The Paul Wells Show - When America attacks

Episode Date: January 29, 2025

Donald Trump’s return to power could have serious consequences for Canada. First, there’s the threat of tariffs. Then there’s that other thing about making us the 51st state. This week, we get two takes on the situation. First on the show, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith talks about why she opposes the threats to cut off energy exports to the U.S. in retaliation for tariffs. It's a position that has caused some politicians to say she’s working against Team Canada.  Then, Penn State historian Amy Greenberg talks about Manifest Destiny, the idea that Americans had a divine duty to expand their territory. Her books include A Wicked War and Manifest Destiny and American Territorial Expansion. Season 3 of The Paul Wells Show is sponsored by McGill University’s Max Bell School of Public Policy.

The Paul Wells show is made possible by McGill University's Max Bell School of Public Policy, where I'm a senior fellow. When Donald Trump pushes, how hard should Canada push back? You can't damage a generational relationship because of a minor skirmish. This week, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith on tariffs and oil and a leading historian of Manifest Destiny. That's right, a double header on the Great American Game, messing with the neighbors. I'm Paul Wells.

Welcome to the Paul Wells Show. The second Trump presidency is barely getting started. It's hard to know for sure what he's up to. But it's already clear there's a lot of it. This is quickly turning into a consequential period, not just in the neighbors' history, but in our own. Sometimes there's so much to talk about, it's hard to fit it all in. This week I've got two takes on everything that's been going on.

First up is Danielle Smith, who becomes the third consecutive Alberta Premier to talk to this podcast. Some of her colleagues, especially in the federal Liberal Party, have tried to cast her as the spoiler as leaders try to draft a response to the threatened Trump tariffs, because she doesn't want to suspend Canadian oil and gas exports to get the Americans to back off their tariffs. Some of her colleagues say she's betrayed Team Canada. I'll tell you a secret, I've never been a fan of this whole Team Canada idea. To me it sounds like an attempt to bully leaders into a paper-thin consensus that can't last. But I'll let Premier Smith make her own case on that. Also on this episode, Amy Greenberg, a professor of history at Pennsylvania State University. She's a leading historian of a stubborn American idea that the United States should grow until

it fills the entire North American continent. The name for that idea is Manifest Destiny. It led to the Mexican-American War and to other historic land grabs. I called Professor Greenberg because I wondered what she thinks about President Trump's threats to annex Greenland, the Panama Canal, and even Canada. She made it clear that she doesn't want to try to analyze Trump just yet. But she did have a lot to say about this idea, that freedom spreads when America grows. As is often the case with history, that idea is just as relevant today. But first, Danielle Smith.

Danielle Smith, thank you for joining me. My pleasure. What was it like in Washington last week? Let's start there and then get into serious stuff. It was a celebration. It was amazing because I was asking people who had been there for the first Trump inauguration and this was a real party. And it was really interesting to see because there were so many different events put on by so many different governments. Texas had an event and Florida had an event and then there were floor-length gala dresses and tuxedos. And so everybody was really in kind of a partying mood. And it was interesting to me to see just the diversity, a lot of

young people, a lot of diversity. It's not what you normally expect when you go to a conservative event, I think, but I think that it was a good reflection of just how broad-based the new president's mandate is. Okay. Because they called an audible in the last few days before the inauguration, you weren't able to see the ceremony itself. Was that a disappointment? I got to go to the embassy, which was fantastic.

I mean, it's always nice to see. I think you'd have to check with the embassy, but there fantastic. I mean, it's always nice to see, I think you'd have to check with the embassy, but there was well over a thousand people there, I think. And I got to connect with business leaders, which is really important. Got to hear the speech and we were all able to react to it together. So I didn't find that to be disappointing at all. The fact that there were so many other events and the ability to meet with business leaders, as well as go to a number of one-on-one meetings after a couple of days, it was a very worthwhile trip. Okay.

There's our on-ramp onto current affairs. Are they're still letting you into the Canadian embassy, even though you're the party pooper of Team Canada? I am on Team Canada. I really am, but I think we have to make sure that we're not proposing remedies that are actually going to harm us or are undoable. And that was the point I was making

because when we were behind closed doors, talking about what our response was, it was all centered on how do we address the border security issues? And then when we left our meetings, I kept hearing different federal politicians talking about cutting off energy. So I had to say, just look at a map, Melanie Jolie.

