Should America Reopen Its Frontiers?

Or are we more than big enough already?

In the first Trump administration, there was flurry of enthusiasm for purchasing Greenland, a vast and sparsely-populated territory with a strategic location and harboring significant mineral resources that will only get easier to extract as the climate changes. Denmark made it clear that Greenland wasn't for sale, but belonged to the Greenlanders, and to date they’ve shown no particular interest in becoming American, but the United States has the financial resources to make Greenland’s 56,000 inhabitants an offer they might not refuse, should we chose to do so.

The United States has expanded in analogous ways many times before—purchasing Alaska from the Russian Empire, Louisiana from Napoleon, and a portion of the Virgin Islands from Denmark, along with various acquisitions from Spain and Mexico that were executed under conditions of greater duress. Why shouldn’t we try to do so again? If you’re the sort of conservative who worries about decadence, or the sort of center-left dynamist who worries we aren’t thinking big enough, there’s a clear appeal to the idea of making America grow again—territorially-speaking. And now that would-be Mars-colonist Elon Musk has the president’s ear, it may feel to some like the sky’s the limit.

Which leads to posts like this one, apropos of President-elect Donald Trump’s remarks suggesting he thinks Canada is already an American state with a governor:

Both Trump’s remarks and the “discussion” they have inspired are basically just jokes, but the breakup of Canada isn’t all that hard to imagine. Furious about economic issues like the soaring public debt and out-of-control housing prices, and increasingly divided over cultural issues, the country’s electorate is angrier that it has been in my memory, and is likely to hand the Conservatives an enormous majority next year. But a Poilievre victory could well boost the chances of a new referendum on Québecois independence. Personally, I think the odds of a new referendum succeeding are still quite poor, but a great deal depends on whether the next government succeeds in tackling Canada’s ongoing problems—and, if it fails, whether the fissiparous sentiments that have already spread well beyond Quebec finally break through.

If Canada did ever crack up, the widespread assumption is that America could, would and even should pick up some of the pieces, with oil-rich Alberta and the small, thinly-populated Maritime provinces being the most-likely acquisition targets. That could be what would happen. But should it? Should Americans want the country to grow again, territorially-speaking?

As I ask the question, I find myself struggling even to figure out how to frame an answer. Alberta has a lot of oil, yes. But America has ready access to that oil already, if we want to access it. Acquiring Alberta as an American state wouldn’t meaningfully improve the energy security of ordinary Americans. The Maritimes are beautiful, but Americans can visit them easily already if they want to. Canada is as reliable an ally as America has; absorbing pieces of it might prevent other countries from taking advantage in the event of the country’s breakup, but would not obviously improve America’s security position over what it is today. Back when America acquired Louisiana, Florida, Texas and California, we were demographically expanding, and citizens were eager for new land to settle. Today our demographic expansion is driven entirely by immigration, while much of our interior depopulates—and Canada’s housing shortage is even worse than ours is. What exactly would we be getting by gobbling bits of it up?

The most straightforward answer is: the extension of American institutions, and American law, over more of the earth. That is indeed a considerable convenience, particularly for business, which can expand into new territory without fretting about currency exchange rates, differing regulatory requirements, etc. Americans as a whole benefit more than we probably realize from being part of a very large integrated economic and political region; the economies of scale are very substantial. Much of the benefit of extending this to Canada has, historically, been provided by trade agreements like NAFTA/USMCA, but actually merging would reduce this friction still further (and reduce it especially for the most mobile members of the labor force). It would also alter the balance of power, since Canadian interests would no longer have to be agglomerated in Ottawa, which would undoubtedly produce some winners and some losers among Canada’s industries. Even if it produces economic winners on net, though, how much actually flows down to an ordinary citizen?

The question is, in a way, parallel to the more familiar one of immigration. The preponderance of evidence suggests that immigration brings a large net benefit to the receiving country, though how large is disputed and may depend on the selectivity of the immigration system. But the preponderance of evidence also suggests that the lion’s share of the economic benefit accrues to the immigrants themselves—which is precisely what you would expect in a competitive labor market where immigrants undertake large costs (and sometimes large risks) to come in the first place. The benefit to America as an entity is clear: a larger population means a larger tax base, a larger pool of talent, a larger potential military, all under the same government. But what do Americans gain, besides the knowledge that they are part of something that is growing rather than stagnating?

I think that psychological motivation is actually a huge contributor to the instinctive enthusiasm in some quarters for the idea of both territorial and demographic growth for its own sake. As a feeling, though, it’s not ultimately very different from that which prompted Romans to cheer the legions upon their return from their latest conquest in Germania or Mesopotamia. It is a vicarious participation in a larger entity over which one has little control, which is to say, it implies an essentially imperial relationship between the citizen and the government. It implies that, in an important sense, America is already too big to be a real democracy.

Maybe there’s nothing to be done about that; maybe that ship sailed so long ago that the only thing to do is figure out how to be a better empire rather than a worse one. Heck, even the European far right has increasingly turned away from Euroskepticism and toward the project of remaking Europe in their image. And I understand the practical case against smallness. For all that they can be more nimble than large countries (though tell that to post-Deng China), and more capable of fostering real participation by citizens in self-government, small countries are also more easily captured by reactionary elites and concentrated interests; Madison’s idea of opposing faction to faction wasn’t a bad one at all. Both history and the contemporary world are full of small states that have been captured like that, whose economies are stagnating or worse and whose people eagerly flee to countries like America. And for all that competition between small states—as in ancient Greece, Renaissance Italy and modern Europe—seems to have contributed to extraordinary cultural creativity and technological advances, small states are also far more vulnerable to domination by global business interests with far more economic power, to say nothing of manipulation and conquest by larger states. Yet even on that last score, the case against smallness isn’t a slam-dunk. In our own day, a resurgent Russia has made manifest the value of hanging together rather than separately, but it’s also worth noting that the state that has done the most to respond to that challenge—Poland—is also one that has hewed to a relatively more nationalist course than the average European state.

I’ve written before about my romantic attachment to the idea of political breakup, so maybe I’m just talking by biases. But I hope—I sincerely hope—that if Canada were to come apart, that America would benevolently nurture the emergence of new states in our backyard rather than presumptively gobbling them up. The province of Newfoundland and Labrador has a larger population than that of Iceland, which seems to have done quite well for itself since splitting from Denmark. The Maritimes collectively have a population roughly comparable to that of Latvia, a bit smaller than Slovenia and a bit bigger than Trinidad and Tobago. Which of those countries is too small to be allowed an independent existence? Alberta’s population is only a bit smaller than fellow would-be petrostate Scotland, or than existing petrostate Norway, and is roughly comparable to that of Kuwait. I think it’s much better off remaining in Canada, but if pushing came to shovel, why couldn’t they make it on their own? And if they could, why should we hope that, instead, they become part of us?

In the new world aborning, citizens of Greenland or New Brunswick—or, for that matter, of Nassau, Havana or Panama City—may have to weigh the benefits against the risks of being absorbed into the American Borg. But it would say something encouraging about our continued romantic attachment to our small-r republican ideals if we didn’t lean too hard on the scales in favor of integration and embiggering, as we have long been wont to do.

And if we do wind up building a Muskian metropolis on the moon, well . . .