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Wednesday, August 26, 2026

Trump's trade threats spiral out of control as Canada slaps down 100 pages of tariffs

David Edwards
August 25, 2026 
RAW STORY


FILE PHOTO: Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney speaks with the news media after he suspended trade negotiations with the United States, in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada August 22, 2026. REUTERS/Chris Tanouye/File Photo

President Donald Trump spent Tuesday morning threatening Canada online while Ottawa put a nearly 100-page tariff schedule on the calendar he cannot stop.

Four Canadian cabinet ministers announced the retaliatory tariffs in Ottawa on Tuesday, according to the New York Times. The duties cover about 700 American products and take effect Sept. 8.

The rates range from 15 to 50 percent, matching the level Washington set for each product, according to CNBC. Prime Minister Mark Carney had promised a "dollar for dollar" response after talks collapsed Friday night, the Times reported.

The schedule runs nearly 100 pages, Global News senior journalist Mackenzie Gray reported on X. It taxes fish, stoves, carpets, men's suits and fishing rods.

"Our preference was to find a deal that benefits both countries," Canadian trade minister Dominic LeBlanc told CNBC's "Squawk Box" on Tuesday. "We still believe that's possible. But in the meantime, we're not waiting by the phone."

Trump answered on Truth Social, where he suggested halting business with Ontario and repeatedly floated renaming Lake Ontario to "Lake America," CNBC reported.

"I deal with many countries, and Canada is easily the most difficult and unreasonable," Trump wrote in one post.

Trump warned Monday that he would double tariffs on Canadian cars and auto parts to 50 percent, but not until Jan. 1, 2027, Global News reported. Canada's deadline is two weeks away.

Canada doubled its own tariffs on American steel and aluminum to 50 percent, the Times reported. Ottawa added $7.5 billion for businesses and workers harmed by the trade war, according to CNBC.

Senior Canadian officials said the list was not built to punish particular American businesses or states, but to help Canadian industry, Gray reported.

Trump has also complained that the United States runs a trade deficit with Canada. That gap exists largely because Americans buy Canadian crude oil, CNBC reported.

His tariffs have excluded oil, natural gas, potash and many minerals, according to the Times.

Polls taken before the tariffs took effect Saturday showed broad Canadian support for retaliation, the Times noted. Ontario Premier Doug Ford has pressed for it, while Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has urged restraint.

Canada's economy is about one-twelfth the size of the American economy, according to the Times, and economists say the resulting price increases will hurt Canadian companies, too.


‘Canada Must Respond’: Ottawa Slaps Retaliatory Tariffs on US Goods After Trump Trade War Escalation

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said his nation is not “going to accept” an “attitude at the negotiation table that Canada is a subsidiary of the United States.”



Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney speaks about the trade dispute with the United States at the Davie Shipyard in Levis, Quebec, Canada on August 24, 2026.
(Photo by Andrej Ivanov/AFP via Getty Images)

Brett Wilkins
Aug 25, 2026
COMMON DREAMS


Canada announced Tuesday that it will impose roughly $20 billion in retaliatory tariffs on American imports in response to President Donald Trump’s 50% tariff on many of its goods after bilateral negotiations collapsed amid what Ottawa said were last-minute concessions that damaged the Canadian economy and intruded on its sovereignty.

The government of center-left Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said its countermeasures will cover roughly C$27.6 billion ($20 billion) worth of American products, with tariffs ranging from 15% to 50% on hundreds of categories including steel, aluminum, appliances, clothing, seafood, electronics, furniture, and dairy. The measures are scheduled to take effect September 8. Ottawa also unveiled billions of dollars in assistance for workers and businesses expected to be hurt by the conflict.


‘It’s War’: Trump’s 50% Tariffs Take Hold After US-Canada Trade Talks Collapse


“Canada must respond, and today we are, in a proportionate, targeted, and strategic way,” Canadian Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne said during a press conference in Ottawa. “Today I’m announcing that Canada will match the United States tariffs dollar for dollar, rate for rate.”

“Canada’s counter-tariffs are designed primarily to provide protection for Canadian industry impacted by US tariffs and allow them to compete against US products in the Canadian market,” he added. “It’s all about fairness, it’s all about a level playing field, it’s all about supporting Canadian workers and Canadian businesses.”

It’s also apparently about political calculation ahead of November’s midterm elections, in which the congressional balance of power—and therefore Trump’s ability to pursue his agenda—is at stake.