If you look at line five, it goes down through Michigan to get to Sarnia. And that is the bulk of the product that comes into Ontario and Quebec. So you don't want to play that game. If you're going to be talking about cutting off energy, the US has a very big stick to be able to retaliate.

So let's talk about things that we actually can do rather than try to talk tough on things we can't do. Boy, you'd think I would have thought of that because I grew up in Sarnia. If we're shutting down exports to the United States, that means we're shutting off the access for the energy route to my hometown and the rest of central Canada. Completely. And Line 9 is also fed now by Line 5. And that's the one that goes up to Quebec. I believe 44% of their energy now comes from that line. I talked to Irving refinery. They get 300,000 barrels per day of WTI from the US Gulf Coast.

So I suppose they could retaliate that way too. Virtually all of the gas that comes into Eastern Canada, they used to get it from us, but when cheaper gas became available in the United States, they changed the line. So now almost 100% of the gas comes from the United States. So those are the things that we see that our friends in the rest of the country haven't been all that supportive in us trying to get our product to more markets

and building pipelines and in maintaining the East-West ties. Alberta's the solution, but we haven't been able to execute on some of those projects. And now I'm hearing my friends in the rest of the country talk about cutting off energy. It just shows that they don't really understand how integrated our markets are or where their energy comes from. So let's talk about things we can do.

And I think that there are things that unfortunately might be necessary to do. But if we're putting things on the table that are impossible and raising expectations, I think we have to be realistic. So it seems to me there's three issues that are often discussed interchangeably since then President-elect Trump made his tariff threat. One is trying to give him satisfaction on the issues that he's identified, border security essentially. The other one is counter tariffs in general as a rebuttal to American tariffs, something that has been in the Canadian toolkit in the past. And then the third

thing is this notion of cutting off energy exports to really make a strong immediate point. Let me go back to the second one, the counter tariffs. Was that not discussed at all among premiers, among first ministers? Oh, certainly it is. And I think that it's pretty clear when you do get into these situations that if there are tariffs on Canadian goods, there will be a proportionate response. But I tend to want to wait and see what happens. You can't really start talking about what that might look like until you see what happens. Are we going to get them February 1st? Are we going to get them April 1st? Are we going to succeed in putting them off until there's a new administration in Canada? Is it going to be targeted to particular types of goods that the US president has identified as

trade irritants? We don't know. And until we know, we can't really talk about what that response might look like. But you're willing to contemplate. I mean, to some extent, these are going to be federal decisions, but you don't seem allergic to the notion of counter tariffs on principle. Yeah, in part, tariffs is sort of the way the game is played when you're in a tariff war. I don't love it. When you put 25% tariffs on Canadian goods going to the US, it increases the cost of goods for Americans. So there's a punishment in its own right. And if you put tariffs on American goods coming into Canada, it punishes Canadians. So I don't think we should be joyous

about making any goods and services more expensive in Canada when we're in the middle of an affordability crisis. So that's why I think our first step should be diplomacy and trying to avoid that. Okay. And then there's this notion of cutting off energy exports, which I essentially I read in the paper going back several weeks that this was something that federal people were

mooting off the record. And now you've got some cabinet ministers who are discussing it as a all options are open sort of thing. It's got a certain surface plausibility. The one thing the Americans absolutely need is Canadian oil and gas. And it's a very large part of their energy mix. It's not something that they could easily do without. They would sure notice it if it went away.

It's an unusual tactic though. I mean, I think Alberta has already paid enough, quite frankly. We didn't get the Northern Gateway built. We didn't get Energy East built. We had our neighbors saying that they didn't want our oil. And so we built our relationships with the United States to now say, oh, gee, despite everything we've put on you to try to keep it in the ground, now that you've succeeded,

we're gonna use you as a tool so that Ontario and Quebec don't get punished. I don't think that's a fair way to run the country. I think that's a way to create a lot of disunity. So if we're all paying more for orange juice, all right, esprit de corps. I get it. That's one of the things we're going to have to do as Team Canada. But the idea that Alberta should be harmed disproportionately because it's now all of a sudden convenient for the people who've been opposing our energy for the last 10 years, that's something that I've drawn a hard line on. Short of that though, the kind of counter-terrorists that are being discussed, it doesn't sound like it's the sort of thing. I mean, we just saw what President Trump did

to Colombia, made them turn on a dime overnight with heavy and escalating terrorists. And it seems to me that charging extra at the border for Kentucky bourbon or Maytag washing machines, that doesn't feel like it's going to be enough to really change the president's behavior. Maybe it isn't a tariff discussion. I guess that's the point. The discussion with Columbia wasn't about, okay, well, you're gonna tariff our coffee and our flowers, therefore we're gonna tariff your products. That wasn't the discussion. It was, okay, we'll accept the migrants that you're deporting.

