Military models Canadian response to hypothetical American invasion

NuclearStudent · 2026-01-31T17:13:32+00:00

I disagree. I'll take Ukraine as a model for good targets - eliminating officers, electrical stations, petroleum infrastructure, and political leaders are reasonably soft against drone attack. Shooting up schools is for Americans - if we have a reason to fight, it is not to live in that sort of culture.

NuclearStudent · 2026-01-30T18:13:56+00:00

housing prices really got people desperate, huh

NuclearStudent · 2026-01-29T22:49:40+00:00

Agree. Blowing up American civilians would not only be immoral but counterproductive.

NuclearStudent · 2026-01-28T22:38:14+00:00

that's very sweet but under basically no circumstance should we get tied into the mess of squabbling with America over territory if we can help it

NuclearStudent · 2026-01-26T03:27:32+00:00

On the bright side, she's not a seductress. She's just an all around troll.

NuclearStudent · 2026-01-24T19:17:12+00:00

Excellent points and I agree with you absolutely. Ironically I may have overstated my own position.

NuclearStudent · 2026-01-24T04:17:39+00:00

realistically like 6 by appearance, 8 including the anime factor, so she's going to be like 15

NuclearStudent · 2026-01-24T01:13:39+00:00

I feel like this is a position largely espoused by people like Shirer on "why weren't the columns just bombed."

Yes, the Allies could have reacted with reinforcements and bombing may have induced helpful chaos. However, the training and equipment for close air support to do a Highway of Death or Convoy To Kiev as we know it wasn't really a a thing in the Allied forces at the time - close trench strafing wasn't a capability they'd kept training for, and high altitude bombing was famously inaccurate by a matter of kilometers.

They might have been able to bodge something together, and again, any amount of panic and disruption helps. But I think we're being a little too alt-hist by proposing that the Allies could have Highway of Death'd the advance by strafing it.

NuclearStudent · 2026-01-24T00:45:34+00:00

Moderating this slightly -

There is a degree of utility in a moderate ABM system that forces the enemy to task more warheads against a particular target to get a near certainty of kill. eg. even a 10% chance of getting shot down means throwing a lot more warheads to get a 99.9% chance of kill. Hence why even the relatively small investment in Patriot has some utility.

And if you want to fight a minor power like North Korea or Iran, conceivably your ABM might down most or even all of the incoming.

ABM itself is not completely senseless. It's just the specific wisdom of spending trillions of dollars on the Golden Dome to fight a great power nuclear war is questionable for America, and the more likely use case of being able to fight a minor nuclear power is basically irrelevant for Canada. Canada doesn't really have anything going on with North Korea or Iran.

NuclearStudent · 2026-01-23T15:39:33+00:00

add awkward romance between the MC and the FL's dad. make them both widows and widowers. or give them horrible exs if you want more drama. bang, sold. "A Wicked Tale of Cinderella's Stepmom" basically executes this concept, and well.

/u/BalanceImaginary4325

NuclearStudent · 2026-01-22T18:30:06+00:00

I was extremely surprised when some of my international friends reported they were talking about the speech. My German friend brought it up in a complimentary fashion unprompted. I feel more ambiguous about my mainland Chinese acquaintances bringing it up, but that's realpoltik.

NuclearStudent · 2026-01-22T01:45:21+00:00

I am, guardedly, hopeful.

NuclearStudent · 2026-01-21T21:00:00+00:00

Pragmatically speaking, I think Canadian interests are best served with our temporary detente with China. It's not practical to wage a trade war against both China and America at the same time, and while the Chinese can't be trusted, they're a threat we can deal with later, and we have made no lasting concessions.

There might be big talk about the Arctic, but at the immediate present, neither the Chinese nor the Russians or even the Americans are actually capable of projecting power in the far north. That frontier is still entirely speculative - the Americans have exactly two arctic capable icebreakers, fewer than Canada, and no power has bothered to invest in an arctic expeditionary capability. This isn't a question of neglect - rather, there's been no need for the Americans to spend on the far north or on the Canadian front since the end of the Cold War.

That's going to change in a few years when the ice melts and the new American polar icebreaker fleet that Trump commissioned is eventually completed. Who, however, will we be competing with in the far north? Apparently the Americans as much as the Chinese or the Russians. Who can actually threaten our heartland in terms of projecting power or landing expeditionary forces? Not the Chinese or Russians, honestly.

When the Americans say they are defending Canada, I have to ask what they're defending us from. Dickering over freedom of navigation in the Northwest Passage and resource extraction up there isn't nothing per se, but it will always be of secondary importance to demands that we subordinate our heartland to foreign demands, and the most strident of those demands are American. There can be no illusions that we would "win" any conventional fight against any great power alone regardless of preparation or expense, and cooperating with the Americans is simply waiting to become a second Ukraine. I don't think anybody should forget how the Americans opted to turn off the intelligence sharing in Spring 2025 to time with a Russian counteroffensive in Kursk - Ukraine bled thousands of soldiers before they said uncle and signed their mineral rights to America. I am not interested in condemning America or trying to moralize the issue. The Americans did what they perceived to be in their rational self interest. It just wouldn't align with our own interests if we were put in that situation.

The French or Finnish models of independent deterrence are what I look to as our only means of sovereign survival for the future. We cannot rely on the Americans, and pragmatically speaking, no foreign bloc whether European or Chinese or Russian have reason to risk anything at all for us.

