The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Why Trump's Stance on Canada Makes Sense || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: September 19, 2025

The Trump administration’s tough stance on Canada isn't as novel (or as arbitrary) as it may seem.Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/why-trumps-stance-on-canada-makes-sense

Hey, everybody. Hello from Rock Island Pass at the border between the Hoover Wilderness and Yosemite National Park. Today, we're taking a question from the Patreon crowd as we're doing this whole trip. Why is the Trump administration hate Canada so much? Is there anything to it? Or should we just win? That's actually the specific text of the question. Let's start by saying that there is, is something to it. And it goes beyond the Canadians burning our capital back in the war of 1812. And you Canadians, you cannot pledge innocence from this. You know you did it.

Yes, the Brits drove the carpool, but it was Ontario Marines that brought the torches to the party and actually burned the White House down. Now, bigger picture. The United States is a large country that basically has the best parts of a continent. But that doesn't mean that the United States is alone on the continent. Obviously, Canada is the entire northern frontier. And throughout American history, if you go back to before reconstruction, the United States was always concerned that an extra-hemispheric power would establish a beachhead somewhere in the vicinity of the North American continent and potentially use it to interrupt American power or maybe even launch an invasion. And of course, most recently, and from the beginning, actually, Great Britain was the power of concern.

Now, I don't mean to suggest that there's a British invasion imminent or anything like that. Don't put words in my mouth. I'm going to piss off enough people with this video as it is. is. But the idea that you can have an independent power right on America's borders that doesn't bear some degree of security risk is just silly. That doesn't mean that I think that there's a war around the corner, that it's even inevitable, certainly not imminent, but it's not a blind policy decision to decide that you actually want all of the continent under a single flag. And for those of you to the south of us in Mexico, this applies to you as well. Now, that said, I think that the border between the United States and its neighbors are fine. I'm not worried about an invasion. There's good

buffers, whether it's lakes and forests in the north or deserts and mountains in the south. The population density of Canada certainly couldn't do it by itself. Mexico may be a little bit better, but northern Mexico is such a logistical snarl because of a lack of infrastructure that too I'm not concerned about. But the bottom line is, is that this didn't come out of nowhere. This has been part of the American strategic view for 200 years. And to pretend otherwise is being a little bit wingy. Now, that said, do I think we should do it? I think annex Canada, even if they ask.

No, because it's bad math. When industrialization really got going roughly a century ago, people started moving from the farms and into the cities, and they started having fewer kids. And that process was much more intense in Canada than it was in the United States, because I don't know if you knew this, but Canada gets cold in the winter. And so the Canadians basically,

huddled together in their cities for warmth. And there's a much higher dense urbanization rate, oh, got a message, dense urbanization rate for Canadians than there is for Americans, which means that the Canadians have aged much slower. They've also probably played the immigration card as hard as they can. It's starting to generate social disruption. And so the old Trudeau government and the new government have cracked down on immigration quite a bit, basically slowed it to a trickle. Oh, Mr. Popular all of a sudden. Which means that Canada is aging much, much, much quicker than the United States. And remember in the United States, the baby boomers are already two-thirds retired, so we know we face an explosion in social welfare payments over the next decade. Canada is ahead of us, and Canada lacks

a millennial generation of size comparable to what we have south of the border, which means if we were to do a merger of the Canadian provinces and the American states, it would be up to the United States to pay for the retirement of most Canadian citizens, most notably in Ontario, Quebec, and in the maritime provinces where the demographic decline is most advanced. So from a purely financial point of view, merging the two countries would be economic suicide for the United States. Let Canada pay for this. And if that means Canada pays for other things too, great.