War With Canada

Of all the damage Donald Trump is doing to America's standing in the world, our trade war with Canada may be the most stupid.

Canada is not just an ally. Canadians are our neighbors, cousins and friends. Canada and the U.S. fought together in two world wars, Korea, Afghanistan and other conflicts. During the Iranian hostage crisis, Canadian diplomats risked prison and even their lives to hide and rescue Americans.  The Americans escaped Tehran posing as Canadians.  Our militaries work together. Our industries are so intertwined that an automobile assembled in Ontario or Michigan may cross the border repeatedly before it is finished. Canadians work in American universities, hospitals, businesses and entertainment.  Americans do the same in Canada. We cross the border by the millions.

We share the longest undefended international border in the world.

And now we are having a trade war with Canada? A trade war with insults, disrespect, real hostility from our government to our neighbors and its leaders. The lack of respect, the rudeness and crudity of it is embarrassing.  Canadians do not need comments from American politicians or opinions on Alberta secession. 

There are legitimate disagreements between the United States and Canada, dairy products, automobiles, government purchasing and other trade issues. Friends have disagreements. But tariffs, retaliation, threats and insults are turning our ordinary give and take into something much larger.  Trump even uses the language of real war for what is now a trade war between major trading partners.  Partners who signed a newly negotiated trade agreement during Trump’s first term. A trade war with Canada would have been unimaginable 25 years ago.  Our trade disputes before were more like family bickering, not a war.    

The damage is already becoming visible. Canadians are boycotting American products. Their government is looking increasingly toward Europe and even China. Depending so heavily upon the United States no longer seems safe.

That should frighten us.

Not because Canada is going anywhere. Geography has married us permanently. Neither country gets a divorce. But trust is different. Trust is accumulated slowly and can be squandered surprisingly quickly. 

The worst part of this, Canadians may never trust us fully again. Trump treats international relations like he treated his partners in his bankrupt businesses.  His promises and deals are only good as long as they serve Trump.  I don’t think they judge us harshly for electing Trump.   Every country makes mistakes.  What makes us untrustworthy is we elected him again.  In the future the idea we might turn on them again will be in the air for a long time. 

America is not at war with Canada. Whatever happens between governments during the remaining years of this administration, the rest of us should protect what exists underneath it: the friendships, commerce, professional relationships, cultural exchanges, military cooperation, tourism and the ordinary affection connecting two peoples who have managed, remarkably, to share a continent peacefully.

Presidents come and go.

We will be neighbors forever. 

 

What’s the difference between a Canadian and an American?  Canadians know Donald Trump is President of the United States.  Americans know what’s-his-name is president of Canada. 

And personally Canada, sorry about the Fenian invasion.  It was a good idea, but it was still wrong.  The Pig War, I’m not so sure about.  And we’re willing to forget you burned the White House to the ground once, well maybe not forget but no hard feelings.  We know it was supposedly the “British” but we also know it was revenge for York.  And we may have to burn the East Wing of the White House down ourselves one day, just to get the stink out of it.      

Following Orders

 I have been thinking about the sailors and pilots carrying out the orders of Operation Southern Spear.

I was a staff sergeant in the Air Force. I know something about military discipline and I know how difficult it is to refuse an order from a superior. The whole institution is built around obedience, trust and the chain of command. Refusing an order is not without consequences and it is not something service members take lightly or their superiors for that matter.

But there is another principle that is just as important: service members are required to obey lawful orders, not illegal ones. In fact, military law requires them to refuse a manifestly unlawful order.

That principle is not new. After World War II, Nuremberg established that “I was only following orders” is not, by itself, a defense for criminal conduct. That principle has been incorporated into modern military law.

In my opinion, Operation Southern Spear is illegal.

If these killings are determined to have been unlawful extrajudicial killings, responsibility does not stop with the people who gave the orders. But neither does it mean that every young pilot or sailor who carried it out is equally guilty.

Responsibility follows the chain of command.

The President and Secretary of Defense who establish the policy bear the greatest responsibility. So do the senior generals and admirals who carry it out. I believe their decisions should be investigated and if criminal conduct is established, prosecuted and adjudicated in an appropriate court.

There is another thing that troubles me. Trump and Hegseth are putting our own sailors, pilots and officers in a terrible moral position. They are asking people who have sworn to uphold the law to carry out orders that may themselves be unlawful. They are compromising the very people who have entrusted their lives to the military and asking them to choose between obedience to their commanders and obedience to their oath.

That is a disservice to the military and to the patriotism of the people who serve. I am sure there are people in uniform thinking seriously about this. What a terrible burden to place on them.

Below the senior commanders are the officers and enlisted personnel who actually carry out the orders. I have sympathy for them. I have worn the uniform. I know how powerful the obligation to obey can be. Refusing a superior in a military organization is a test of courage and character that I can’t say I would have had the courage to pass.    

But sympathy does not mean that nothing happened.