The administration’s trade war with Canada is hitting industries concentrated in states where Republicans are fighting to defend vulnerable US Senate seats, including Maine’s lobster industry and Michigan’s auto sector, while Ohio and other Midwestern states face exposure via cross-border manufacturing and supply chains.



On Monday, Trump told Canadian leaders to “fall in line” or face “far WORSE” consequences than the new tariffs.

Carney retorted that Canadians are not “going to accept” an “attitude at the negotiation table that Canada is a subsidiary of the United States.”

Canadian anger toward Trump has surged as the US president has repeatedly threatened Canada’s sovereignty, including his frequent talk of making Canada the “51st state.” Canadian political leaders and labor organizations have largely rallied behind a tougher response, while a growing grassroots boycott of US products has become a symbol of national resistance.

“Canadians understand that maintaining our sovereignty and independence will entail consequences and sacrifices,” Calgary-based commentator Jen Gerson wrote Tuesday in The Guardian. “We did not bring this trade war on ourselves; we have merely refused to comply in advance to the unreasonable demands of a bad-faith actor. We will be punished for it. We have accepted this.”

“If nothing else, let the [United States’] retaliation be a warning to the rest of the Western alliance,” Gerson added. “Run, run. Protect yourselves. Move faster.”

Trump—the self-proclaimed “peace president” who has attacked more countries than any other US leader in modern history—has menaced a string of allies. He’s threatened to retake the Panama Canal, launch armed attacks on Colombia and Mexico, “bomb the shit” out of Oman, and take over Greenland.

Longtime US allies have taken notice—and action. Just as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine spooked Sweden and Finland into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Trump’s erratic aggression has pushed other countries in directions once thought highly unlikely. European Union membership for Iceland, long a politically moribund proposition, is now politically plausible amid developments including Trump’s Arctic saber-rattling. US tariff pressure on India is even incentivizing India to seek closer economic ties with China, a traditional adversary.

Trump’s increasingly aggressive and condescending rhetoric has left many Canadians feeling like their relationship with their southern neighbor has irreparably changed.

“America has changed, and... we will not return to our old relationship,” Carney said after Trump announced the 50% tariffs over the weekend.

“You’re at war when you get attacked,” the prime minister also said. “We got attacked.”

Such rhetoric was once the realm of comedy, like the 1995 satirical film Canadian Bacon, directed by Michael Moore and starring John Candy and Dan Aykroyd, about a struggling US president who manufactures a shooting war with Canada, invasion and all, in hopes of rallying Americans around a foreign enemy.

The premise was absurd because the notion of Washington deliberately provoking its peaceful northern neighbor into war seemed preposterous. Many critics have noted that under Trump, absurdity has become the new normal.

On Tuesday, Trump said he’s considering changing the name of Lake Ontario to “Lake America,” because, as one Bluesky account noted, “Trump likes to slap the name of America on everything.”



“Gulf of Mexico? Gulf of America. Strait of Hormuz? Strait of America. Lake Ontario? Lake America,” the account quipped, adding one more suggestion: “Epstein Island? America Island.”


Trump roasted as 'greatest idiot' in a lifetime after Lake Ontario threat: 'Out of ideas'

Alexander Willis
August 25, 2026 
RAW STORY

President Donald Trump floated the idea of changing the name of Lake Ontario to “Lake America” on Tuesday amid his ongoing trade feud with Canada, a pitch that was met with collective sighs by critics who spoke to their exhaustion with the chaotic Trump administration.

In a post on his social media platform Truth Social, Trump claimed that his administration was “giving serious consideration” to the name change as he did not “expect to [be] doing much business with Ontario any longer.” The idea is similar to his executive order issued in early 2025 to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America,” a move that received intense scrutiny at the time.

Regarding Trump’s latest name-change idea — one that came amid Trump imposing 50% tariffs on some Canadian goods, and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney vowing to match said tariffs “dollar for dollar” — critics were quick to condemn it.

The Bulwark's Sam Stein quipped on X, "He's out of ideas."

Stephen Hayes, editor and CEO at The Dispatch, mocked, "It's still astonishing - ten years into the Trump era - that our president so often behaves like a 10 year-old. And that so much of our national policymaking is based on the juvenile emoting of an adult who functions like a preteen."

“We are living in the stupidest f------ times,” wrote Jason Willan, a prominent fantasy sports analyst, in a social media post on X.

