First, American forces would strike with poison gas munitions, seizing a strategically valuable port city. Soldiers would sever undersea cables, destroy bridges and rail lines to paralyze infrastructure. Major cities on the shores of lakes and rivers would be captured in order to blunt any civilian resistance. The multipronged invasion would rely on ground forces, amphibious landing and then mass internments. According to the architects of the plan, the attack would be short-lived and the besieged country would fall within days.
The target was Canada, part of a classified 1930 strategy – War Plan Red – for a hypothetical war with Great Britain where the US would seek to deny it any foothold in North America. But the invasion plans, once dismissed as a fumbling historical quirk, have taken on fresh relevance as the US pivots its foreign policy to an increasingly aggressive view of its “pre-eminence” in the western hemisphere and turns its sights on both foes and allies.
In early January, the fusion of economic nationalism and belligerent foreign policy championed by Donald Trump was on full display when his government ordered the capture of Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, and the US president announced on social media the US would seize control of the South American country’s oil. Days after, both Trump and prominent officials spoke openly of using military force to invade and capture Greenland for its strategic position and its immense mineral wealth. In late January, the Globe and Mail reported that Canada’s military had modelled a hypothetical invasion of Canada, suggesting guerrilla tactics, similar to those used to repel both Russian and US forces in Afghanistan, would supplant conventional war.
With declarations from US officials that regional dominance is their main geostrategic objective, threats from Trump that he intends to annex Canada have rattled the country. Last year, Trump said the centuries-old border between the two nations was no more than an “artificially drawn line” that, with force and persuasion, might be redrawn. “Somebody drew that line many years ago with, like, a ruler – just a straight line right across the top of the country,” Trump told Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney – adding a unified continent was “the way it was meant to be”. On 20 January, Trump posted an altered image on his social media account that features the US flag covering Canada, Greenland and Venezuela.
His comments, condemned by Canadian lawmakers, nonetheless exposed a deep and persistent anxiety that the country, despite decades of tight economic integration, remains vulnerable to US aggression. War Plan Red, first devised in 1927 and then approved in 1930, was drawn up amid fears from American military planners that Britain could launch a war against the US where Canada would be the most likely theatre for battle. US planners conceded that if they lost, Canada would “demand that Alaska be awarded to her”. But the plan highlighted both how Americans believed Canada, with the vast majority of its citizens clustered along the shared border, would fall quickly – and the broader flimsiness of political alliances.
“I’ve always felt that Canada was this incredibly ‘ridiculous’ country, geographically and demographically – and this makes us one of the most vulnerable states in the world,” said Thomas Homer-Dixon, a Canadian conflict researcher. “We’ve been critically dependent on the friendship and benignness of the United States, and all of a sudden, both those things have just disappeared. They’ve vanished and I worry that only now Canadians fully appreciate what this means.” Homer-Dixon, who runs the Cascade Institute, a Canadian thinktank that studies global crises, says battle designs such as War Plan Red underscore fears within Canada of its continued vulnerability to US military action.
