The Forgotten Dystopian Vision That Explains Trump's Canada Obsession

Seva Gunitsky
March 31, 2025
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The Forgotten Dystopian Vision That Explains Trump’s Canada Obsession

The president’s outlandish fixation on annexing Canada and Greenland makes sense when you understand his worldview. It’s pretty similar to one articulated in 1941.

https://newrepublic.com/article/193334/trump-greenland-canada-annex-ukraine?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the_ticker_rss

"SNIP............

Trump’s obsession with Canadian annexation has quickly gone from an awkward joke to a serious security concern. With more tariffs due April 2, Canadian leader Mark Carney has said Canadians should “prepare for the worst.” Trump’s threats should not be dismissed, at this point, as crude bargaining tactics or buffoonish theatrics. They’re also a sign of something more: the rise of a post-liberal global order defined not by institutions or alliances but by loyalty and hierarchy.

We’ve been here before. In the spring of 1941, as Hitler’s armies swept across Europe, American conservative James Burnham published a book outlining his vision for a new global order: a post-democratic world centered around a few powerful blocs he called “super-states.” These great powers would exercise complete dominion over their designated regions while locked in perpetual rivalry with each other. The United States, Burnham thought, should “draw a ring” around the Western hemisphere, securing the Panama Canal and reducing Canada to “a satellite.” This new order would be governed not by international law but by personal dealings among the great powers, who would control the sovereignty of weaker states and suspend it as they wished.

George Orwell used Burnham’s bleak vision as the geopolitical setting for 1984, in which three giant autocratic empires live in a state of permanent conflict. And now, the real-world global order is starting to take on a disturbingly similar shape.

Once we make sense of his preferences for the post-liberal order, Trump’s treatment of Canada—but also of Russia, Greenland, and others—begins to make a lot more sense. Trump’s approach to the international system is a strange blend of neo-feudal hierarchy with transactional politics guided by five principles: dominance of great powers, conditionality of alliances, weaponization of trade, irrelevance of institutions, and personalization of diplomacy.

.............SNIP"