Roland Ley, a former contributor for Euromaidan Press, called Trump the “greatest idiot” he had witnessed in his “lifetime.”

“Just as internationally 'Gulf of America' isn't recognised, this won't be either,” Ley wrote in a social media post on X. “Not even passed by the US Senate anyway.”

In response to Trump’s announcement, Canadian horse-racing photographer Julie Wright quipped, “Lunatic says what,” and prominent online influencer Mario Nawfal argued that Trump’s trade war was “getting silly” in a post on X to his more than 3.8 million followers.

“It would require a lot more than a President’s bad mood to change the name of a gulf or great lake!” Nawfal wrote. “Maybe a vote or something a bit more thought out.”


'Sounds like me': Trump confesses to CNN that he torpedoed trade talks with Canada

Robert Davis
August 25, 2026 
RAW STORY


U.S. President Donald Trump welcomes Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., October 7, 2025. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein/File Photo

President Donald Trump admitted on Tuesday that he caused the intensifying trade war between the U.S. and Canada after he added conditions to the talks at the 11th hour.

Trump spoke briefly with CNN's Jim Sciutto after Canada announced retaliatory tariffs on a bevy of U.S. goods. During the call, Sciutto asked about Canadian officials' assertion that late-stage demands were inserted into the negotiations, and the president's response was eerily surprising.

Sciutto shared a snippet of the conversation on X.

“That sounds like me,” Trump told the reporter.

“So you don't deny it?” Sciutto responded.

The president replied, “No, no, I don't deny anything. So no, they have to pay a fair amount. And if they don't pay a fair amount, we won't make a deal. That's fine.“

The exchange stunned some of the president's critics.

"At least he admitted it. LOL. Clown show operation," Dean Blundell, a Canadian comedian, posted on X.

"How Donald Trump is sending America's manufacturing economy to the brink of the abyss," Grant Stern, executive editor for Occupy Democrats, posted on X.


CNN's Daniel Dale smacks Trump with a stinging fact-check after latest Canada flop

Erik De La Garza
August 25, 2026
RAW STORY



U.S. President Donald Trump points a finger as he speaks during a roundtable on antifa, an anti-fascist movement he designated a domestic "terrorist organization" via executive order on September 22, at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., October 8, 2025. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein

President Donald Trump repeated another series of false claims about Canada as his escalating trade war with the United States’ northern neighbor erupted again this week, according to a brutal CNN fact-check.

CNN’s Daniel Dale examined two social media posts Trump published Monday, beginning with the president’s claim that “Canada’s Unemployment Rate is now at 10%, and rapidly rising.”

“This is wrong on both counts,” Dale wrote Tuesday.

“Canada’s unemployment rate declined to 6.4% in July. That was the third consecutive month it had gone down,” Dale told readers. “It was also a two-year low.”

The rate would be approximately one percentage point lower if Canada calculated unemployment using the same methodology as the United States, Dale noted. The U.S. unemployment rate was 4.1% in July.

Trump’s claim that Canada conducts “95% of their business with the U.S” also came under the microscope.

“There’s no doubt that the Canadian economy is heavily reliant on the US, but there’s no apparent basis for Trump’s '95%' figure,” Dale found. According to his report, approximately 72% of Canadian merchandise exports went to the United States in 2025, down from roughly 76% the previous year and the lowest percentage since the early 1980s.

“And the figure fell below 70% in the first half of 2026,” Dale added.

While Dale acknowledged that the United States is less dependent on Canada than Canada is on the U.S., he stressed that Canada remains a critical trading partner, particularly for northern border states.

Trump just made toilet paper a lot more expensive


President Donald Trump meets with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, Tuesday, May 6, 2025, in the Oval Office. (Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok/Flickr)

August 26, 2026 
ALTERNET

After U.S. President Donald Trump threatened Canada with new 50 percent tariffs, Canada responded with retaliatory tariffs of their own on Tuesday. Tariffs on some Canadian goods imported into the United States, the Associated Press (AP) reports, could be as high as 50 percent. And according to The Guardian, Americans could face higher prices for paper products like toilet paper, facial tissues and paper towels as a result.