That was the solution. It had nothing to do with trade. That's why we don't really know what is the solution with this president. Does he want tariffs for tariffs sake? And there are some members of his administration who just believe in tariffs as a source of revenue. If you read Robert Lighthizer's book, No Trade is Free, he's really irritated by national

value added taxes. Canada has a 5% one. The European countries have 20% higher. And he thinks that's unfair that American products sold into another market get taxed at that level, whereas foreign governments selling into their market don't because they don't have that tax. So if that's what he's interested in is some kind of border adjustment tax because he thinks that national sales taxes are unfair, then that's a different argument.

If his issue is NATO and our 2% commitment, you can imagine the frustration that the president has when he made that point to Justin Trudeau the first time he was in office, and here he is back again. And it's still a 10-year commitment to get to 2%. So we have to guard our Arctic border. We have to be investing in that. And if the U.S. president doesn't have confidence that we're going to do that, it's no wonder that there's some punishing tariffs on the way. So do we have to meet our 2% target? Would that be enough? The other issue is around the border security. I think that the announcement of $1.3 billion was great,

however, didn't pass. And so how are we implementing it? Where are the sniffer dogs at the border and the extra commercial vehicle inspection and the drones and the helicopters? And where's our plan? If we do end up apprehending a number of people seeking across the border, what's our plan to deport them? Those are the kind of things that I actually think this is about.

So yes, I agree with you having conversations about orange juice and Maytags is probably not where this is going to go to get a resolution, but we have to get serious about border security and meeting our NATO target. And I think that might create a breakthrough. going to go to get a resolution, but we have to get serious about border security and meeting our NATO target. And I think that might create a breakthrough. So my worry is that we're going to be chasing ghosts. I have never heard a US public official before President Trump call Canada a major export market for American illicit drugs.

And given that I have never heard of this problem before, I'm not sure it was possible to fix it in the short term. And similarly, he's got criticisms about NATO and NORAD, but that's not how he's framing this tariff threat. He's framing this tariff threat essentially as Canada is as bad as Mexico when it comes to migrant flows. And again, I don't know anyone who believes that. There's a couple of things I'd say. I mean, if it is the case that there's 11 million individuals who are in the country illegally and they're wanting to deport them, like what happens if a million of them come across the Canadian border? Like what are we doing? What's our plan for that? Are we just going to let them stay here and buy their time so that they can sneak back into the

U.S. again? I think that's something that we really have to sort out. That is a real issue. I think as well, I've been told we have something like 2.3 million temporary permits coming up for expiry within the next 18 months. What's our plan with those 2.3 million? Are we going to grandfather them in, let them stay, or are they gonna go across the border? So if I know that, and I was told that by American scholars,

then the Americans know that. So I think we have to be taking this issue seriously, and we have to demonstrate to the Americans that we share their concern about the legal flow of migrants, drugs, guns, and that we've got to have a coordinated response to it. Are they satisfied with that? I mean, some of the language I've heard coming from Tom Homan suggests that's the case. But this is a president you can see. You can see what he does when he takes a border security issue seriously.

Within seven days, he's in the middle of deploying, I think, some 10,000 troops to the Mexican border. And he's already started with military planes flying people back. That's the kind of action he wants to see. Have we demonstrated through our actions that we're going to be prepared to match that? I don't know. And so that's why I think we have to have more conversations with the administration to find out what it is they need to feel confidence that we're taking it seriously. And I do think it's about the border. And I do think it's about Arctic security. What do you make of the way you have

been framed in the reports and the commentary from my colleagues? There's a Team Canada, you're not on it. Does that make your job more difficult? Do you think it's a healthy dynamic at all to sort of demand unanimity across the board on questions like this? Well, we can be on Team Canada, we can restart the discussion about Northern Gateway. We can be on Team Canada, we can restart the discussion about Energy East. We can be on Team Canada, we can reverse those gas lines that are now taking American gas into Eastern Canada and again, go back to getting it from Western Canada. That is a

