Girding for War

I read the following posting from Thomas E. Ricks with dismay. He's talking violent confrontation between Canada and the US. He's probably thinking Canada is a pushover. Certainly the US would reduce us to burnt cinders with their nukes, but the last time they came across the border with the idea of pushing Canadians around... they got their heads handed to them.

With the polar icecap shrinking, the Canadians are gearing up for a confrontation eventually over whether other nations' ships will need their permission to transit the Northwest Passage. They say it's an internal waterway; we maintain it's an international strait.

Here's an article exploring how the Northwest Passage is central to Canadian identity. I think we'll be seeing a lot more of these in the future.

This is one way the BP oil disaster is going to have second and third order consequences: Anytime the United States asserts a right to passage, people can just hold up a photo of the oil mess in the Gulf of Mexico, and say, "Hey, you guys can't take care of your own waters, so stay the hell out of ours."

The problem with the US is that they "believe in" international institutions only if they can control them. Otherwise they ignore them and act as a rogue nation, the only superpower... a rogue nation. For example: the US doesn't accept the rulings to the International Court of Justice or the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea which gives status to internal waters.

The US treats Canada the way the old Soviet Union treated Sweden: the USSR sent its subs into Swedish national waters contrary to international law. The US does the same in Canada's north. Funny, the US was outraged by Cuba stationing USSR missiles on Cuban territory and so the US declared "extra-territorial jurisdiction" and quarantined the island. But when Canada makes claim to an archipelago of islands in its north, a stretch of intra-national land, the US again claims extra-territorial jurisdiction and unilaterally declares the water between these islands to be "international" waters. These are the perrogatives of the big bully on the block. The same bully that wanted to seize pretty well all of British Columbia (after having a supine England give away the "Oregon territory"... actually the territory of the Hudson's Bay company) when the US "patriots" began chanting "54 40 or Fight!"

As the prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau put it: Canada is the mouse living beside the elephant. Every time the elephant twitches, the mouse has to fear for its life. In other words, the US falls under Lord Acton's dictum.