"Using the bathroom or having a cry is about to become more expensive for North Americans as the U.S. and Canada enter a full-fledged trade war that threatens to flush away decades of peaceful trading between the two nations," journalist Lauren Aratani reports in The Guardian. "After trade negotiations broke down between the two countries last weekend, Mark Carney, the Canadian prime minister, vowed to match U.S. tariffs 'dollar for dollar' and unveiled a list of nearly 900 American goods that will face 25 percent to 50 percent tariffs starting on 8 September."

Many economists, both liberal and conservative, have been warning that a trade war with Canada could cost U.S. homeowners a fortune — as many building and construction materials are imported into the U.S. from Canada. And according to a Canadian government website, "Canada's counter tariffs will apply to products covering $27.6 billion in imports from the U.S. and will focus on sectors such as steel, dairy, appliances, agricultural equipment, pulp and paper, and electronics, that are most impacted by U.S. tariffs."

Aratani emphasizes that "paper products are among the hardest-hit sectors, with Canada threatening to put tariffs of between 25 percent and 50 percent on 'toilet paper or face tissue stock' from 8 September in retaliation for a 50 percent hike from Washington DC."

"Though American toilet paper and tissues are often made domestically," Aratani explains, "they heavily rely on lumber-rich Canada for raw materials. Procter & Gamble, the owner of Charmin toilet paper, said last year that it would have to increase prices amid tariffs that were in place at the time. The U.S. imported $328m worth of toilet paper from Canada in 2024, according to the World Bank, making it by far the largest exporter of the product to the U.S. Retailers including Costco source much of their paper products from the country."

The Guardian reporter continues, "The U.S. accounts for more than 20 percent of global tissue consumption despite having only 4 percent of the world's population. The average American uses 141 rolls of toilet paper per year, making them No. 1 for No. 2s globally, just ahead of Germans, each using an average of 134 rolls annually."


‘The Red States, We’re Going to Hit Hard’: Canadian Politicians Vow to Make MAGA Pay for Trump’s Trade War

“We can put massive pain on the US,” said Ontario Premier Doug Ford.



Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney speaks about the trade dispute with the United States at the Davie Shipyard in Levis, Quebec, Canada on August 24, 2026.
(Photo by Andrej Ivanov/AFP via Getty Images)

Brad Reed
Aug 24, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

Politicians from Canada’s two biggest political parties vowed on Monday to hit back hard against US President Donald Trump’s trade war against their country.

Trade negotiations between the two countries collapsed last week after Trump reportedly sought to restrict Canada from striking trade deals with other nations, while also pressuring the country to scrap requirements aimed at preserving the use of the French language.

Speaking to reporters on Monday, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney warned that Trump’s aggression would come back to hurt US workers.

“It’s not a surprise that the US would take some form of reprisal to our response to their unjustified tariffs,” said Carney, a member of the center-left Liberal Party. “But what message does that send to the workers in Michigan and Ohio and Kentucky and Alabama who rely on Canadian demand? We’re their largest customer for automobiles, more than the European Union, Japan, Korea.”



Carney also said there was an “attitude at the negotiating table” from US officials that “Canada is a subsidiary of the United States,” which is “not something we’re going to accept.”

Ontario Premier Doug Ford, a member of the rival center-right Progressive Conservative Party, delivered a more strident rebuke to Trump, vowing that Canada’s response would deliver a hit to the president’s voters.

“The red states, we’re going to hit hard,” said Ford.

The Ontario premier then outlined all the ways his country can make life more painful for US consumers so long as Trump keeps trying to undermine Canadian sovereignty.

“If it gets really, really bad, I say everything’s on the table,” Ford said. “We need everyone to be on Team Canada and throw everything and the kitchen sink at them, no matter if it’s electricity, if it’s fuel, again, if it’s potash, if it’s uranium. We need to have everything on the table... we can put massive pain on the US. President Trump underestimates us. And that’s the biggest mistake.”



Trump lashed out at both Carney and Ford in a Monday morning Truth Social post.

“The USA will always be far bigger, richer, and stronger than Canada,” Trump wrote. “Without the United States, Canada couldn’t survive—it’s where they get all of their money and, because of their current bad leadership, primarily Governor Carney, and his Flunky, Ford, they will not be allowed to keep taking advantage of the United States—their key to survival.”

Tuesday, August 04, 2026

United States

Colonialism, conquest, extermination, white supremacy, the roots of Trump’s policy

Monday 3 August 2026, by Patrick Le Moal



“When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate & equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”

Thomas Jefferson, July 4, 1776.