two-way street is that we are prepared and always have been prepared to support our colleagues in the rest of the country and our fellow citizens but I think we haven't seen reciprocation there. So I think now as I mentioned before when everybody's scared to dump on Alberta is exactly the wrong approach. There is a way that we can find items that we can all agree on. That is normally how our COF table works. Our Council of the Federation has always been a consensus table. That's why it's a powerful table, since it doesn't matter if it's an NDP leader, a liberal, a conservative, or an independent. We develop communiques where every person can sign

off to what's in there. And I just wasn't prepared to sign off on a document that basically in the quiet discussions and the leaks to the media, we're meant to give them the social license to pick on Alberta. I'm just not gonna do that. We've had that before. We've had export taxes on our product before.

It created a lot of division. I just wanna be honest. Don't create that division. Let's find the things that we can agree on. And I think there's lots, but if you think that you can solve a problem with the Americans by igniting another unity crisis, I just don't think that's the right approach. It's time for us to all figure out what it means to be a country. Let's tear down the internal trade barriers. Let's figure out

how we can sell alcohol across borders, which we can't do. Let's figure out how you can get a truck coming in with product, traveling across the entire country with consistent rules. Let's figure out how we can procure construction projects with each other. These are the kind of things that we should have been working on that the real challenge we have right now is most of our relationships are North-South. This is something about us as a country, why is it easier for us to do business with our American neighbors than it is with each

other? And I hope that's the conversation that we ignite. Uh, because the other approach is, well, let's just keep on punishing Alberta until the, the, the Americans give in. And I don't know that the Americans are going to give in on this one. I think, I think this is really the start of a national conversation we need to have about how

we can better support each other. It's kind of hard to have that conversation while the neighbor is standing just outside with a hammer and a stopwatch though. There is something to that. I mean, I was hopeful that because in his executive order, he mentioned April the 1st. I was hopeful that that was what the

timeline was to look at these trade imbalances. But you know, he's demonstrated he's serious and it could well be that we're bracing for broad-based tariffs as of as of February 1, and we'll have to figure out how to deal with that. But my approach is to engage with the administration, make all the arguments that I'm making to you about how much this relationship benefits them. The big argument that I make when I'm with the Americans is to tell them they cannot achieve

their goal of energy dominance without us. They produce 13 million barrels a day of oil. They consume 21 million barrels a day. The only reason they're able to export at all is because we are there to backfill. And when we backfill with our discounted oil, it ends up keeping prices low for their consumers. We can do that on a whole range of fronts,

on all of our critical minerals, we can do that on auto parts that go back and forth across the border. We can do that on auto parts that go back and forth across the border. We can do that on food products. And if we can make that case that they understand that the value added component that they're able to bring to bear creates jobs, keeps prices low, and then we're their best customer. Then I think we might be able to have a breakthrough,

but it's going to take some hard lobbying and some hard conversations. Did you tell Mr. Trump that in Mar-a-Lago and how did he respond? I asked him if he wanted to buy Mar-a-Lago oil and gas and he seemed to indicate the answer was yes. And it shouldn't be a surprise because the Keystone XL pipeline was approved with a presidential permit. And then it was canceled within, I think, five seconds of Joe Biden getting elected. So I've met with some of the Montana legislators and I know that they would be very keen

to restart the conversation of how we can get more pipelines built to the United States, whether it's Keystone XL right of way or something else. I think that's the conversation that we wanna have. So yes, it is true that oil and gas are a point of leverage with the United States, but I think the leverage is how we promise to sell them more, not how we promise to sell them less. Because I just don't think that you end up, you can't damage

generational relationship because of a minor skirmish. And if you start doing things like cutting off energy, that damages the relationship permanently, and we just shouldn't do it. Okay. I'm getting the hook from your team. So we'll have to agree to continue this conversation another time. You know, I might just say one more. I'm sorry, I've been having to doing a few interviews, but the dimension of the AI data center obsession that the United States has. No, but that sounds like something Pierre Poliev has mentioned in some of his speeches. It's really important. Like, I think that's the other thing that people need to understand is that the Americans want energy dominance so that they can ensure that they're providing a secure product to their friends and allies so they don't have to go to Iran and they don't have to go to Russia. But more so, they're very worried that China is going to win the AI dominance for.

