The United States has been dropping economic atom bombs on designated enemies for decades, in order to pressure them into giving up their sovereignty and becoming US vassals—often with Canada’s assistance. Now Washington has dropped an economic atom bomb on its “closest friend and ally,” seeking its annexation.
March 12, 2025
By Stephen Gowans
Canadians like to think of their country as the United States’ closest friend and ally. They’re now coming to the conclusion that the aphorism, “countries don’t have allies, only interests,” is true. US president Donald Trump has repeatedly said that Canada needs to become the fifty-first US state, and that he’ll use economic coercion to ensure it does. His plan is to use tariffs to severely weaken Canada’s economy, until Canadians cry uncle, and beg to be annexed.
So far, Trump has offered a dizzying array of pretexts for his tariff action, but the key one is that Canada has been allowing illegal immigrants and fentanyl to pour across the border. Trump has invoked this false motivation in order to secure a legal foundation for his tariff measures. Its falsity, however, is obvious. Few illegal migrants and little fentanyl actually flow south across the US border. What’s more, the Canadian government has taken significant steps to reduce what began as a trickle and has become a mini-trickle.
Last week, Justin Trudeau, the outgoing prime minister, decried Trump’s fentanyl reason for imposing tariffs on Canada as “completely bogus.” He’s right. Trump’s response has been to double down on the necessity of Canada becoming the fifty-first US state. The only way Canadians can avoid tariffs (and the massive economic pain they’ll bring), he warns, is to allow their country to be annexed.
If Canadians fail to capitulate, they’ll pay a hefty price. The governor of Canada’s central bank, Tiff Macklem, has just lowered interest rates as a way of providing some protection against the coming economic storm. Canadians, he said, are “facing a new crisis” and, depending “on the extent and duration of new U.S. tariffs, the economic impact could be severe.” Trudeau has gone so far as to say that Trump wants to destroy the Canadian economy, “because that’ll make it easier to annex us.”
Evan Dyer, a veteran journalist with the publicly-owned Canadian broadcaster, the CBC, has recently posted an article titled “The U.S. has covertly destabilized nations. With Canada, it’s being done in public.” Dyer talked to former members of the Canadian intelligence community to find out how US destabilization efforts work, and how Trump’s destabilization will affect Canada.
Neil Bisson, a former intelligence officer who teaches at the University of Ottawa, told Dyer that “If you have individuals who are concerned about where their next meal is coming from or if they’re going to get a roof over their head, that supersedes [their commitment to] sovereignty.” These people will be inclined to pressure Ottawa to accede to US demands for annexation. Bisson also told Dyer that “there will be individuals within Canada who could potentially be co-opted to push [the] narrative forward” of US “citizenship as the answer to [the country’s] economic woes.”
Ward Elcock, who headed Canada’s intelligence agency for a decade, told Dyer that Trump “intends clearly to try and destabilize our economy. The reality is that if Canada is really impoverished, people may start to think about it. That’s always the possibility — that not all Canadians are going to be willing to endure economic deprivation. And so, some may start to think about it as time goes along.”
It’s revealing that Dyer approached former intelligence officials, who will have worked closely with their US counterparts on destabilization operations around the world, for insight into what the United States is up to. The United States has destabilized countries economically for decades, including Arab nationalist Iraq, communist Cuba and North Korea, Islamic nationalist Iran, and Arab nationalist Syria, among others. All these countries had one thing in common: They had their own developmental agenda which excluded their becoming vassals of the United States. For that, they were punished.
Significantly, US operations against these countries shared three key features with the current operation to destabilize Canada.
- They aimed at destroying the target country’s economy in order to cause enough pain that the country’s citizens would pressure their government to accede to US demands.
- The overarching goal of the operations was to bring the target country under US control.
- The real motivation was hidden behind a false reason given to justify the action (fentanyl in Canada, WMDs in Iraq), as well as the claim that the country’s economic difficulties were due to the government’s economic mismanagement.