If these were unlawful orders, the military should acknowledge that those who carried them out failed in their responsibility to refuse them. Their participation should be recorded in their service records and considered in evaluating them for promotion, particularly to positions of command and responsibility.

We do not need a purge of the military; we need a reckoning.

After a serious safety crisis, the military stops, investigates and determines how to keep it from happening again. Operation Southern Spear deserves that same kind of examination: the oath, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the law of armed conflict and the responsibility of every service member to refuse a manifestly unlawful order.

I know that would be a hard thing to do.  

That is precisely why the lesson has to be unmistakable.

Following orders is not a defense.

The people at the top who create an unlawful policy must be held responsible. But the principle has to reach all the way down the chain of command.

Otherwise the next unlawful order will be that much easier to give.

Will it happen again?  It has happened once. 

US Military Complicit In Crimes Against Humanity

On August 24, the United States military struck another small boat in the eastern Pacific and killed the two people aboard. It was not an isolated incident. According to U.S. Southern Command, the campaign had by then killed at least 223 people in 67 strikes against boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. Operation Southern Spear.  Brown University's Costs of War project says Southern Spear has cost at least $4.7 billion through March 31.

I am seventy-nine years old and I have lived through enough American history to know that our government has done terrible things before. What is happening now is different.  There is no reasonable argument to be made that these actions are  not war crimes or crimes against humanity.  I have seen some questionable decisions in the past, but I have never seen military commanders order their pilots and sailors to execute what is so obviously a crime. 

The administration says the boats are carrying drugs and the people aboard are members of cartels or “narco-terrorist” organizations. Perhaps some are. Drug smuggling is a crime, and people who engage in it should be arrested and prosecuted.

But the United States knows how to do that.

The Coast Guard regularly intercepts suspected smuggling vessels in international waters, disables them when necessary, boards them, seizes the drugs and arrests the people aboard. In June, for example, the Coast Guard reported three interdictions in the eastern Pacific that produced roughly 7,720 pounds of cocaine and 4,000 pounds of marijuana, with the vessels boarded and the crews apprehended. In January, another interdiction north of Puerto Rico seized more than 1,100 pounds of cocaine and arrested three men.

That is law enforcement.

Southern Spear is something different. The military approaches small vessels and destroys them, killing the people aboard. They are civilians, maybe criminals, though no proof has been shown.  There is no arrest, no courtroom and no opportunity to surrender.

And the available evidence raises questions about who some of these people actually were.

In December 2025, a burned-out boat from one of the strikes washed ashore on Colombia's Guajira Peninsula. Two bodies were recovered. Most of the packets found among the wreckage were empty; several contained traces of what appeared to be marijuana. Colombian experts told the New York Times that marijuana and cocaine smuggling in the region is often conducted by small, community-based operations rather than large cartels. One researcher described people who might carry marijuana one day, cocaine another day, and fish another.

That does not make them innocent. If the occupants of that boat were criminals, at best they were petty criminals. 

A fisherman or a small-time smuggler is still a civilian.  He is not part of an armed conflict. There is little difference between Trump and Hegseth and Bukele of El Salvador or Duterte of the Philippines, who is now imprisoned in the Hague awaiting trial for his crimes.  This is state sponsored vigilanteism ordered by the President of the United States.  A crime does not automatically become an act of war because the government gives it a military name.

The part that bothers me the most is that Trump has ordered military officers to be complicit in committing crimes, crimes prohibited by their military oath and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.  In press conferences Hegseth and Trump present their crimes like snuff films.   

The New York Times has also reported on Ecuadorian fishermen who described attacks by English-speaking men wearing U.S. flag insignia. One fishing vessel disappeared with eight of its ten crew members still missing. The Times found evidence consistent with U.S. surveillance of the boats, although it could not establish who carried out the attacks.

I have no doubt that Americans were involved. Whether they were acting for the CIA, the Defense Department or the DEA.  I can’t prove it but it’s pretty obvious.  If we had a Congress I would demand they open an investigation.  Who are these people?  And who's paying them?   

For most of my lifetime, the United States has argued that there are laws governing war and rules protecting civilians and prisoners. We have violated those principles before. The Bush administration's torture program and indefinite detention after September 11 were enormous breaches of American law and international norms. The Obama administration's drone campaign raised grave questions about civilian casualties and targeted killings outside conventional battlefields.

These previous events make it more important than ever to acknowledge it now and take action.  We are further down the road to being a pariah state than ever before. 

Legal specialists cited by the Times have argued that these strikes amount to extrajudicial killings because the military may not deliberately kill civilians, including suspected criminals, who do not pose an imminent threat of violence.

Perhaps the administration has a legal theory that will persuade the courts or historians.

But I look at the pictures of small boats exploding in the Caribbean and Pacific, and I see something much simpler.

The United States and its military are using the language of war to justify killing people accused of crimes, without arrest, trial or any opportunity to surrender. Whatever legal theory is offered, I believe the killings are wrong.

I am witnessing it. I am recording it. I object. 

And I will vote.