The day after his election, US President Donald Trump issued an executive order on 29 January 2025, “Celebrating America’s 250th Birthday”, and set up a political task force within the Department of War to organize, outside of all the committees composed of historians, a “unifying, patriotic, and family-friendly event" to celebrate the United States’ place in the world among “the powers of the earth… to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them”. The planned big concert will not take place, as the main artists contacted have refused to participate in a partisan event.

Trump wants to justify his current imperialist interventions, his discourse on the dangers facing white America by relying on the imaginary of conquest and colonial history. “Trump’s arguments and semantics call for a long-term reading, free of the most immediate strategic issues: it is a question of taking seriously, as a hypothesis, the filiation of which he claims [...] U.S. imperial practices [...] must be seen as the crux of an identity, expressing itself again today in a striking way – destabilizing the world and stunning Europeans.”  [1]

This new form of US imperialism no longer claims to defend freedom and democracy, but affirms its desire of “restoring peace through strength for a new golden age of America”, as the Pentagon’s National Security Strategy published on 23 January 2026 says. This document, in which the word democracy does not appear once, shows that there are no longer permanent allies or enemies – only the law of the strongest and American interests count.

Trump wants to join in history the great presidents who have won or conquered land. It is no coincidence that his inaugural speech referred to President McKinley, who was at the initiative of building a U.S. colonial empire at the end of the 19th century, from the Philippines to Puerto Rico and Cuba, as well as to Theodore Roosevelt or Franklin Delano Roosevelt. To measure what is at stake, it is therefore essential to look back at the constitutive history of this country.

Celebrating the Independence of 1776... Or the conquest of 1492?

This celebration of the independence of July 4, 1776 is being prepared by public prayers and Bible readings organized with great pomp, which put forward a historical narrative centred on Christianity, the civilizing mission of the West on the American continent.

It began very early, without any particular ceremony, on 23 March 2026, with a political gesture that is far from trivial: the installation of a statue of Christopher Columbus near the White House. It was built from the fragments of a statue dismantled and thrown into the water in Baltimore during the 2020 mobilizations of the Black Lives Matter movement. Because since 2020, Christopher Columbus is no longer celebrated everywhere as a hero: states and cities have chosen to remove his statues from the public space, to no longer celebrate Columbus Day, to replace it with a day dedicated to Indigenous peoples, Indigenous Day. To combat this development, an article of the executive order for the 250th anniversary aims at “protecting American monuments from vandalism” and specifically cites the depredation of the Christopher Columbus memorial fountain.

The colonial conquest of land and the extermination of Native American populations began with the arrival of the first settlers in America, more than a century before independence. Convinced that they were a chosen people, the colonists appropriated the land of those whom they saw as savages incapable of cultivating it and which was therefore rightfully theirs. In the first colonies, in New England and Virginia, colonization took place in a bloodbath, which was added to devastating epidemics.

This exterminating conquest is celebrated in the United States during the Thanksgiving holiday, which celebrates the first harvest of the Mayflower colonists in 1621. This holiday totally obscures the genocide of the Amerindians and recounts a myth of poor Britons, religious dissidents in search of a place to practice their religion. In reality, this boat was chartered by London merchants to participate in colonization, to seek their fortune in the “new world”. Let us never forget that while the majority of these settlers were poor, not all of them were: there were migrants who arrived to make their fortunes and dominate from positions of economic strength in Britain.

How did the 13 colonies become the current USA?

How did the 2.5 million white Anglo-Saxons (who exploited 500,000 enslaved people) who emancipated themselves from the British metropolis in 1776 became the leaders of the world’s leading power in less than two centuries? There is of course the conquest of the West erected into mythology, the genocide of the Amerindians, but the expansion was also to the detriment of the European imperialist powers present on the American continent.

Although populated by immigrants, the United States is the first nation in history to be freed from European tutelage, with one particularity: the notion of empire is consubstantial with its creation. The new country created is not the final goal, but the starting point for the construction of an empire that Thomas Jefferson calls the “Empire of Liberty,” a country in which territorial expansion is both necessary and natural. For example, as early as 1775, the United States tried to integrate Canada into its project and engaged in a war of conquest, which it lost. Thise extension continued through several channels.

Buying land

40% of the current territory of the United States was simply bought from foreign powers. Louisiana, a territory from New Orleans to the present-day Canadian border, representing 22% of the land area of the United States, was purchased from France in 1803. In 1867, it was Russia that agreed to sell Alaska, 18.7% of the United States’ land area. The last acquisition was that of the Virgin Islands, sold by Denmark in 1917.