Cuba is a paradigmatic case. In the wake of the 1959 Cuban revolution, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Lester Mallory, concluded that the only way to bring Cuba back under US supervision was to alienate internal support for the government by wrecking Cuba’s economy to cause disenchantment and disaffection among the Cuban people. The key was to make sure the blame for economic hardship was misdirected to the government’s socialist economic policies and away from US destabilization operations.
As historian Louis A Perez Jr. explained,
Mallory recommended that ‘every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba’ as a means ‘to bring about hunger, desperation and [the] overthrow of the government’. Assistant Secretary Rubottom similarly outlined the approach by which ‘the United States use judiciously elected economic pressures … in order to engender more public discomfort and discontent and thereby to expose to the Cuban masses Castro’s responsibility for mishandling their affairs.’
The expansion of the embargo was designed to deepen Cuban economic distress as a means of political change, once more an effort to use hardship as a way to foment rebellion among the Cuban people. The Torricelli and Helms-Burton laws were particularly harsh, both in timing and in kind, for they sought to visit upon the Cuban people unrelieved punishment, to make daily life in Cuba as difficult and grim as possible, to increase Cuban suffering in measured but sustained increments, at every turn, at every opportunity at a time when Cubans were already reeling from scarcities in goods and the disruptions of services in the wake of the Soviet collapse. Cubans faced a new round of shortages, increased rationing, declining services, and growing scarcities, where the needs of everyday life in their most ordinary and commonplace form were met often only by Herculean efforts. Representative Torricelli proclaimed his intention succinctly: ‘My objective is to wreak havoc in Cuba … My task is to bring down Fidel Castro.’ [1]
Now, the economic warfare used to destabilize Cuba, as well as North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Zimbabwe, and Venezuela, is being turned on Canada. The irony is that Canada itself participated in US operations to destabilize many of these same countries, eagerly contributing to the immiseration of peoples who wanted to safeguard their own sovereignty, in order to soften them up for US domination. Canadians weren’t so concerned about sovereignty when that of other peoples was at stake and they were helping to undermine it. Now that the tables have turned, they’re beginning to discover that their neighbor to the south has no friends and allies, only interests—and that it doesn’t care a fig about their sovereignty.
Canadians’ outrage at Trump’s efforts to bully them into ceding their independence calls to mind Aime Cesaire’s analysis. He argued that Europeans were outraged at Hitler, not because of his Nazism, but because he had turned what Europeans collectively had done in Africa, Asia, and South America onto Europeans themselves. What the European “cannot forgive Hitler for,” wrote Cesaire, “is not the crime in itself, the crimes against man, it is … the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the ‘coolies’ of India, and the ‘niggers’ of Africa.” [2] Likewise, Canadians are outraged that what they have helped their “friend and neighbor” do to the Arab nationalists of Syria and Iraq, the communists of North Korea, and the economic nationalists of Venezuela, is now being done to themselves.
Finally, an explanation as to why I said the United States is dropping an economic atom bomb on Canada. The effects of economic warfare on countries are often more lethal than the consequences of conventional military coercion. Writing in Foreign Affairs, the unofficial journal of the US State Department, John Mueller and Karl Mueller showed that US economic warfare on Iraq during the 1990s produced more deaths than all the weapons of mass destruction in history, including all the chemical weapons used in the First World War and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Indeed, the political scientists found sanctions to be so devastating to qualify as instruments of mass destruction, even more injurious to civilian populations that weapons of mass destruction. For this reason, some began to talk of economic warfare as an “economic atom bomb”—a way to achieve atom-bomb levels of destruction in human terms, without incurring the opprobrium of actually dropping one.
1) Louis A Perez Jr, “Fear and loathing of Fidel Castro: Sources of US policy toward Cuba,” Journal of Latin American Studies, 34, 2002, 237-254.
2) Aime Cesaire, “Discourse on Colonialism,” Monthly Review Press,2000, p. 36.
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