And what does the world look like if a totalitarian communist regime has the upper hand on that important development. So what do you need to have AI data centers? Well, you need energy. And when you look at what I've understand is in China, that they're building coal plants on spec, not turning them on in anticipation that they're going to need the power for AI. Whereas back home in North America, you can't get the gas turbines, you can't get transformers, and you have a multi-year process to be able to get those kinds of major installations approved. So we are also a solution to that because we do have the ability to bring more gas on

stream and we have the ability to permit closer to home so that we can build those AI data centers. But that is the second conversation that's going on about what the American sees the global threat to be. And I think if we can convey to them that we are a partner in solving those problems, then I think we can have it to enjoy a tariff-free relationship. We just haven't been able to make that case right now

because we've had 10 years where we've been doing the same thing, shutting down our energy, not taking the China threat seriously, not investing in AI data centers. So it's no wonder that they're having some questions about whether we can be that partner that they need. I think we can, I think we should. So your goal is to try and make Canada look more like part of the solution than part of the problem. 100% and we are, whether it's we've got all the critical minerals, uranium, oil and gas,

we've got food products. We can provide energy security, food security. We can help to build the AI data centers. We're a reliable partner. If they do need to have more data support outside of the United States, I just think there's no better partner for them than us. Premier Smith, thanks for taking the time to talk to me. I appreciate it. You bet. Thanks, Paul. After the break, American historian Amy Greenberg on The Great American Land Grab.

I want to say a word about the people who are supporting this podcast. McGill University's Max Bell School of Public Policy offers more than just a master's program. They strive to bring together different perspectives and disciplines through public lectures and seminars, strike a better balance between theory and practice in their research, and emphasize the various complexities of the policy process in their conferences. But if you are interested in earning a Master of Public Policy with global reach in just one year, applications are open now for next fall. Learn more at mcgill.ca slash maxbellschool.

Amy Greenberg, thanks for joining me. Oh, my pleasure. Thanks for having me on. Why have you spent basically most of your career talking about the United States before the Civil War? Well, it's the period of time when people in the United States actually turn into the country that we kind of are now.

So a lot of the things that people in the United States take for granted now originated in that time period. Democracy, capitalism, gender roles, all this stuff formed in the decades between really 1820 and 1860. My brief read of some of your writing suggests it's extraordinarily complex time. And one of the ideas that gets marketed and tested and refined and really put to the crucible

is this idea of manifest destiny, which my sense of it is it's the idea that freedom expands when America grows. Am I close? Yeah, that's it. That's a really interesting and good way to put it. Basically the idea of manifest destiny is this belief that the US has been singled out by God to bring a better form of life across the continent with democracy, the Protestant religion, free market capitalism, all that. Does it have a founding moment? Yeah, I mean, anybody who really looks at it closely is going to tell you that it is baked into the American DNA,

that from the first settlement in Puritan, Massachusetts, the idea that the Puritans that came here were gonna be a beacon to the Puritans that were left back in England. People in the US have had this really remarkable sense of themselves as being special. And perhaps the first big expression of it in, what from your perspective were modern times, was the Mexican-American War, which Ulysses Grant

called a wicked war. And that became the title of your book on the Mexican American War. Yeah, that's right. The Mexican American War is the, it's the culmination. It's the high point of manifest destiny. So we've got a lot of incredible territorial annexations before that, you know, from the Louisiana Purchase through taking control of Oregon, the Oregon Territory, which, you know, was jointly controlled between Britain and the United States, getting control of that. The US had been steadily marching westward with by fighting wars with the Indian nations. But it's not until the 1840s when the US goes to war with Mexico that Manifest Destiny really reaches its crescendo. And people across the United States cry out that the lands, California, Texas, some people

wanted all of Mexico. The idea was that basically Mexicans didn't deserve this land. They weren't putting it to use and that it was really not greedy by the US to try and take this land from Mexico, but it was just fulfilling what was an obvious destiny. That land that was not being put to good use, whether it was by Native Americans or by Mexicans, it would become American land and American farmers would put it to good use. So the argument is essentially use it or lose it. And since you haven't been using it,

