The News: Believe That The Worst Is Possible--But Not Inevitable

Wednesday's Child Is Full of Woe

I am skeptical about strategic plans, forecasts, simulations and drills.

Taken together, they represent a kind of integrative futurism that managers, consultants and generals find attractive. These exercises allow people who have authority or control to perform that authority in the absence of the emergencies and crises that are the primary purpose of that authority, to justify their position without having to really prove their superior qualifications for it. Frequently these exercises have guardrails to prevent them from addressing entirely plausible scenarios that would be unsettling or destabilizing to the managers and leaders who have commissioned the planning.

There are exceptions. Extremely frequent drilling with relatively routine situations where some degree of muscle memory might help improve response times may make a difference. Occasional controlled exposure to frightening or threatening situations may prevent paralysis in a real event—you would want people training to fight fires to experience a residential fire in a controlled setting before dealing with the real thing, for example. Computer simulations that can run thousands of iterative models of a complex system can give a fair idea of what the most likely and least likely outcomes might be, which is a requirement for any judicious use of the precautionary principle. If you have to come up with building standards for earthquakes or hurricanes, then you want to know what protects against the most likely events and where those standards become prohibitively expensive compare to the probability of extreme outcomes.

And in the event of a completely unexpected event suddenly presenting itself as a plausible scenario, at least one methodical planning session between leaders and their top subordinates can help shift allocation of resources and deployment of assets in response to the new reality. Equally, the inability or refusal to imagine the unexpected is a diagnostic sign of an ideological limitation in an existing order. Planning should be the way a system imagines its own shortcomings, its failures, its broken promises. But if the system could think that way, it wouldn’t have the problems it is failing to perceive.

A lot of what is happening right now in American politics should have been expected and planned for, not the least because it was actually in a plan available to the wider public since April 2023. The lack of anticipation by interests and organizations who are already suffering enormous damage is precisely a sign of how beholden they were to an unwarranted belief in their own inevitability. The Democratic Party ran on being a bulwark against a fascism, but we have now discovered that most of them never believed that fascism could really happen. It was just a campaign message that tested well with their voters. They assumed that most of those voters were just overwrought.

Institutions that ought to have been urgently laying the groundwork for a hard fight as early as 2015 instead just pretended that it wasn’t going to happen, that it was all just bluster, that they’d be able to use the same tried and true forms of lobbying and lawyering and risk aversity to divert and deflect some modest pressures on their ordinary operations. I’m a little bitter about this point, especially in reference to higher education, because I know there is much more that could have been done to get ready. So many strategic plans, and almost none of them speaking to real possibilities of the near future.

That said, there are also some entirely new threats on the board and I hope to god that the kind of planning that lets people reimagine the entire world is happening in response to them. Most prominently, the Trump Administration is not just walking away from the world system established in the aftermath of World War II. It is quite seriously running towards a world where territorial aggression and imperial conquest are entirely thinkable—and where the United States will not just ignore aggression in the spirit of isolationism but will actively pursue it for itself.

Despite some kidding around from time to time in popular culture, the thought of a serious conflict between Canada and the United States has been unthinkable for the last 150 years. Frankly, it was unthinkable until mid-2024. Trump’s previous obsession in his first term with Greenland was taken by everybody as an oddball joke, a typical bit of grandiose preening. Instead, it was the equivalent of a poker tell, a sign of a deeper vision that he is now spreading like a disease within his new collection of flunkies and psychopaths.

Looking back, the signs of that vision are visible in Trump’s public thinking all the way back to the George W. Bush administrations. Trump said at the time that we shouldn’t have gone to war in Iraq but if we were going to, we should at least have “taken the oil”, as if it was pirate booty you could physically collect and put in a vault somewhere. During his first term, he was tempted by the thought of going to war in Venezuela for the same reason but was wary of the risks. He’s persistently talked about the American military as if it were a mercenary force available for hire from any client rather than an instrument for protecting the perceived strategic interests of a nation-state. He thinks less like Bismarck and more like Leopold II: other countries are for looting, and not by the relatively sophisticated methods of multinational corporations.

It’s only beginning to dawn on Americans, Canadians, Europeans and the rest of the world that Trump is perfectly serious about annexing Canada, Greenland and perhaps other territories by forceful means. I don’t think that even the worst MAGA-base voter was casting a vote in favor of war with Canada, though I’m sure many of them are busy recalibrating their thinking in line with the cult leader’s latest demands. Moreover, I think you can even guess at what is being whispered to him to direct his covetous and violent gaze to the north. Someone in Project 2025 land or its adjacent fever swamps actually believes climate change is real, and they’ve decided that securing the future requires having direct territorial sovereignty over as much of the Northern Hemisphere as possible. Today, Canada and Greenland, tomorrow perhaps Iceland and Scotland, Svalbard and Norway. This even casts the Trump Administration’s intensification of hostility to immigration and the desire to delink from global supply chains in a new light. This is a prepper regime, preparing to be Fortress America against a drowning and melting world.