But there have been other attempts to buy land that have failed, such as Texas in 1827, 1829 and so on. Greenland has also been the subject of multiple acquisition processes, in 1867, 1910, 1946, repeated in the 50s, recalled in 2019, so far without success. The first offer to purchase, in 1867, was part of an overall plan to bring the entire northern part of the continent into the United States. During the Second World War, the United States became the “protecting nation” of Greenland and obtained the right to build military bases there: during the Cold War, the Thule base in the Arctic was essential.

It was, and still is, a framework for the main objective, Canada, through the purchase of Alaska and Greenland. Trump is only taking up this objective in an attempt to make history by achieving it. Beyond the island’s mineral resources, he has made it a national security priority. As a result of global warming, traffic in the Arctic is steadily increasing, and Alaska, Canada and Greenland have a key strategic position for controlling the flow of trade and military control of these routes.

Several tripartite meetings involving the United States, Greenland and Denmark have been held since January 2026 during which the US government has presented three demands: the possibility of stationing its troops indefinitely (it has even begun to inspect sites likely to host American bases), a right of veto on investment agreements between Greenland and foreign countries and cooperation for the exploitation of the island’s resources. Trump’s envoy who arrived on 17 May is the same person who, upon his appointment, said he was honoured to serve to make Greenland part of the United States.

Annexations

In 1787, the United States adopted the Northwest Ordinance, which allowed its nationals who settled in a new territory outside its borders to then integrate it into the United States. This predatory economy was to be one of the levers of territorial expansion. It allowed the annexation of Mexican Texas. The Anglo-Saxon American settlers who settled there wanted to keep slavery on their plantations at a time when Mexico abolished it and imposed the emancipation of all slaves brought into the country, including those who escaped from neighbouring states such as Louisiana. The United States sought to buy Texas, but the Mexicans refused. The American colonists rebelled and declared themselves independent of Mexico after defeating the Mexican army, then asked for the annexation of Texas to the USA, which was obviously accepted with glee in 1845, giving an advantage to the slave states.

There were also “simple” annexations, such as those of Florida or lands conquered on the colonization front against the Native Americans in the West. They were adorned with motivations such as a divine mission, the expansion of Christian civilization, this “manifest destiny”, which would lead to genocide. Violence was at the heart of this conquest, in all its aspects, as illustrated by the seven land runs organized between 1889 and 1895 that made available to tens of thousands of white settlers, on a given day, the land stolen from the Native Americans: the best to the first! For example, in April 1889, 10,000 settlers settled around the area that is now Oklahoma City and created in one day the city that would become the capital of the state of Oklahoma.

Wars of conquest

In 1812, while the United Kingdom was at war in Europe against Napoleonic France, the United States invaded the English-speaking areas of Canada. This war of conquest, known as the “emancipation of Canada,” lasted three years but was a relative failure. And if, in 1846, the United Kingdom ceded three states, Idaho, Oregon and Washington, the main objective, Canada, remained British.

It is in line with this history that Trump has declared his desire to see Canada become the 51st state of the United States, using “economic force” if necessary. Beyond the declarations, there are meetings of the US administration with a secessionist movement in the Canadian province of Alberta that seeks to obtain its independence. This province is the fourth most populous in the country (about 4 million inhabitants) and produces 84% of Canada’s oil.

In the south, the integration of Texas into the United States in 1845 led to a war with Mexico in 1846, which the latter quickly lost. This was a great achievement for empire building. In 1848, Mexico was forced to cede nearly half of its territory, all the provinces west of Texas, New Mexico, Utah, Arizona, Nevada, California, and part of Colorado. In addition to all this, there was an expansion in the Pacific, in 1867 the annexation of the desert island of Midway, then in 1897 Hawaii. In half a century, through annexations, wars and purchases, the United States of the 13 original colonies had tripled its surface area, and in 1890 proclaimed the end of the colonization front.

White supremacism consubstantial with conquest

As soon as the American Civil War ended in 1865, the army invaded and controlled Native American territories, massacring and starving the population. Fifteen years later, all the surviving tribes were locked up in the reservations. More than 90% of the Native American population, estimated at 850,000 people when Christopher Columbus arrived, perished during the conquest, a veritable genocide: only 50,000 survivors remained at the time of the Wounded Knee massacre in 1890.

