Threatening Canada is more Putin than Reagan

To grasp the aberration of US foreign policy under President Donald Trump, consider an abbreviated history of America’s shifting attitudes toward just one country, Canada.

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And start with Ronald Reagan, who stood for the original and genuine version of “peace through strength.” When signing a free-trade agreement with Canada in 1988, Reagan marvelled at the world’s longest land border. “No soldier stands guard to protect it,” the 40th president said.

“Barbed wire does not deface it. And no invisible barrier of economic suspicion and fear will extend it.” Canadians and Americans, Reagan remarked on another occasion, are “more than friends and neighbours and allies; we are kin.” In the current context, three things are notable about Reagan's sentiments. The first is that most Americans really like Canadians, even if they also struggle to see them as distinct, because Canadians can easily seem like “nicer” versions of Americans. The second is that Reagan oversimplified what has historically been a complicated, often competitive and sometimes contentious relationship. The third is that Americans, in both of those ways, have long regarded Canadians roughly as Russians used to view Ukrainians.

Fast forward to 1999, when the TV series South Park captured the dark side of this ambivalence as only satire can. A gathering of Colorado parents, generally cranky about what Trump would later call “American carnage,” breaks into a chorus. Our kids are failing and we're frustrated in life: It can't be our fault, so it must be someone else's. Ergo, as the chorus has it, “Blame Canada.” As one soloist riffs, “they're not even a real country anyway.” If South Park were Russian, the song might have been about Ukraine.