On the Mark

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney will likely be remembered by history as the most influential and most consequential man of the early twenty-first century.

Carney's government just signed a new agreement with the European Union, which makes Canada an associate member of the EU and a partner in international trade and common defense.  This will allow Canada to work more closely with the EU to put a check on Russia and its increasing harassment of its adversaries along with new economic incentives that will allow Canada to sell EU members timber, oil, and minerals in exchange for European goods.  

Where does that leave the United States?  Nowhere.  And that's the point.  After nearly 160 years of friendship with the U.S., Canada now treats the United States as a belligerent that cannot be dealt with in a rational manner.  This is perfectly understandable, given the high tariffs the U.S. has imposed on its neighbor to the north.  The European Union had already been turning away from the U.S. and its quixotic tariffs and trade policies.   The United States has already made it clear that it no longer wants to be interdependent with other countries and in many cases, if you consider all of the international treaties the United States has rejected over decades for reasons of "concern" over national "sovereignty," never did want to be interdependent with anyone.  Canada and the European Union are now working in concert to make sure that the U.S. is more isolated than it ever wanted to be.  

The chief architect of American isolation and decline, of course, is Donald Trump.  He and his henchmen and henchwomen did all of this.  And seventy-seven million Americans voted for this.  American voters have demonstrated quite clearly that their limited education and questionable judgment have brought all this about, even as the government that Americans elected has demonstrated clearly that it can no longer function properly, with Republicans running things into the ground and Democrats merely going along with the escapade and going through the motions.

The United States has also demonstrated with equal clarity that it can no longer be trusted or accepted as a responsible member of the international community.  I've said it before, and long before Trump came to power, but it's truer now that ever - "You and Me Against the World" should replace "The Star-Spangled Banner" as the national anthem.  Electing a Democratic President in 2028 - who will not be Kamala Harris (sorry, Kamalamaniacs, she's had her chance) - will not change that.  Because we could just as easily elect as President another right-wing nationalist in 2032 (assuming the planet hasn't been destroyed by AI by then).

And that, my friends, is yet another argument for breaking up the United States into separate countries, or at least allowing Democratic states and maybe a couple of swing states to secede from the Union and apply for admission to the Canadian Confederation.  In fact, if the six New England states have a second Hartford Convention and conclude that secession and forming a separate country is now not only plausible but also necessary, and New York and New Jersey make moves to secede and ask Canada to take them in (as they weren't taken in by Trump - get it?), that might all cause the U.S. to unravel faster than the U.S.S.R. did in the early nineties.  

In other words, Carney's new deal with the European Union may be instrumental in the fall of the United States.

Let a Republic of New England or an independent California and an expanded Canada move on to work in harmony with the rest of the world to solve the planet's problems.  The remnants of MAGA America - a Mormon State of Deseret, a restored Confederacy, a revived Republic of Texas - will merely fall by the wayside.  And they'll deserve it.