To populate and whiten these immense territories inhabited by Native Americans, Latinos and enslaved African descendants, a massive immigration of European populations was organised from the 1840s onwards, which would grow throughout the 19th century. Between 1819 and 1840, 750,000 immigrants arrived. Between 1840 and 1860, 4 million, and even 25 million between 1880 and 1920. From 1921 onwards, quotas were introduced favouring migration from Western and Northern Europe in order to maintain the hegemony of the white Protestant population in the face of the increase in the share of Catholic, Jewish and non-white minorities. Racial segregation, the official doctrine of “separate but equal,” was institutionalized in the United States from the end of the Civil War (Jim Crow laws from 1877) until the mobilizations of the 1960s.

Struggle against European imperialists central

The confrontation with the European powers is not new. This is the meaning of the Monroe Doctrine, as enunciated in 1823 in a message to Congress: “In the wars of the European powers in matters relating to themselves we have never taken any part, nor does it comport with our policy so to do. It is only when our rights are invaded or seriously menaced that we resent injuries or make preparation for our defense.… With the existing colonies or dependencies of any European power we have not interfered and shall not interfere. But with the governments who have declared their independence and maintained it, and whose independence we have, on great consideration and on just principles, acknowledged, we could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing them, or controlling in any other manner their destiny, by any European power in any other light than as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States.”

It was a time when the European powers began their colonial conquests in Africa and Asia. European creditors were threatening to intervene to recover their debts in Latin America. The United States thus asserted its hegemony over everything south of its territory, this time without territorial conquest. It would involve support for military dictatorships, various caudillos, and if necessary dozens of armed interventions in Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, Colombia, Guatemala, Cuba, Nicaragua, Honduras and Haiti.

From the Monroe Doctrine to the Roosevelt Corollary

When the United States had acquired a power that allowed it to build a military apparatus, to equip itself with bases elsewhere than on the American continent, it put forward another, lesser-known imperial theory, the “Roosevelt Corollary”, set out in a message to Congress in 1904. At this time, the United States was expanding outside the American continent. They annexed Hawaii in 1898, and set up the Pearl Harbor naval base there. They won a war against Spain that allowed them to annex Puerto Rico and occupy Cuba and the Philippines, countries in which they pursued a “classical” colonialist policy.

Theodore Roosevelt went further than Monroe, extending the “right”" for the United States to intervene beyond the American continent “until some method is devised by which there shall be a degree of international control over offending nations”. The United States thus arrogated to itself the right to decide whether a nation makes “good use” of its independence and under what conditions it can exercise an international police right: “Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power”.

The National Security Strategy, a new imperial era

The current proponents of MAGA are in the imperial, racist and conquering lineage of the 19th century, of the Monroe and Roosevelt doctrines, to which they constantly refer. The plan of the US National Security Strategy published on 6 December 2025, presented as a “Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine”, is enlightening.

It reaffirmed the importance of remaining the strongest country economically and militarily and of “the restoration and reinvigoration of American spiritual and cultural health”, an America “that looks forward to a new golden age”. To do this, we must put an end to "American strategies since the end of the Cold War”: we must end America’s “willingness to shoulder forever global burdens” betting on globalism and so-called “free trade”” [which] have tied U.S. policy “to a network of international institutions, some of which are driven by outright anti-Americanism and many by a transnationalism that explicitly seeks to dissolve individual state sovereignty.” It pronounced the death warrant of the international institutions that emerged from the Second World War. The United States is equipping itself with the means to counter the rising power that is China, with all possible means, without any brakes.

China, referred to as “the other side of the world”, is the designated adversary. The United States “cannot allow any nation to become so dominant that it could threaten our interests. We will work with allies and partners to maintain global and regional balances of power to prevent the emergence of dominant adversaries. As the United States rejects the ill-fated concept of global domination for itself, we must prevent the global, and in some cases even regional, domination of others.”

This is about much more than US dominance over Latin America, it is about stopping foreign actors’ incursions into the US economy while maintaining “secure and reliable supply chains and access to critical materials”. The United States no longer wants to support the world order on its own, and therefore it will not be “equally attentive to all regions”, with a readjustment of its military presence according to its priorities.

