The Past Speaks

A research collaborator sent me a recent article on Ukraine by the famous political scientist John Mearsheimer, who writes:

“Imagine the American outrage if China built an impressive military alliance and tried to include Canada and Mexico…This is Geopolitics 101: great powers are always sensitive to potential threats near their home territory…”

This offhand remarks reveals how the US policy-making establishment views Canada and Mexico– dependencies in the same way that, say, Belorussia is a dependency of Russia.

It has the ring of truth– not that there is anything inherently wrong with being a dependency! One of the great things about Canada is that it doesn’t making a fetish over sovereignty or maintaining control over every last inch of its territory. It acquiesced long ago to previous acts of US territorial aggression (thinking Oregon and Washington states, plus the Alaska Panhandle and a some other bits of land. That was probably a good thing. Moreover, Canada allows the US military to tramp over Canadian soil without getting too worked up about it. Mexico has also given up pining for the territories it lost in the 1840s and is now busy exporting stuff to the US.

Perhaps there is a lesson there for Ukraine. Learn to compromise. Learn to roll over. Then focus on getting rich.

Just sayin’.