Written by: Humphrey McQueen on 27 March 2025
Trump’s pledge to push the boundary of the United States of America 2,000 kilometres north is not another rush of blood but channels 300 years of imperial rivalries over resources.
In the grip of ‘now-ists,’ all ‘News’ is fake because it comes from the ‘context of no context,’ a blight made worse by journalists afflicted with the compulsion to accuse anyone able to rub two facts together of running a conspiracy theory. Conventional wisdom around academe passes scholarly myopia off as expertise so that Clinton Fernandes can be chastised for sullying international relations with economics in What Uncle Sam Wants (2019).
Take up the contexts of Trump’s annexation of Canada at Britain’s 1759 victory over France at Quebec on the Plains of Abraham, securing barrels of Newfoundland cod to feed slaves on West Indian plantations and the Hudson Bay Company’s monopoly over beaver pelts.
Marquis de La Fayette joined the Continental Army (1) in 1777 in the War for Independence against Britain’s Hessian mercenaries. To entice the victorious Americans away from their French backers, in 1783 London talked about handing over Canada. Meanwhile, defeated Tories headed north.
Blockading Napoleonic Europe thirty years later, the Royal Navy stopped other nations trading with its enemy. In response to attacks on U.S. merchant vessels, President Madison authorised incursions into Upper Canada in 1812, which led to open warfare. The Duke of Wellington pointed to the difficulties of defending its borderless frontier. Two years later, a British force burned down the Capitol Building and the White House.
After the collapse of the Spanish Empire and with Britain’s unchallenged naval power after Waterloo, President Monroe in 1823 warned off European powers. His Doctrine soon turned into a land claim, starting with Texas in 1837 before annexing what became the States of Arizona, California, Colorado and New Mexico, (not forgetting Hawaii in the 1890s).
The U.S. annexation of ‘America’ for its quarter of the Western hemisphere makes Trump’s renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America nothing new. Does anyone around the Oval Office have the faintest after whom the entire hemisphere had been named in 1507, before being reserved for the southern half in 1537? (2) While Trump is at it, he could follow Tony Abbott’s lead and rebadge the threatened annexation ‘Canadia.’
Financial panic distracted Washington from the 1837-8 rebellions in Upper and Lower Canada before Congress agreed in 1839 to a $10m. war budget and 50,000 conscripts, reviving schemes to bring Canada into the Union. Continentalists assumed that Canadians would rush to join the Land of the Free, apparent in the accompanying map from 1888.
Lincoln’s campaigns against Confederate independence involved the British whose government backed the slaveholders’ rebellion to secure cotton and to stymie competition from textile mills in New England.
Richard A. Preston documented the next eighty years in The Defence of the Undefended Border Planning for War in North America, 1867-1939 (Montreal; McGill-Queens University Press, 1977).
In response to the victorious Union Army’s genocidal expansion westward against the Amerindians, London revived its decades-old plan to bring Ottawa, Quebec, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick together as a self-governing Dominion.
Within hours of Royal Assent to the British North America Act on March 29, 1867, the U.S. of A. applied pressure from the west by paying the Czar $7.2m. for Alaska. At the same time, it hoped to squeeze from the north-east by acquiring Greenland from Denmark, on which Trump also has his sights for minerals, as in the Ukraine.
The conga-line of High-Tech chieftains at his second coming are after shares of the copper and rare earths to extend their energy-gobbling networks.
In the 1880s, the President of the U.S. Naval War College, Admiral Mahon, surveyed The Influence of Naval Power upon History 1660 and 1783 (1890) through the Royal Navy’s rise to global dominance, attending to its operations in the West Indies and along both the North American coastlines. As a disciple of Mahon, Teddy Roosevelt dispatched the ‘Great White Fleet’ around the world in 1908 as a warning to Britain as much as Germany or Japan.
Doughboys landed in France in 1917 with the battle cry ‘Lafayette. We are here,’ suggesting that although they were happy to help France, they had not forgotten who their common enemy had been.
No sooner had the U.S. of A. stopped fighting alongside the British Empire, than Washington strategists drew up ‘War Plan Red’ as a contingency for armed conflict against its erstwhile ally. A joint US Army-Navy force would take Halifax to block British reinforcements, seize power plants near Niagara Falls, occupy Montreal, the railhead at Winnipeg and Ontario nickel mines, while the Navy secured the Great Lakes and blockaded its Good Neighbour’s Atlantic and Pacific ports.
Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1937 saw Plan Red’s being abandoned since Washington no longer feared that London and Tokyo might combine against it, as Britain and the U.S. of A. had eighty years earlier to inflict unequal trade treaties on Meiji Japan.
Canada became a founding member of N.A.T.O. in 1948, the U.S.-dominated GATT and then WTO, before signing up to a Free Trade deal with the U.S. of A. from 1989 before its extension to Mexico in 1994 as the North American Free Trade Agreement established a continent for a market and a market for the continent.
The U.S. wrote the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement which signalled an end to Imperial Preference in trade and installed the Greenback as good as the gold in Fort Knox, which it was until the late 1960s, since when its military-industrial complexes have kept the dollar Almighty, enabling it to flick the switches at the system for international electronic financial transfers, SWIFT.
The U.S. of A. writes the rules for the rest of us to take their orders. Washington is not a signatory to the Law of the Sea Convention yet when China does not accept a ruling it is confronted by the Seventh Fleet in the Taiwan Strait.
The U.S. of A. withdrew from the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice in 1986 and sanctions staff of the International Criminal Court.
Enforcing the Extra-territoriality of its laws, Washington fined France’s BNP Paribas $US8.9bn in 2014 for trading with Iran, forgetful of Reagan’s Iran-Contra deals of the 1980s.
Madison Avenue manifested American destiny by alerting the world’s consumers to our being latent U.S. Americans. For them, there is no ‘other.’
In the midst of dismantling its Department of Education, Washington is telling Australian universities that research funding will be cut off if they persist with diversity, inclusion and equality, or in being bribed by anyone but the U.S. corporate-warfare state, above all, by its commercial competitor, the Peoples Republic of China.
On May 14, last year, Biden’s White House quadrupled the tariff on Chinese EVs to 100 percent. To protect the Trump-Biden tariff wars, successive administrations have, since 2019, blocked the appointment of new judges to the Appellate body of the World Trade Organisation.
U.S. diplomacy remains a near-run thing between hypocrisy and mendacity.
Its latest Globalism trumpets what had been true all along in Teddy Roosevelt’s ‘Speak softly and carry a big stick.,’: ‘America’ first!
Marxist historian Humphrey McQueen's works include A New Britannia, From Gallipoli to Petrov, Suspect History, Australia’s Media Monopolies, Japan to the Rescue, Gone Tomorrow, Framework of Flesh and We Built This City.
(1) The Continental Army was created to coordinate the military efforts of the colonies in the war against the British, who sought to maintain control over the American colonies -eds.
(2) The earliest known use of the name America dates to April 25, 1507, when it was applied to what is now known as South America. It is generally accepted that the name derives from Amerigo Vespucci, the Italian explorer. He disproved Columbus’s claim that the West Indies and the South American continent were part of the East Asian land mass and established that South America was a separate continent – eds.
