do is march on Quebec, because it's hard to get to the Atlantic provinces. Actually, if you don't control the sea, you can't march here in the 18th century. They do it again in the War of 1812.
So America has really always been a kind of existential threat to New France, to British North America, and after 1867, to Canada.
Until quite recently, that threat has been there, but America has not maintained, through the colonial period and the earlier period, large standing armed forces.
America, currently, is the world's global hegemony and has the most powerful armed forces in the world by any measure, except perhaps raw personnel.
In terms of air power, sea power and ability to launch it, we don't stand a chance if America decided to invade.
So the idea of an American invasion is arguably absurd to contemplate, but we're not in a position to resist it in any event, unless we decide to engage in some protracted guerrilla campaign, which is frightful to contemplate.
Q: Give us a sense, in ways that we can understand, about how our size of military would compare to something like the U.S.
A: Well, in theory, we're supposed to have about 77,000 professional armed forces people. We're about 12,000 short.
In terms of actual spear carriers, the number of people who would pick up a rifle and march to the front, it's smaller than it would take to fill Maple Leaf Gardens.
The Americans have about a half a million men under arms at the moment.
The upshot of that is the people I know in the States who are in the U.S. Armed Forces are horrified by any thought that they could be ordered by their head of state to do something like that.
And I think it's alarmist at best to suggest that anything like that would ever happen. I just don't see it happening.
Q: How do you see the next weeks, months and years going between Canada and the U.S. vis-à-vis these annexation threats?
A: Well, I don't worry too much about the annexation threats. I worry about the trade threats because that will get, I think, quite serious.
We're only 30 days or so, a little more than 30 days, into the Trump presidency. You know, he arguably hasn't really gotten going. But he does tend to bluster and boast and then almost immediately retreat from whatever position he's laid out.
I think we saw that during his first presidency and I think we're going to see that again, but I think there's going to be some heartache along the way.
The fact that he controls the Senate and controls the House of Representatives is alarming. It will be interesting to see whether the American judiciary stands up to his attempt to drive a bulldozer through the U.S. Constitution. That, to me, is the most alarming part.
Q: One of the criticisms of Canada [from the U.S.] is that we aren't pulling our weight militarily, that we don't contribute enough to NATO. How valid are those concerns in this whole discussion?
A: I think they're entirely valid.
If you look at what Canada has done over the last 10 years or so with its defence expenditure.
The Armed Forces are in free fall. It's under strength. The equipment is outdated. It's hard to know where to start.
I mean, if you're the Canadian government trying to figure out how to fix it, everything is broken, from the recruiting right through to equipment maintenance to aircraft.
Our aircraft are getting so old that, in some cases, they can't even communicate with the latest aircraft in NATO in the United States.
Q: How worried should we be about this?
A: I don't think it should keep you from going to the mall this afternoon or going for a snowshoe in the woods. If you're in government, if you're in the Canadian Armed Forces, it would make you anxious.
I think, as a Canadian citizen, you should probably try to get up to speed on what's actually happening. And it's hard to do because there's no political constituency for the Canadian Armed Forces — it simply doesn't exist.
Q: What's keeping you hopeful?
A: The fact that Trump's term is limited, that the pushback has started.
I'm a little more alarmed about the break between NATO and the Americans, because that leaves us out here on a limb.
I'm not sure that that, despite the prognostications about it being permanent, is something that will be permanent. There's too much invested in this.
So I'm a little less anxious about all the, you know, doom and gloom. But … when Trump threw Ukraine under the bus — not the first time the Americans have done that to Eastern Europe, by the way — that's alarming. When you give Putin a soapbox to stand on, and when Trump comes out and says the Ukrainians started it, there's a lot of hurt caused by that.
And I don't mean personal hurt. Credibility gets lost.
So I would expect to see the Americans under Trump sell out Ukraine, which to me, is alarming.
There are some short-term issues. I think the long-term sanity will prevail. Not sure what the new government in Germany means — it's right of centre. They said NATO needs to stand on its own.
And so if Trump is giving the European nations a little more backbone, that's pretty good. [Canada has] to get in with the flow, and I think that's the way forward for us, is to tie ourselves a little more closely to the Europeans.
With files from Information Morning Fredericton