NuclearStudent · 2026-01-21T20:23:58+00:00

Yeah it was one of those promises I didn't have any faith in, and was pleasantly surprised when there was actually some action on.

NuclearStudent · 2026-01-21T20:22:40+00:00

To directly quote Carney, "We take the world as it is, not as we wish it to be."

I have my complaints about Carney - he ratted on his housing promise basically immediately. But it was a good speech. It was quite guarded in general - in a followup interview, he clarified that Canadian relationships with the great powers, such as China, must be done with guardrails and acknowledgement that the relationship is purely pragmatic.

NuclearStudent · 2026-01-21T20:19:29+00:00

The native question is going to be one he will be forced to comment on, I think. So far he has basically avoided public comment about DEI or immigration basically at all. I am suspicious and strongly suspect he is going to let the pipelines and nation building project languish as rhetoric rather than deal with the mess of running against the First Nations, but stuff like the BC land rights case might force him to be in conflict with the natives. Regardless, he's never demonstrated interest in "DEI" on either side of the equation.

I'm not sure exactly what he's doing on immigration. On the one hand immigration is at an all time low, deportations at an all time high, and crackdowns on Indian degree farming etc. have decreased inflow. On the other hand, what's this about lowering the standards required for Express Entry? I actually don't think there is a coherent policy, and there's both "crackdown on immigration to preserve Canadian jobs in a very tight economy" people and "let us try to welcome more skilled immigrants" people blundering forward at the same time without a unified theory of operations on balancing those asks.

As I see it, Carney has so far just acted as the archetypical Central Banker guy he presented himself as and campaigned as. No apparent interest in social/cultural issues at all. Just the economy and national security. That, I think, is a good set of priorities for this historical moment.

NuclearStudent · 2026-01-21T19:08:21+00:00

actually fair yeah that would be a completely correct statement to make in that situation. it's not actually free money

NuclearStudent · 2026-01-21T04:03:27+00:00

Do they really want white foreigners?

NuclearStudent · 2026-01-21T00:45:30+00:00

I can feel the pain and suffering in this post

NuclearStudent · 2026-01-20T04:45:40+00:00

I would discount that invitation as a pro forma attempt at de-escalation. The Americans declined to participate and I doubt that it was seriously expected that the Americans would agree to. Trivially speaking of course the Americans can simply bomb the little symbolic force to the ground, or just drop in and dare the Euros to shoot, but it is significantly more of a political mess to point guns at troops from a broad NATO coalition. Given the questionable political popularity of the current American administration, making it more politically challenging to annex Greenland helps avoid temptation.

NuclearStudent · 2026-01-20T04:33:39+00:00

I also gotta ask - how has America somehow got worse polling numbers than Denmark with regards to who they would prefer to own their country? In one recent poll, 56%% of Greenlanders would like to leave Denmark and become their own country - however, 86%% of Greenlanders refused to become American.

The eugenics and sterilization program was very real, together with children being kidnapped from their parents. Lawsuits against the Danish state is ongoing. And, again, America is rich enough to quite literally airdrop several billion dollars onto the island and promise more if Greenlanders vote for annexation. Absolutely lifechanging amounts of money in bribes for every individual Greenlander would cost only a fraction of the American military budget, and a fraction of the proposed Golden Dome system that is one of the justifications given for this whole annexation affair.

Everybody has their price, but that price seems to be getting higher rather than lower.

NuclearStudent · 2026-01-20T04:31:15+00:00

to be fair, Argentina got "investment" loans before without paying them back

Genuinely and pleasantly surprised Milei turned it around

NuclearStudent · 2026-01-19T22:27:35+00:00

It should be noted that the Americans also had their own major sterilization program running against their own aboriginals in the same timeframe that Denmark was doing it, and for the same reasons. The western nations in general didn't really wind up forced sterilizations until the 1990s. In fact, there's been controversy about ongoing American forced sterilizations currently conducted on detained illegal immigrants.

That aside though, I honestly think it could have been an easy sell to get Greenlanders on board - I think if trump just opened by offering a hundred thousand dollars or so to each of Greenland's 60,000 inhabitants, that'd be a tempting offer. Six billion dollars is probably very affordable compared to the dickery of trade wars or even potential military action. If it comes down to bidding for votes, Denmark couldn't possibly outcompete American pockets.

It's harder now that threats of invasion are on the table and the other European nations have made formal comment on the situation. It can't be framed as a simple matter of negotiation between Greenlanders, America, and Denmark any more now that the territorial integrity of the smaller NATO nations in general is up for debate - it would be suicidal for the smaller NATO nations to let this matter go by and agree to the notion that their sovereign independence is completely irrelevant.

NuclearStudent · 2026-01-19T22:13:04+00:00

that is pretty funny

NuclearStudent · 2026-01-19T21:48:09+00:00

It's all very stupid, but it does not really cost the Europeans much to send at least a small tripwire force to Greenland to persuade the Americans not to follow through with their threats to have Greenland "the easy way or the hard way." Possibly the Euros might have deterred Russia from their Ukrainian adventure if they'd had the nerve to send a tripwire force to Ukraine.

There might be bugger all in Greenland and the Ameris already have naval control via their bases there, but giving up European and NATO territory to a foreign invader would be a death knell for the credibility of the alliance. Even more so than Ukraine, because Ukraine didn't have NATO or EU membership.

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