Two regions are excluded. The Middle East, in which the US has a heavily armed colonialist military presence, a kind of gigantic American aircraft carrier that enforces imperial order in the area, Israel. It is enough “that the Strait of Hormuz remain open, that the Red Sea remain navigable, that the region not be an incubator or exporter of terror against American interests or the American homeland, and that Israel remain secure.” And on the other hand, Africa, in which it is enough to join forces with “capable, reliable states”.

In the Western Hemisphere, the US must be “preeminent” and expand its network, discouraging its members in various ways from collaborating with others. Europe, which remains “strategically and culturally vital for the United States [...], one of the pillars of the global economy” must therefore be vassalized, while financing its defence itself. It must adapt politically to the current US worldview to avoid a “civilizational erasure” (some countries eventually becoming “majority non-European”), aligning itself with “healthy nations”.

Two obsessions are present: mass immigration and the rejection of the “disastrous “climate change” and “Net Zero” ideologies that have so greatly harmed Europe, threaten the
United States, and subsidize our adversaries.”

Regarding Russia, which is almost absent from the document, one idea dominates, that of rejecting “NATO as a perpetually expanding alliance”. Both the United States and Russia have an interest in the destruction of all coordination between the European powers, and the destruction of their democratic model. Some to be able to vassalize them more easily, one by one, the other to take back part of the USSR’s zone of influence. As long as Putin’s Russia limits itself to this perspective, it is not perceived by the US as a competitor or a threat. This is what fundamentally explains their attitude to the Russian imperialist aggression against Ukraine.

Finally, the Indo-Pacific region, which accounts for nearly half of the world’s GDP, “is already and will continue to be among the next century’s key economic and geopolitical
battlegrounds” The document analyses Chinese advances, without explicitly mentioning the major Silk Road programme, the aim of which is to secure the movement of goods outside the traffic lanes totally controlled by the United States. It only insists on the need to “rebalance global trade relationships”.

It is in this part that the sound of boots is heard, the need to build “a military capable of denying aggression anywhere”, which is the usual way of the dominant to express their desire for an offensive. The question of Taiwan, because of its “dominance of semiconductor production” but also because it “splits Northeast and Southeast Asia into two distinct theaters. Given that one-third of global shipping passes annually through the South China Sea, this has major implications for the U.S. economy.” The message is very clear: hands off Taiwan, our strategic interests are at stake.

“If the doctrine is the basis of a singular conception of space, breaking with the European order, it is because the Western hemisphere has no precise delimitations. The doctrine can thus be seen as a process of despatialization of sovereignty, the latter no longer being indexed to a sovereign state territory within its borders. It is now the ‘rights and interests’ of the United States that delimit the space of its prerogatives.” [2]. This conquering ideology aims at the construction of a space, called the Western Hemisphere, in which U.S. capital and military have secure and unconditional access to the resources and markets that are necessary to strengthen it.

It is based on three pillars. An internal white supremacist policy of reconquest through the mass expulsion of immigrants. A marginalisation of Europe. An appropriation of new land, resources, wealth to be the strongest in the confrontation with China, by reviving the expansionist version of the spirit of the “border” to use the founding myth of the United States.
The American empire in crisis is all the more dangerous in its desire to move quickly to reconstitute its power in the face of China through dispossession and domination.

How to counter this imperial offensive?

We are at the beginning of this new imperial offensive by the United States. In order for it to move forward, it is necessary, from the point of view of the United States, that the world order that emerged from 1945 be abolished, that we return to the era of empires, of conquests, of the right of the strongest without any mask, with regard to everyone. The forms it will take will depend both on the reactions of the other empires involved, and mainly on China, and on popular reactions, particularly within the United States itself.

We must fight, denounce, mobilize against all these imperial machinations of the United States that seek to dominate and vassalize the entire Western Hemisphere, and reopen an era of empires on a global scale. The challenge is to achieve the existence of a vast popular movement of the exploited and oppressed masses against all imperialist aggressions, wherever they come from, here from the United States, there from Russia, from Israel, or from China. In this great confrontation that is being organized, we have only one compass, the right of peoples to self-determination, while remaining independent of the bourgeois governments of the different countries.

July 2026

Translated by International Viewpoint from Inprecor.

Attached documents

Footnotes

[1] “Trump et la guerre coloniale sans fin des États-Unis”, Farid Abdelouahab, Pascal Blanchard and Pierre Haski, 26 January 2026, Le Grand Continent.

[2] “Le seul principe de Trump est la soumission par tous les moyens”, Joseph Confavreux, 23 January 2026, Mediapart.