Terence Corcoran: Not the 51st state, but maybe a ‘North American Superstate’?
financialpost.comIn the atmosphere of political conflict created by United States President Donald Trump it is hard, even impossible, to understand what his administration’s objectives are. His confrontational style has unleashed a global wave of uncertainty and instability that is shaking nations and international institutions, from Ukraine to Europe and Asia. Nobody knows that experience better than Canadians who have been grappling with Trump’s consistent and demeaning claim to want to turn Canada into “the 51st state.”
Even the cross-border Four Nations hockey game became a presidential target as Trump continued to polarize Canadian-American relations. As I outlined in a column earlier this week, the 51st state has become a metaphor for an attempted U.S. invasion that has sent Canadian politicians stampeding into new forms of anti-American economic nationalism. But could it be that Trump’s aggressive negotiating style is destroying a sensible policy plan and undermining the potential for what some see as a promising concept.
In the view of U.S. historian Arthur Herman, the great potential is to forge an economic alliance between the United States and Canada. Herman, author of bestselling and award-winning histories (most famously, perhaps, is the 2001 bestseller “How the Scots Invented the Modern World”), explained the alliance prospect in an interview: “It would be interesting to explore more deeply how the Canadian and U.S. economies could become more integrated together and the enormous power and synergy that could flow from that.”
Herman, now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, said talking about “the 51st state” is not a good approach to producing greater unity of purpose. “But I think that what Trump has done
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