Christopher White: A few months after your Globe and Mail article, are we where you expected us to be? And what do you think comes next?

Thomas Homer Dixon: I think Canadians are only now fully coming to terms with the threat that Trump and his administration pose to Canada. Since 2015, people have tried to understand him within the confines of conventional American politics. But Trump is a radically different political phenomenon.

He’s what the great philosopher Hegel would have called a “world historic figure” — someone who, in real time, is reconfiguring institutions and shifting the trajectory of not just America, but human civilization.

Initially, the business community saw his tariff threats as negotiation tactics, and his comments about Canada as a 51st state as jokes. But now, those tariffs are being imposed. He’s doing enormous damage to the world economy and doesn’t really seem to care. I think we’ve started to internalize the fact that he actually does want to subsume Canada into the United States, and that he’s prepared to pay a really substantial cost to do that. He sees that as part of an old-style manifest destiny, a vision of the expansion of America to be geographically dominant, with Canada as part of that territory.

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Trump poses a mortal threat to Canada — not just economically, but I think territorially and physically.

CW: So you believe there is a real risk of a military invasion from the United States?

THD: I think there’s a real chance that military force could be used against Canada in the future. I don’t know what more he needs to say. He’s already stated that he thinks that the border between our two countries is not legitimate and should be moved. He has also stated that he’s prepared to use economic force to coerce Canada into becoming part of the United States.

He’s not paying attention to the fact that 85 percent of Canadians don’t actually want that. If Canadians reject his vision and are prepared to bear that economic burden — which I expect we will be — and he still believes that we need to be part of the United States, he could order the American defense department to invade or attack Canada.

CW: How should we respond to Trump’s economic attacks and his threats to erase or change the border?

THD: First, we need to understand how this is likely to unfold. It won’t be a frontal military assault where tanks move across the border or an attempt to capture our capital city. Instead, it will happen piecemeal, starting with a demand that we move the border in the Great Lakes, or that the border be adjusted to allow for more American access to water resources that they feel are part of their national security.

But that demand will only take place after it’s been established, according to a certain framing put forward by Trump and his administration, that Canada is a threat to the United States. That process is already underway. We’ll be accused of failing to secure the U.S. northern border or of doing economic damage to the United States by threatening to cut off key resources that they need, like water, potash and energy supplies. It’ll be accompanied by a severing of security ties: We will be removed from the Five Eyes intelligence network, removed from the NORAD defense apparatus, the North American Air Defense Command. And then there will be a demand that the border be adjusted somewhere, and it will be implicitly backed by a threat of military force.

Canadians can watch for an additional set of warning signals. One will be whether the Trump administration is prepared to defy the courts. If they cross that boundary, then the next will be if there are significant protests against the Trump administration policies, and those protests start to get unruly, whether Trump is prepared to invoke the insurrection act in order to use the military to suppress those protests. The further threshold would be whether there would be an arm’s-length acknowledgement of the possibility of paramilitary forces assassinating political opponents in the United States. The final component of this story would be whether he uses military force against Greenland or Panama.

If all of those thresholds are crossed, then I think we are in extraordinary trouble in Canada.

CW: So, what should we be doing about all this?

THD: We should be stepping up homeland defense; we should have a national service plan and a civil defense corp. The Scandinavian countries have really well-established homeland defense programs. They’re broadly supported in the population and it’s all part of shifting the risk calculus for anybody who is thinking of taking a slice of territory here or there. That’s why the Russians stay out of Finland and Sweden, and it’s why Switzerland has stayed secure in the middle of a seething turbulence in Europe for many, many years.

CW: What impact do you think that all of this is going to have on the Canadian election?

THD: I think it’s the most important election in Canadian history, and I’ve been advocating for quite some time that we need something to emerge from this process that’s resembling a national unity government. We need to have all parties together within the cabinet, but I think it is infeasible because there’s deep animus — especially on the Conservative side towards the Liberals. Frankly, there are a lot of people who simply refuse to work with Pierre Poilievre, and it’s not clear that Mr. Poilievre has the temperament to sit in a cabinet that is a unity government.

One would hope that whatever emerges from this process is as reflective of the broader interests and views of the Canadian public as possible. All of our political leaders have to be careful to speak to the Canadian public honestly about the sacrifices we have to make, the costs that are coming, the challenges we face and to leave as much as possible the petty partisanship aside and speak on behalf of the whole country.

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Canada, for better or for worse, is now one of the front lines for the defense of liberal democracy in the world. What happens in Canada along that frontier is critically important to liberal democracies, which is why I was so disappointed with U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer. During his recent visit to Washington, he essentially threw Canada under the bus when asked about his position on Canada as a 51st state. There’s been a wimpishness exhibited by Europeans, but they need to recognize that they have a very strong interest in Canada’s survival. If the United States were to absorb Canada and bring all of its resources within its kind of proto-fascist embrace, liberal democracy will be in much more dire straits in Europe than it already is.

CW: You wrote a book called Commanding Hope. Where do we find not simply hope, but resilience to get through what is going to be an incredibly challenging time?

THD: Commanding hope has three components: it’s honest, it’s astute and it’s powerful. By honest, I mean that it fully recognizes the magnitude and the seriousness of the challenges we face. It’s astute in that it’s very aware of the politics and the sociology of the moment. We may not like Trump, but we need to have a very intimate understanding of how he and his allies see the world because otherwise, we are fighting blind. And then it needs to be powerful in that we need to have a vision of where we want to go and what kind of world we want to build, even if we’re only partially successful.

Trump and the rise of populist authoritarianism are functions of underlying stresses that have been developing over decades. And those underlying stresses are a consequence of the way the world is structured, the kind of economies we’ve had, the fact that we haven’t dealt with some very deep issues of inequality, of systemic racism and systemic injustices within our societies.

There needs to be fundamental reconfigurations of economies and societies. We may not have wanted them to break exactly this way, but we can guarantee that the cracking apart of institutions, of common practices, of conventional ways of looking at the world is going to open up opportunities for new combinations and possibilities. Some of those will be positive.

This is a period of turbulence and transition that could be highly creative. We can’t see all those possibilities yet, but some of them are almost certainly there. For those of us who want to build a more just world, we need to realize that this is the moment of opportunity. These are the times when real change to the things that have been structurally embedded and haven’t been changeable in the past is possible. For me, that’s a genuine source of hope.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

***

Rev. Christopher White is a United Church minister in Hamilton.

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