By Becket Adams
Sunday, January 25, 2026
For all the talk about the U.S. media’s sensationalistic
tendencies, we have nothing on the Canadians.
Consider the following: Throughout President Trump’s
erratic and often bellicose effort to acquire Greenland, Canadian newsrooms
have indulged in similarly lurid fantasies, repeatedly floating the possibility
that the U.S. might invade the Great White North at any moment.
Just look at the headlines from this month alone:
“SURVEY – AMERICAN INVASION IMMINENT? OVER HALF OF
CANADIANS THINK A CANADIAN INVASION LIKELY AFTER VENEZUELA OCCUPATION,” a
syndicated Canada Newswire headline declared this past week.
Meanwhile, the Globe and Mail published an editorial titled, “In the age of Trump, it’s
time to think about the unthinkable,” with the “unthinkable” being a U.S.
invasion.
Earlier this month, the CBC ran an
entire segment based on an “expert” assessment that “Canada should be
prepared for possible military coercion from the United States.”
Just to cover her bases, the CBC host added, “Others
suggest that the possibility of a military threat is unlikely. But that doesn’t
mean Canada won’t face other threats from the U.S.” She then cited a separate
report that claims the “U.S. political revolution led by Donald Trump is the
top risk facing the world in 2026.”
These headlines and reports, of course, came amid Trump’s
recent — and, um, poorly received — effort to acquire Greenland. For years, the
president has tried to purchase the Danish-controlled territory, claiming it’s
crucial to U.S. national security. Denmark has rejected Trump’s offers,
prompting him to, for a while, publicly leave the door open to taking Greenland
by force, even though it’s protected by NATO. In Davos this past week, he ruled
out forcibly seizing the Arctic island. Relatedly, Trump has also joked in the
past about making Canada the 51st state.
Folks, the U.S. isn’t going to invade Greenland.
It certainly isn’t going to annex Canada, and it’s
misleading to audiences to point to the president’s Greenland rhetoric as proof
of any intent. You don’t have to be a genius to see that Trump’s Greenland
threats were just that — threats. He was applying his usual bullheaded
negotiating style — without, unfortunately, a moment’s thought for how
unsettling his rhetoric would be to fellow NATO countries. Denmark, I should
add, engaged in some bullheaded counter-negotiating of its own by deploying
additional troops to Greenland and asking its neighbors to do the same. (Some of us predicted all of this last week when this Greenland
business took a more serious turn.) But good luck telling that to “over
half of Canadians.”
Every criticism of Trump’s handling of Greenland is fair.
He behaved shamefully. He hurt longstanding alliances while appearing to get
very little in return. The White House lackeys who’ve entertained the talk of
annexing Greenland and Canada have also behaved boorishly.
It’s also true that some of the coverage of Trump’s
expansionist talk has been way over the top, particularly in Canada, where they
apparently harbor a long-standing fear of a U.S. invasion, a fear that seems to
have metastasized into outright panic.
“If the U.S. invaded, could Canada defend its
sovereignty?” read the tease for an episode of the CBC radio show As It
Happens.
Elsewhere, the Globe and Mail reported that the
Canadian military is modeling an “invasion of Canada as Trump threatens Greenland.”
“Almost one in three Canadians say U.S. might try to
invade Canada: poll,” read the headline to a January 14 report by the Canadian Press.
Whipping up audiences with fantasies of defending the
homeland against marauding hordes of Yankees is exactly the wrong move in a
time when cooler heads are desperately needed.
A cautious stance, or even some wild
speculation-as-entertainment (like Don Lemon suggesting Malaysia Airlines
Flight 370 might have disappeared into a black hole), is one thing. However,
the tone and tenor of the Canada-invasion coverage — and there’s no shortage of
it — is another thing entirely. The coverage is potentially dangerous and
utterly unhelpful, especially when the target audience is apparently already
primed to believe it.
The headlines this week aren’t even unique. Canadian
media have been pushing this content since at least early last year.
“What if the U.S. invaded Canada?” CBC radio asked in
February 2025.
The CBC published a report at the time titled, “The U.S.
has always been an existential threat to Canada, military historian says.”
“American invasion of Canada would spark decades-long
insurgency, expert predicts,” reads the headline to a March 2025 report by the Canadian Press.
This flavor of coverage is particularly unhelpful for
those of us who want to restore some normalcy in the relationship between the
U.S. and Canada.
Trump will be gone in three years, and so might his
wrecking ball approach to foreign policy. But we’ll still have neighbors to the
north who, evidently, have spent this time making spears from sticks to prepare
for an imminent Yankee invasion — neighbors who openly fantasize about how
they might creatively kill enough Americans to make their imagined occupation
difficult.
The Canadian perspective isn’t hard to understand. They
don’t like living next door to an erratic and overwhelmingly powerful cowboy.
Fair enough. We’ll work on that.
Hopefully, they eventually come to understand our
perspective, which is that we don’t particularly enjoy living next door to an
exceptionally paranoid neighbor who daydreams about killing U.S. servicemen in Red
Dawn–style guerrilla warfare.
Maybe then we can both calm down long enough to figure
out how to go back to coexisting.
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