we will, you'll lose it to us. That's exactly right. They do, they talk about that. They draw on John Locke's idea of making use of land as being part of ownership of land. And they say, look, you're not using it properly. We're taking it. And these adventures are also a handy distraction from whatever else might be going on. So you begin this book by talking about John Tyler, who was the very sad sack president who decided that to get away from the prospect of impeachment, to get away from the fact that his

own party had kicked him out of the party, that it might be time to annex Texas. That's right. I mean, I think you could do an entire show, Paul, just about John Tyler, who was known as his accident and all the kind of a negative models that he set for the future. But yeah, so Tyler's looking for an issue that will keep him in the White House after he ascends for the first time in American history becoming a president after a previous president had died. William Henry Harrison dies and Tyler becomes president and then you know both parties, neither of them want him and he knows that the annexation of Texas is an issue that's so popular with the American people because of Manifest Destiny because they believe that there can't be

an independent Texas. Texas has to be part of the US. That he negotiates a secret treaty with Texas and then attempts to bring with Texas into the United States. And it's this crazy move on his part that leads the Democratic Party to choose James K. Polk, the first openly expansionistic presidential candidate to be their standard bearer. And of course he wins in 1844, setting the US on a course of war with Mexico. What did Grant mean when he said it was wicked? It was a violent war.

It was the deadliest one before the Civil War. And the second deadliest, I believe, apart from the Civil War in the second deadliest I believe apart from the Civil War in the history of the United States. That's correct. Grant's full quote was that he had never known a more wicked war than the US war against Mexico. And what he meant by that was that the US attacked a weaker republic, a neighboring republic, for no reason at all except greed. You know, we may look at that now and say, well, I mean, you know, this is how geopolitics work. But at the time, the United States, in part because of this idea of manifest destiny, it's holding itself to a higher standard and says, look, you know, evil corrupt nations like England,

they may go to war to take territory, but we don't. We don't. We fight wars of a principle. Our war against the British, the revolution, that was about principle. War of 1812, that was about principle. Of course, nobody can really tell you what the principle was behind the War of 1812. But the war against Mexico, there's no principle. It's just we want the land, you won't sell it to us. We're gonna take it. So that's why Grant, who is a young officer in Mexico at the time, he says,

this is as wicked of a war as you could fight. So one thing I've noticed living as I do just outside the United States is that when these expansions happen, there's almost always somebody on the other side who really doesn't want them to happen. That these expansions have almost always happened through land grabs or, well, I'll call them swindles.

Really good deals on like the Louisiana Purchase. That's absolutely right. But the difference between the Louisiana Purchase. That's absolutely right. But the difference between the Louisiana Purchase and the war with Mexico is that 13,000 Americans and over 25,000 Mexicans die in this one. Louisiana Purchase, nobody dies. So you got to kind of distinguish between the swindle and the, um, the outright war of aggression.

And also manifest destiny has often turned its gaze northward to Canada. As a matter of fact, in the 1860s, we moved the capital of our country a little further away from the border just to be on the safe side. What can you tell me about Canada and this American idea? Yeah. So I've been so interested in this topic for a long time. So one thing that is really interesting about this is a lot of historians, when they look at U.S. and Canada relations, they say, oh, well, yeah, people in the U.S., they wanted to acquire Canada, but that really all ended after the War of 1812,

or that really all ended after the war of 1812 or that really all ended after the 1830s when some people in Michigan went and invaded Canada. After that it was all settled. But the truth of the matter is is that the entire time that the western portion of the United States and the western provinces of Canada are being settled there is dissension along the border. And there are people in Minnesota who are saying, nobody's even up there. Canada can't even settle its own provinces. We should just take it. Or there are people in the Dakotas that are saying that.

There are people in what is now Washington state. There are all kinds of boundary disputes that are happening all the way to the West with British Columbia. And it actually doesn't really stop until after World War I, as far as I can tell. And equally interesting to me is the fact that a lot of Canadian politicians took seriously the possibility that their border was not as secure as it looked.

So here I have a quote from Mackenzie King, our Prime Minister during the Second World War, who will work very closely with Franklin Roosevelt. But he wrote in his memoir, the secret aim of every American leader, including Franklin Roosevelt, is to dominate Canada and ultimately to possess the country. So old habits die hard, including a certain nervousness on our side at the strength of our neighbor. Isn't that a great quote? I love that quote. Okay, so from what I can tell, Franklin Roosevelt had zero interest in taking over parts of Canada. This was not even on his radar. Did he want to dominate Canada?