Prepping is a lunatic species of planning, of course. And unfortunately, if I’m right that the driver at the base of this new imperialism is a secret acceptance of the reality of climate change, then the rest of us have accidentally contributed to the lunacy. Many of us have engaged in a more conventional style of planning for disastrous climate futures as a way of trying to persuade the world to change course and pursue serious efforts to reduce the magnitude of climate change. Those scenarios seemed to have wormed their way into a much more malevolent mindset. Rather than avoid a future where millions of people are forced to try and move, where sustained agriculture is only possible closer to the poles, where only the rich and their favored servants will be able to live as billions once did in the late 20th Century, the bad guys are choosing to embrace that future.

Trumpists have made it clear that they can only be defeated, never persuaded. So it is time for the rest of the world to plan something new: to be ready to fight against or counter a territorially aggressive, conquest-seeking United States. For some places, that may well mean seeking the best accommodations possible with an aggressive neighbor or a forming a new regional alliance before American protection is withdrawn.

Europe and NATO need to consider the threat of a two-front war, a modern Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact where the United States moves to claim Canada and Greenland while Russia moves into eastern Poland, the Baltics or Finland.

And Canada needs to regard the threat as completely serious and not just bluster, in a way that goes beyond stalwart rhetoric from political leaders and clearing the shelves of bourbon. The Canadians need to be planning in response to scenarios that no one has modeled before—what if Trump directs the American military to deploy special forces and air power to seize Canadian airports and key government buildings with the goal of forcing a quick surrender while moving some ground forces to the northern border in anticipation of a longer conflict? It doesn’t matter if this is madness, because this administration has already made it clear that they’re not playing at being madmen for negotiating advantage but are in fact doing all of that self-destructive nonsense. The Canadian government and its real allies in NATO need to act now to remove the United States from all shared military and intelligence cooperation, no matter how hard that is to do in practical terms. The U.S. needs to be booted out of Five Eyes, needs to be expelled from NATO. Because now those countries have to plan as if the United States government is an enemy regime, to take all of what is being said as if it is serious.

Which brings us round to Americans themselves. Every Trump voter, every “well, at least he’s getting things done” bystander, needs to ask themselves: do I want a world war? Do I want my children to be marching in an army of conquest towards Ottawa and Toronto? Do I want cruise missiles hitting Montreal and Vancouver to try and force a surrender to violent annexation? Is that what I voted for? Is that what I want?

Do not dare to claim that you don’t think it’s serious. In global history, wars have been fought over much less than the leader of a powerful country constantly saying he wants to conquer a neighboring state. It’s not a joke, it’s not a negotiating tactic. It’s not about fentanyl: if it were, Trump would be spending on prevention, rehabilitation and enforcement inside the United States first and foremost—and not pardoning notorious drug smugglers like Ross Ulbricht. It’s not about anything but a reawakening imperialism.

Americans need to plan in order to think what a war with Canada—and possibly Europe—means for the rest of their lives. Misery, deprivation, suffering, and the certain end of anything like a constitutional democracy in this country are only the immediate consequences. None of it necessary, none of it right, none of it for the better in the long or short run. Every single American needs to take stock right now of what they have, what they value, what they hope for and realize that it will all go away if this is allowed to go on. We are not planning to try and find out how to survive the worst, we are planning to recognize that the worst can still be stopped, that the worst is not necessary or needed or preordained.

I also hope therefore that people with real power in our unequal society recognize that this planning outcome applies to them as much as it does to ordinary people just going about their business. And before they will allow this utterly preventable catastrophe to become reality, I hope they will do whatever they have to in order to stop it. If the orders are given, they need to be disobeyed. If assent is sought, it needs to be denied. If possibilities are floated, they need to be sunk. The spineless need to get an emergency surgery to replace what they’ve lost. The unballed need to grow a pair at last. Forget “never again” and focus instead on not this time. Not on our watch. Not with our people, our guns, our government, our country.

The value of planning in this kind of moment is not in prepping to survive disaster. It is for drawing a line in the sand now before the people who embrace disaster take one more step towards voluntarily immiserating the entire world.