Trump’s Monroe Doctrine turns North: is US pushing Canada toward China?

Uriel Araujo, Anthropology PhD, is a social scientist specializing in ethnic and religious conflicts, with extensive research on geopolitical dynamics and cultural interactions.

The escalating trade war between the United States and Canada marks a sharp turn in North American relations. On August 23, 2026, the superpower imposed tariffs of up to 50% on roughly $20 billion worth of Canadian goods - after talks collapsed.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney walked away from what he called a bad deal and pledged to retaliate dollar for dollar starting September 8, targeting steel, dairy, appliances, agricultural equipment, pulp and paper, and electronics.

President Donald Trump responded by claiming Canada “wants the benefits of being a state without being one” implicitly repeating his (by now familiar) threat of turning the country into the “51st American state”.

These moves clearly go far beyond ordinary trade friction. As Greg Poelzer of the University of Saskatchewan argues, Trump’s hostility is driven by geopolitical aims - not pure and simple economics. According to the scholar, the 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS) rejects the post-1945 rules-based order and liberal trade regime. It resurrects isolationist and protectionist ideas while asserting a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine.

The original 19th-century doctrine warned European powers against further intervention and colonization in the Western Hemisphere; later interpretations, most notably the “Roosevelt Corollary”, expanded it into a justification for Washington’s intervention in the domestic affairs of Latin American states. For two centuries the doctrine looked south. Now it is looking north as well, in a development that Poelzer describes as a “seismic shift”.

For decades Canada and the United States deepened integration through agreements such as NORAD, the Auto Pact, free-trade deals, and joint environmental treaties.

That era, Poelzer argues, is going away: the world is entering a period in which major powers assert domination inside their spheres of influence.

The US thus no longer treats “allies” in a “first-among-equals” basis, but rather in a more bluntly Hobbesian approach, so to speak.

In this new approach, Canada’s energy and mineral resources matter a great deal. It is a well known fact that the Trump administration seeks expanded access to critical minerals and seems willing to treat hemispheric resources as assets the United States can own and control outright - or at least make claims even if through symbolic renamings.

Considering this, constant references to a “51st state” and to the border as “artificial” might go beyond rhetoric and provocations. In this context, tariffs are weaponized to wound key Canadian sectors, especially autos, in the hope of thereby forcing political submission: Poelzer argues that Canada as the “51st state” remains the preferred outcome in a long shot sort of way; a weakened “Venezuela North” (as the expert puts it) would be the acceptable second scenario.

To be clear, annexing Canada would be a far-fetched scenario - just as, one could argue, “capturing” Lula would - a risk the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs seems to have taken seriously nonetheless. Or “conquering” Cuba. Or invading Greenland. Or… capturing the President of Venezuela, for that matter. Of course, Canada is no Venezuela, but the point here is that the incumbent American administration seems to operate resorting to increasingly aggressive rhetoric, threats, and intimidation, while building an escalatory framework - the designation of Brazilian gangs as terrorist groups being a case in point.

Regarding this neo-Monroeist impulse, it is worth recalling that it did not begin with Trump’s second term. I commented on the Monroe Doctrine making a comeback in December 2023, when scholars Carsten-Andreas Schulz and Tom Long argued (in their Foreign Policy piece) that the White House's warnings, under Biden, about Beijing’s “growing footprint in the Western Hemisphere” carried “a distinctively Monroeist undertone.”

With Trump and Rubio, we might be witnessing Monroe on steroids, admittedly - and the novelty is that the same logic is now applied northward. Again, the US, in all likelihood, is fully aware that outright annexation (beyond renaming lakes) is not feasible or immediate. In any case, it employs tariffs to inflict economic pain on Ottawa in the short term.

In an increasingly de-industrialized world, geoeconomics and geopolitics often fuse. As China has become the “world’s factory,” insulating industries from geopolitical disputes has become harder, while economic nationalism rises and Washington increasingly weaponizes trade and finance - even against partners and allies.

Earlier threats to annex Canada, talk of purchasing Greenland, and pressure over the Panama Canal can be read as pointing in the same direction: control of energy, minerals, and strategic space.

Yet the strategy risks backfiring. Canada still retains significant leverage through its energy and potash exports, though retaliation also carries costs and could accelerate US efforts to find alternative suppliers. Ottawa, in any case, is already diversifying trade, including with China - hardly a strategic success for Washington.

Neo-Monroeism treats Ottawa and Europe as dependencies expected to absorb costs without benefits - much like the West historically treated much of the so-called “Third World”. Carney’s Davos speech already conceded the rules-based order is collapsing. With trust eroding, military cooperation is also impacted: the Permanent Joint Board on Defence was paused, and NORAD looks increasingly fragile.

In other words, Washington’s approach thus far has produced more friction than durable control of any kind.

The Panama Canal dispute, for one thing, illustrated the limits of coercive pressure when China retains commercial and shipping influence. The same structural constraints arguably apply farther north.

Aggressive enough pressure can alienate partners, accelerate diversification, and weaken the very ecosystem of influence the United States once built - as Richard J. Kilroy Jr. puts it (a Baker Institute Nonresident Scholar).

In short, Trump’s Monroeism now looks north, forcing its northern neighbor onto a war footing as it seeks new partners and rethinks security ties. Short-term gains risk fracturing the Americas and driving Canada toward independence, diluting rather than strengthening US power.