I'm not even sure about that. I think he wanted Canada as an ally. I mean, if you want to look at the US presidents and say, who's really eyeing Canada, I wouldn't put Franklin Roosevelt on there. So I do think that part of this, you know, obviously wonderful relationship between our two countries has had elements of mistrust and fear that maybe in some cases is groundless. But by no means is this kind of the peaceful, happy relationship that everybody seems to think in the US that we have with Canada. And in part, I think that's because

And in part, I think that's because attempts to take over Canada have never had the vigor or the possibility of actually accomplishing them as events on the southern border have. So what I'm trying to say here is that in the US imaginary, it is lands to the south that are potential US targets. And people kind of forget about Canada, forget about the fact that there were a lot of people that wanted to take a lot of parts of Canada. I want to ask you about the title of an earlier book that you wrote a few years before the book on the Mexican-American war. And that is a book in which you mentioned or you explored in some detail the notion of manifest manhood. That manifest destiny is an expression of a certain idea of what it means to be a man. Can you tell me more about that?

Absolutely, and I do feel like we're getting dangerously close to Trump here with this one. So the idea is that let's just say that a large swath of Americans believe in manifest destiny. I think that's true. There's plenty of evidence for that. There is only a certain portion of that group of Americans who in the 19th century believe in manifest destiny, who think that we can overpower through physical force other countries and get what we want. So in other words, manifest destiny can manifest itself in various ways. You can have the good luck of the Louisiana

purchase. You can have the ability to force Native American tribes into signing treaties with you, right? But there's a segment of Americans, particularly American men, who feel like we are the stronger and more powerful nation and we need to dominate other nations to show them how powerful we are. So manifest destiny when you look actually at elections and who in the US is voting for expansionist candidates, like James K. Polk. Polk, when he's running for president, he wants to take all of what's British Columbia away from the British, bring it into the US. He talks about the domination of the United States over other nations. The men, of course, only men are voting in this time period. The men who vote for him, by and large, are men who believe that physical strength

is the key to power. So when I look at how men are expressing their masculinity in the 19th century, Manifest Destiny is a key part of that. But again, it's an idea of how do you manifest that Manifest Destiny and you do it through overpowering weaker people. So, I mean, on the face of it, the meaning of the term manifest destiny is it's manifest. It's obvious and it's destiny. It's going to happen. But there's this subgroup of people who say,

it's not gonna happen unless we put our shoulder to the wheel and what do you got? And those are the people that you think are people like Polk and people who actually load up and march into the next neighborhood. Yeah, that's exactly right, Paul. And you can see that happening all over the place. You can see it in Polk's comments. At a certain point when the US-Mexico war sort of just started, the secretary of state, who at that time was James Buchanan, he says to Polk, he says, we need to be careful here because Britain and France are going to get really upset if they think that we're fighting this war in order to take over large portions of

Mexico. And Polk's response is, I will fight England and I will fight France. They can't tell us what to do. And after the US-Mexico war, you have a phenomenon of filibustering, where men actually get private armies and they go into Latin America and they try and take more territory. The most famous one of these guys, this guy named William Walker, takes over Nicaragua in early 1850s,

wants to annex it to the United States. So there's a celebration of violence. There is a feminization of other countries, particularly Mexico and Mexicans, Native American nations, Canada to a lesser degree, there are definitely newspapers in the US that say, you know, Canadians won't fight. They won't fight, they can't fight. They are effeminate.

And we are young America and we will whip anybody. Amy Greenberg, thank you so much for sharing your knowledge with us. Oh, it is a pleasure. Thank you so much. Thanks for listening to The Paul Wells Show. The Paul Wells Show is produced by Antica and supported by McGill University's Max Bell School of Public Policy.

My producer is Kevin Sexton. Our executive producer is Stuart Cox. Laura Reguerre is Antica's head of audio. If you subscribe to my Substack, you can get bonus content for this show, as well as access to my newsletter. You can do that at paulwells.substack.com. If you're enjoying this show, give us a good rating on your podcast app. It helps spread the word. We'll be back next Wednesday. you