Is Canada Helping Identify Boats the US Is Blowing Up?
What is Canada’s position on killing alleged drug smugglers in international waters, without disclosing supporting evidence or offering due process? What is Canada’s position on arbitrarily designating so-called drug gangs as narco-terrorists and then claiming, without evidence again, that they are controlled by a sovereign government, making that nation a legitimate target for United States military action?
These are not hypothetical questions.
Let’s start with those extra-judicial killings. Canada already has skin in that game.
Since 2006, Canadian warships and patrol aircraft have participated in Operation Caribbe, a US-led but multinational “enhanced counter-narcotics” operation in the Caribbean Sea, Gulf of Mexico, and the eastern Pacific Ocean. Our planes and ships identify and track “vessels of interest,” which a detachment of the US Coast Guard then boards, inspects, and if drugs are found, seizes. Their crews may even be brought to the US to face charges.
Over the past seventeen years, the Canadian Armed Forces claim to have contributed to “the disruption or seizure of more than 123 metric tonnes of cocaine,” with an estimated street value of more than $4.41 billion.
Our Department of National Defence (DND) is quick to point out, when asked by media, that Operation Caribbe, which operates in “co-ordination” with the US Coast Guard, is “separate and distinct” from the Donald Trump administration’s unilateral, we’re-just-going-to-kill-people-that-bring-drugs-into-our-country approach being carried out by the US military. Since September 2, US Air Force planes have blown up twenty-one-and-counting vessels in those same waters, killing at least eighty people. Without offering evidence, US president Trump claimed the boats were smuggling drugs into the US.
DND, however, has not halted our involvement in Operation Caribbe. We know that, at least in one case, the US military provided location information about survivors from its strikes to its coast guard—showing that information moves quickly and laterally across US institutions. What guarantees does Canada have that the coast guard won’t share our spotting data with the US Air Force, which it can then use to bomb suspect vessels? The United Kingdom has reportedly begun withholding some intelligence from the US to prevent exactly that outcome. Canada has given no indication it will do the same. “The United States has made clear that it is using its own intelligence,” Canadian foreign affairs minister Anita Anand reassured reporters at a recent G7 summit.
Worse, the Canadian government has yet to criticize what United Nations experts have condemned as “extrajudicial execution” or challenge what most legal analysts view as the Trump administration’s “far-fetched” justifications for its various extraterritorial threats and actions, particularly in Central and South America. Anand again: “I would say that it is within the purview of US authorities to make that determination” about whether it is complying with international law. Not exactly comforting.
Why should that matter to Canadians?
Well, consider Trump. And then consider the people around him: Stephen Miller, Marco Rubio, and Pete Hegseth, a triumvirate of America First warmongering. Latin America has already become their re-proving ground for an expansionist twenty-first-century Monroe Doctrine.
First laid out in 1823 by former US president James Monroe, the doctrine warned European powers against meddling in the western hemisphere, which Monroe declared a US sphere of interest. By the turn of the twentieth century, the doctrine was routinely invoked to legitimize American military and political intervention in neighbouring states. Over the years since, it has been primarily used, conveniently of course, to justify US intervention in the southern half of the hemisphere too. Nicaragua, Panama, Honduras, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Brazil, Chile, El Salvador, Grenada: the list is long; the pattern unmistakable.
In some ways, Trump 2.0 began with the same Monroe playbook. One of Trump’s first acts after taking office was to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. He later threatened to post American forces on Mexican soil. Still another was his threat to take control of the Panama Canal. Recently, he revoked the visa of Colombian president Gustavo Petro and, ironically, decertified Columbia as a “reliable partner” in the war on drugs for the first time in thirty years. The move came after Petro described Trump’s extrajudicial killings of alleged drug smugglers as “assassinations” and called for a criminal investigation into Trump and others involved in the strikes.
But Trump 2.0 has also ventured further afield. Earlier this year, he refused to rule out using military force to take control of Greenland and, notably, mused about making Canada the fifty-first US state. “Would he use military force against us?” he was asked. “It’s highly unlikely,” he said.
He didn’t say no.
For the moment, Trump is focused on Venezuela, where he has dispatched a flotilla of warships. In a threatening show of regime-change force, the White House has been seeking a “legal opinion from the Justice Department” to undertake “strikes against land targets” in Venezuela, according to CNN. As of October 23, the BBC had identified ten American military ships dispatched to the region, including the USS Gerald R. Ford, the world’s largest aircraft carrier, guided missile destroyers, amphibious assault ships, and oil tankers for refuelling vessels at sea.
The Trump administration justifies this, in part, by claiming that Venezuela is a major source of illegal drugs, like fentanyl, flowing into the US. It isn’t. According to the International Crisis Group, “almost all the fentanyl entering the US is produced in Mexico: according to US Customs and Border Protection, 94 percent of the drug seized in the US is intercepted at the southern border.”
Hold that latter thought.
So, why is Trump really threatening Venezuela then? How about the fact that Venezuela holds the world’s largest proven oil reserves? According to the New York Times, Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro offered “to open up all existing and future oil and gold projects to American companies, give preferential contracts to American businesses, reverse the flow of Venezuelan oil exports from China to the United States, and slash his country’s energy and mining contracts with Chinese, Iranian, and Russian firms” just to appease Trump and save his government, but even that does not appear likely to stave off regime change there.
If fighting fentanyl is a flimsy cover for regime change in Venezuela—and it is—what about Canada? Trump’s first phony excuse for imposing punishing tariffs on Canada, of course, was that we were not doing enough to stop a trickle of fentanyl seeping into the US.
And then, consider our own motherlode of oil and gas, as well as the rare earth minerals essential to the world’s current and future economy. In October, the Trump administration took equity stakes in two Canadian critical mineral companies in deals Globe and Mail business columnist Rita Trichur described as “pursuing annexation by stealth . . . a flagrant flex of economic might to show Canada who’s boss.”
Will stealth annexation turn into the real thing?
It is easy to comfort ourselves with the idea that consolidating US hegemony over Latin America will take much of Trump’s current term. And, of course, the US Constitution precludes a president from seeking a third term. But we already know Trump acolyte and former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon is scheming ways around that. Even if he fails, there is a reasonable chance Trump will be succeeded by the equally imperialist ambitions of US secretary of state Marco Rubio or US vice president J. D. Vance.
So, why isn’t Canada joining the chorus of opposition to Trump’s flouting of international law? Could it be because we’re so busy trying to strike a trade deal with a Trump administration that really doesn’t want to make one—that changes the rules of political engagement on a presidential whim, that invokes its own alternative facts to create new realities—that we’ve lost sight of the bigger picture?
By the time we recognize the real threat to our sovereignty, it may be too late.
The post Is Canada Helping Identify Boats the US Is Blowing Up? first appeared on The Walrus.
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