From: julianlzb87@gmail.com   
      
   We Americans celebrate July 4, 1776, as our national birthday, and this   
   year, of course, marks our 250th. But the American Revolution began   
   before that. And when did it end? Maybe it never did. In 1812, warhawks   
   in Congress and president James Madison – the man known to posterity as   
   the very father of the Constitution – launched an invasion of Canada in   
   the hopes of completing the American Revolution. Canada was unfinished   
   business. We had invaded Québec in 1775, but that was a disaster. And   
   even though the 13 colonies that became the United States succeeded in   
   winning their independence from Britain, the newborn US was not   
   altogether free. The British still had forts in our territory, British   
   agents were suspected of inciting Indians to harry our western frontier   
   and the British Navy wielded considerable power over our commerce.   
      
   And then there was Canada, a vast territorial base from which the   
   British could launch attacks against us, if they ever so chose. So was   
   our war for independence really over? America’s first three presidential   
   administrations didn’t want war. George Washington declared America   
   neutral in the wars between revolutionary France and Britain – despite a   
   mutual defense treaty we had ratified with pre-revolutionary France –   
   and did his utmost to keep us from being dragged into Europe’s   
   superpower conflict.   
      
   John Adams hewed to the same policy, despite his affinity for the   
   British and deep antipathy to the French Revolution’s ideology.   
   Washington had earlier been disturbed by French meddling in American   
   politics, notably in 1793 when the French ambassador (or minister, as   
   the title then was) Edmond-Charles Genêt enlisted Americans to serve on   
   privateers to harass British shipping and promoted pro-French   
   “democratic societies.” Those societies were aligned with fully   
   homegrown ones that were the nucleus of Thomas Jefferson’s political   
   movement (and, eventually, party). France’s revolutionary regime   
   eventually turned on Genêt, and he was lucky to be accepted by   
   Washington as a refugee. But during the Adams administration, France   
   persisted as a source of mischief, abroad and at home in the US, which   
   led a Federalist Congress to pass the Alien and Sedition Acts,   
   empowering Adams to expel foreigners at will.   
      
   Yes, more than 200 years ago, American politics was riven by bitter   
   partisan divides over foreign influence and whether to remain neutral or   
   aid in a foreign war for freedom and democracy (or, on the other side,   
   for the international order and to prevent the spread of radical   
   leftism). During the Whiskey Rebellion – which Washington blamed,   
   somewhat implausibly, on Genêt –Jefferson even questioned whether armed   
   intimidation of judges and federal agents was truly an “insurrection” or   
   just an occasional “riot.” The riotous mobs of Jefferson’s own   
   “democratical societies,” in their pro-French ardor, were not entirely   
   unlike today’s antifa types.   
      
   The Alien and Sedition Acts added to Adams’s unpopularity and Jefferson   
   won the 1800 presidential election. He believed some of the Federalists,   
   notably Alexander Hamilton, really did want to undo the American   
   Revolution while the British Empire harbored the same desire. Even so,   
   he tried to keep the country out of the European bloodbath by means of   
   an embargo on trade with the belligerents. But that only imposed more   
   hardship on America’s export industries, including Southern agriculture.   
      
   Trade, territorial acquisition, strategic logic and ideology all   
   provided grounds for Madison’s War of 1812, a war that America didn’t   
   exactly win – the British even burned down the original White House, and   
   of course, we didn’t get Canada – but that made us stronger anyway. We   
   fought well enough to dispel any notion, in our own minds as much as   
   those of the British, that our independence was insecure. And Canada   
   became, if not exactly our hostage, a vulnerable asset the British now   
   knew would be expensive to protect.   
      
   Yet more than 200 years later, Donald Trump likes to speak of Canada as   
   fated to become our 51st state, although if he gets his way, Greenland   
   will become a US territory first. Trump believes Canada depends as much   
   on us today, both strategically and economically, as much as it ever did   
   on the British Empire. So why shouldn’t it be ours, as it was once   
   Britain’s? His thinking about Greenland resembles the way Americans   
   thought about Canada in the lead-up to the War of 1812, too, in one   
   respect: he sees it as a hole in our security fence. To forestall that,   
   the US has already been the guarantor of Greenland’s security since   
   World War Two. Isn’t it a rip-off if Denmark can extort security   
   subsidies from us, forever, on the threat of Greenland going undefended   
   or, worse, falling under the influence of a rival?   
      
   Jefferson had some constitutional qualms about purchasing the Louisiana   
   territory from France, yet he found the strategic logic irresistible.   
   “There is on the globe one single spot, the possessor of which is our   
   natural and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans.” Whether or not Trump   
   feels that way about Greenland, he’s doubtless aware, real-estate man   
   that he is, that Greenland’s 836,300 square miles exceeds the size of   
   the Louisiana Purchase. It would be the largest single territorial   
   expansion in American history. Forget the history books – Trump wants to   
   write his legacy on the map.   
      
   If it happens, it’ll be negotiated: even before Trump pledged at Davos   
   not to use force, or tariffs, to take over Greenland, there was never   
   any real risk of a War of 2026. But a problem remains. If Greenland is   
   already a protectorate of ours in all but name, the same is true of   
   Europe as a whole. Sooner or later, the price of accepting the American   
   empire’s protection may be accepting that protection implies   
   sovereignty. And Europeans may decide they’d rather lose Greenland than   
   have to provide for their own defense.   
      
      
   Daniel McCarthy   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)